"It's Dark as Pitch Out There": Cornell Woolrich and Dark City (1998/2021), by Eddie Muller

Note from the Passing Tramp: I reviewed Eddie Muller's revised edition of Dark City for an academic journal, Crime Fiction Studies, in 2023. Below you will find the original, uncut version of the review.  

Eddie Muller’s Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, originally published in 1998, was reissued in revised and expanded form in 2021 by Running Press in association with Turner Classic Movies.  Described in the book’s author blurb as “the world’s foremost authority on film noir,” Eddie Muller also hosts Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies and is the founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to rescuing and restoring “orphaned” noir films.  

Two of these rescued films, The Guilty (1947) and Never Open That Door (1952), are based on the work of Cornell Woolrich and have been released by Flicker Alley and the Film Noir Association as beautifully restored DVDs. 

scene from The Guilty

Over several pages of Dark City, Woolrich, who is mentioned more times in the book than any other crime writer aside from hard-boiled master Raymond Chandler, receives his just due from Muller as the “Bard of the Blind Alley”: that dark dead end where dreams go drearily to die, betrayed by the beckoning finger of fate.  However, Muller’s account of Woolrich’s life and work is not without some factual inaccuracy and erroneous interpretation.

somebody on the phone (Don Castle in The Guilty)

Although original films based on Cornell Woolrich’s crime works mysteriously vanished into thin air in the twenty-first century, over one hundred cinematic films and television series episodes were adapted from the author’s crime novels and short fiction between 1938 and 2001.  It is no exaggeration to say that Woolrich was one of the primary creative wellsprings of film noir.  As Bruce Crowther put it in his book Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror (1988), among American crime writers “Cornell Woolrich is closest to the bleak mood and distorted vision of film noir.”  The best-known of these many films surely remains the classic Fifties suspense flick Rear Window (1954), director Alfred Hitchcock’s slick, big-budget, color film version of Woolrich’s short story “It Had to be Murder.”

Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window

Yet looking beyond Rear Window, Cornell Woolrich’s crime fiction was a staple of more downscale and gritty Forties and Fifties black-and-white noir films, such as the seventeen flicks which follow:

Cornell Woolrich and his wife, who had their marriage
annulled on grounds of nonconsummation
(see below)

Street of Chance (1942, based on the novel The Black Curtain)

The Leopard Man (1943, based on the novel Black Alibi)

Phantom Lady (1944, based on the novel of the same title)

Deadline at Dawn (1946, based on the novel of the same title)

Black Angel (1946, based on the novel The Black Angel)

The Chase (1946, based on the novel The Black Path of Fear)

Fear in the Night (1946, based on the novelette “And So to Murder” aka “Nightmare”)

Fall Guy (1947, based on the novelette “C-Jag” aka “Cocaine”)

The Guilty (1947, based on the novelette “He Looked Like Murder” aka “Two Fellows in a Furnished Room”)

The Window (1949) was a critical and box
office success, in 1950 winning the Edgar
for best mystery film and earning child star
Bobby Driscoll an honorary juvenile Oscar.

I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948, based on the novelette of the same title)

Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948, based on the novel of the same title)

The Window (1949, based on the novelette “The Boy Cried Murder,” aka “Fire Escape”)

No Man of Her Own (1950, based on the novelette “They Call Me Patrice,” later expanded as the novel I Married a Dead Man)

If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952, Argentina, based on the novelette of the same title)

Never Open That Door (1952, Argentina, adaptations of the short story "Somebody on the Phone" and the novelette "The Hummingbird Comes Home")

Obsession (1954, France, based on the novelette “Silent as the Grave”) 

Nightmare (1956, a remake of the film Fear in the Night)

Woolrich works were also adapted for acclaimed Forties, Fifties and Sixties radio and television series like Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock Presents/The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Thriller.

scene from "Momentum," based on the Cornell Woolrich novelette
(Alfred Hitchcock Presents)

During his lifetime Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) published nearly two hundred crime short stories and novelettes as well as sixteen crime novels and a like number of short fiction collections.  Woolrich attended Columbia University for a short time, leaving after the publication of a couple of successful mainstream novels to become a film screenwriter in Hollywood, where his dreams quickly died.  

The product of an estranged marriage who endured physical and emotional neglect during a lonely, solitary childhood in Mexico and New York City, Woolrich turned to writing crime fiction for the pulps after the failure of both his mainstream writing career and his brief, ill-advised marriage in California to Gloria “Bill” Blackton, who amid much embarrassing national publicity had their marriage annulled in 1933 on the grounds of her husband’s apparent inability to consummate it.

Resembling the proverbial ninety-eight-pound weakling from Charles Atlas’s famous fitness ads, which ran in comic books from the Forties into the Seventies (I personally remember these), Woolrich may have suffered from such maladies as anemia and agoraphobia, crippling his inability to lead a normal life.  He had great difficulty making and maintaining social connections with others and lived unhappily in a codependent relationship for twenty-five years with his mother in a New York apartment, carrying on alone, after her death in 1957, in another apartment in the city until his own lonely demise from a massive stroke at the age of sixty-four.

Based on his miserable experiences Woolrich developed a profoundly pessimistic view of the world, believing himself hindered at every twist and turn by malign fate.  This belief found memorable artistic expression in his crime writing, some of the bleakest in the genre, as over and over men and women due to cruel twists of malign chance lose their stakes in the desperate game of life (and death).

Peter Lorre in The Chase

Eddie Muller discusses the life and work of Cornell Woolrich, whom he rightly deems the “preeminent scribe of noir suspense,” in Dark City’s chapter “Blind Alley,” wherein he relies heavily for details of the crime writer’s life on Francis Nevins’ award-winning yet deeply problematical 1988 biography of the author, First You Dream, Then You Die.  

Barbara Stanwyck in No Man of Her Own

Like Nevins, Muller can be overly dramatic in his pronouncements, as when he declares that Woolrich was “a pathological liar” and “a guy who’d fit any serial killer profile,” and he sometimes gets details wrong.  For example, he states flatly that Woolrich’s parents divorced, although it is doubtful that they ever actually did so, and he asserts that Woolrich’s father took to him as a boy to a performance in Mexico City of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly (a pivotal event in his life by his telling), when in fact Woolrich states that the man who took him was his wealthy maternal grandfather.

modern production of tragic death scene in Madama Butterfly

Drawing on Nevins, Muller confusingly asserts that Woolrich’s “reverence” for his wife “precluded physical confirmation” of his marriage while simultaneously contending that Woolrich, a supposedly gay man, mockingly “married her as a joke.”  These motivations are flatly contradictory.  

Following Nevins’ interpretation of Woolrich’s late crime tale “Story to be Whispered,” about a man’s brutal “panic” murder of a transgender woman, Muller pronounces it an example of the author’s supposed homosexual “self-loathing,” although Nevins clumsily misinterpreted the story to reach this conclusion.  Contrary to Nevins’ and Muller’s contentions, the exact nature of the ambiguous author’s sexuality remains elusive today and it is by no means clear that the crime writer ever had what Muller terms “homosexual encounters” or, indeed, that he ever experienced sexual intimacy with anyone.

Ella Raines in Phantom Lady

Muller mentions fourteen films based on Woolrich’s work.  His most substantive discussions are of these five films 

Phantom Lady (1944), a “classic Blind Alley thriller” produced by Hitchcock protégé Joan Harrison, whom Muller discusses separately in a section of the book entitled “the mistress of suspense”

Deadline at Dawn (1946), dismissed by Muller as a “stilted adaptation” of a novel drenched with “sweaty frenzy”

the critically divisive film The Chase (1946), which Muller argues anticipates the mind bending meta-noir works of director David Lynch

The Guilty (1947), an interesting Poverty Row production that Muller believes compellingly evokes the “fetid milieu” of Woolrich’s crime fiction 

The Window (1949), a low-budget smash hit in which, anticipating Rear Window, an imaginative boy witnesses a murder but cannot get anyone, including his parents, to believe him.

Bobby Driscoll in The Window

No Man of Her Own (1950), a reasonably effective though watered-down version of Woolrich’s novel I Married a Dead Man that starred noir icon Barbara Stanwyck, is briefly discussed in the section devoted to that actress.  

Oddly Black Angel (1946), which features a rare, sensitive turn by noir baddie Dan Duryea (“a serviceable good guy, but a delectable bastard,” pithily observes Muller) and which Francis Nevins deemed the best of the myriad Woolrich film adaptations, goes unheralded.

Dan Duryea in Black Angel

In discussing The Window, Muller notes that two decades later the film’s young star, Bobby Driscoll, who was awarded a special miniature Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his performance, was tragically discovered dead at the age of thirty-one from drug-related causes by two boys playing in an abandoned New York tenement.  His remains were not positively identified until the next year and his death was not reported in the press until 1971.  

former child star Bobby Driscoll. who died tragically at age 31

The former child star, who once poignantly complained “I was carried on a silver platter—and then dumped into a garbage can,” predeceased by just six months Cornell Woolrich himself, who expired in his New York apartment from a massive stroke at the age of sixty-four in nearly as wretched circumstances, despite the relative fortune he had accumulated from film, television and radio adaptations of his work.  

In Bobby Driscoll, who passed away anonymously and miserably alone, his childhood dreams cruelly dashed, Woolrich surely would have discerned another ill-starred brother in misfortune.

Although not without serious purpose, Dark City is primarily an engagingly written and artfully designed coffee table book lavishly illustrated with eye-catching film stills.  It should send the popular audience for whom it is intended eagerly venturing down mean streets and around dark counters in search of these fascinating films--many of which can, of course, be seen on Turner Classic Movies.

see The House of Fradkin-Stein

Lovesey's Bathtub Companion: Reader, I Buried Them (2022), by Peter Lovesey

Back in the 1980s I think my Mom joined a book club of some sort and received as a "free gift" something called The Agatha Christie Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion (1986).  How many people actually read the book while soaking in the bath, I don't know.  I don't believe I ever read any of it in the bath, but I certainly did read it.  

In the Christie Bathtub Companion there was an introduction by Julian Symons, who was everywhere in the mystery world in those days, where among other things he listed his favorite Christies. (The only one of the list which I remember now is The Pale Horse, which I think he called a "goodish late specimen.")  There were also all sorts of odds and ends, including a poem by someone about her saving her last precious unread Christie novel, which she lovingly called "my Agatha Crystal."  (My last unread Christie novel is Passenger to Frankfurt, about which I can't get that effusive, having started and stopped reading it three times now.  Maybe someday....)  

Peter Lovesey's sixth and latest short story collection, the wryly-titled Reader, I Buried Them--the title is a play on the famous line in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, "Reader, I married him."--offers a sort of retrospective look at the English Crime Dean's career as a writer of short mystery fiction, including, among other deadly delights, his very first published crime story, "The Bathroom," which was published in the great British short crime fiction anthology series Winter's Crimes over a half-century ago in 1973.  

This was back when your own Passing Tramp was in the third grade earnestly pledging allegiance to the flag and reciting the Lord's Prayer.  But my heart was really set on murder.  

I would read my first mysteries--Christies, of course--the next year, during the summer of 1974, when my family was living in an apartment in Mexico City.  I also read my mom's Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.  I remember lying curled up on the loveseat by the big window overlooking the street reading a story I swear was called "The Machete Murderer," where the wife winds up getting chopped to pieces at the end of the tale.  Just the reading for an eight year old!  I loved it--it was thrilling stuff for someone who had been reading Sally, Dick and Jane "adventures" not long before.  Sally, Dick and Jane never solved any murders.  They just watched Spot run.  

I also read, in Pocket paperback American editions (you could get them in Mexico City at Sanborns department store), And Then There Were None, Easy to Kill, aka Murder Is Easy, The ABC Murders and Funerals Are Fatal, aka After the Funeral--a pretty sinister quartet of murder tales!

In the only true crime piece in Reader, I Buried Him--which, speaking of bathrooms again, is entitled "The Tale of Three Tubs: George Joseph Smith and the Brides in the Bath" (2015) (there's another literary reference in this title)--Lovesey mentions having first read about famed serial murderer George Joseph Smith back when he was ten years old.  This was in a book detailing notorious English murders (then not nearly so far off in time) that had been salvaged after the Lovesey home had been destroyed in 1944 by a V-1 flying bomb.  Some 6000 Londoners were killed by these bombs, which constituted Germany's last gasp of air terror.  

I think the taste for reading tales of crime and murder frequently develops at a young age.  Indeed, some of us skip right over the anodyne children's mysteries (which inversely I have gotten interested in recently) and go right to the grim fairy tales of adult murder fiction.  

George Joseph Smith, the brides in the bath murderer

I mention Lovesey's "The Bathroom" and "Tale of Three Tubs" because both of these short works are included in Reader, I Buried Them.  They make a natural pairing because the former tale is a nod to the brides in the bath murders, as you will see.  Lovesey tells a charming story about "The Bathroom" in his foreword.  After it was published in Winter's Crimes, he received a letter from Ruth Rendell wherein she praised the story and queried where the house in the story was located.  (It is a real place and Rendell was always interested in creepy houses.)  This collegial praised prompted Lovesey to submit the story to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, but it was rejected.  

During the Seventies, Lovesey devoted his writing primarily to his Victorian era Sergeant Cribb series of eight novels, but in 1978, the year the Cribb series ended, he published his second short crime story, "The Locked Room," in Winter's Crimes.  He likewise submitted this story to EQMM and this time it was accepted and the next year published there under the title "Behind the Locked Door." (Editor Frederic Dannay of Ellery Queen fame loved to change titles.) 

Emboldened by this success, Lovesey resubmitted"The Bathroom" to EQMM but heard nothing back from them.  He assumed it had been rejected yet again and was disgusted with himself for having had the temerity to resubmit a rejected story. Then in 1981 he attended a crime writers conference in Stockholm and found to his mortification that Fred Dannay was among the attendees.  

Embarrassed to meet the Great Man after the peculiar affair of "The Bathroom," Lovesey tried to avoid a face-to-face encounter with Dannay at the conference.  "He was easy to spot in a crowd," Peter amusingly divulges of Dannay in discussing his avoidance tactics, "because he was bald and bearded with thick dark-rimmed glasses.  But he was also a short man who disappeared from view behind more substantial figures like Julian Symons and Christianna Brand."  All was going well, as it were, until the moment when....

Well, I'll leave the rest for you to read for yourself.  I'll just add that as a matter of record "The Bathroom" did appear in EQMM in August 1981, under the title "A Bride in the Bath."  In 1982, Dannay accepted two more Peter Lovesey stories for EQMM: "Butchers," which five years later became the title tale in Lovesey's first short story collection, and "Taking Possession," which appeared in the magazine in November, not long after Dannay's death at age 76. 

There are two additional earlier pieces in Reader: a long overlooked story called "Oracle of the Dead" (1988) and a poem, very nicely constructed, called "A Monologue for Mystery Lovers" (1999), which delves into the question of whether Miss Marple really was, um, a maiden lady, shall we say?

Gas Light in its 1941 Broadway 
incarnation Angel Street
starring Vincent Price 
as the fiendish husband 

The additional fourteen stories are more recent, eleven of them having been published between 2008 and 2020 and three of them--"And the Band Played On," "Formidophobia" and "Gaslighting"--being  original to the volume.  These constitute, I believe, Lovesey's 98th through 100th short stories, making the book quite an occasion.  95 of these stories were published between 1980 and 2020, a rate of over two a year for four decades.  Surely Peter Lovesey is one of mystery fiction's most notable authors, in both its long and short forms.  

"Gaslighting"--about the death by hanging of an actress during a stage production of, yes, Gas Light--is one of the purer detective stories of the bunch and quite enjoyable.  It feels very up-to-date with its depiction of texting and its use of the a term that has become very fashionable of late in its application to the rise of that gruesome gaslighter par excellence, Donald Trump. 

As with several of the best stories in this collection, there's an effective interplay between the title and the theme.  (See also "Sweet and Low" below.)  

"Formidophobia" is an intricately plotted story about--well, I'll let you find out about this one (and what the heck formidophobia is) for yourself.  Don't cheat and google it, now.   

 "And the Band Played On" is about an old man suffering from dementia who returns after a long absence to his family.  He keeps singing that same song.  Why?  My Dad uses to sing a lot in his later years, all these songs from the Forties I had never heard of, like "Six Lessons from Madame La Zonga."  You should write a story about that one, Peter!

There's also a good Christmas murder story with Lovesey's primary series detective Peter Diamond cleverly called "A Three Pie Problem." Yes, there's yet another literary reference there. 

"Remaindered" is the longest story, a novelette really.  It's an entertaining mystery set at a small-town Pennsylvania bookstore.  How can you not like a story with a mobster character (offstage) named Gritty Bologna?  Agatha Christie first editions play a role in the criminal events.  

The shortest tale--an amusing short short--is "Agony Column," about a wife who fears her husband is plotting to murder her. (What else do husbands do in crime stories?)

Of the remaining eight stories, Edgar Allan Poe himself appears in "The Deadliest Tale of All," where the real villain is the detestable Rufus Griswold.  "Ghosted," about a very decent proposal indeed made to a midlist romance writer, reminds me rather of a certain Ethel Lina White novel, while "The Homicidal Hat" has a murder method that challenges John Rhode for originality.  

"Sweet and Low," about the theft of a beekeeper's hives (and much more mayhem) is one of my favorites in the collection, as is the title story, about multiple murder among a group of monks.  It reminded me of the board game Mystery of the Abbey if you know that, as well as a short story by the late Robert Barnard (I forget the name): a sendup of a group of progressive leftists.  Not that Lovesey's story is political.  It manages a contemplative ending, shall we say.  

My hardcover edition of Reader, I Buried Them, published by Soho Press, is a lovely book, harking back to the great days of short story publisher Crippen & Landru.  It's makes a grand tribute to a Grand Master of Mystery. 

An Abbreviated Trip: Charlie Chan's Murder Cruise (1940)

Charlie Chan's Murder Cruise (1940) was the sixth film starring Sidney Toler in the title role of the great Chinese detective; five more Toler Chans were made before Fox dropped the franchise in 1942, so it came midway in the Toler series.  It was the second Chan film based on Earl Derr Biggers' penultimate Charlie Chan novel, Charlie Chan Carries On (1930), recently reviewed here.  

Susie Watson (Cora Witherspoon) gets a shock

The first film adaptation, which retained the book's title, premiered back in 1931 and starred Toler's predecessor Warner Oland; it was, indeed, the very first Warner Oland Chan film.  Unfortunately, it was one of the four early Chan films lost in the Fox studio fire of 1937, though a Mexican version, using the same sets, survives. 

The original English language 1931 film version of Charlie Chan Carries On evidently closely follows the novel, crucially retaining the full world tour plot, while Charlie Chan's Murder Cruise substantially abbreviates it, starting the story in Honolulu with the tour about to commence the last leg of the tour, by boat to San Francisco.  

After a comic bit where No. 2 son Jimmy (Victor Sen Yung) and No. 7 son (Layne Tom, Jr., who played sons of Charlie in two previous Chan films) are caught by Charlie himself in his office while trying to swipe No. 7's bad report card from the mail piled on the great detective's desk, we are introduced to Charlie's old pal from Scotland Yard, Inspector Duff, who has stopped by, halfway around the world, to pay Charlie a visit.  

Charlie's back!

that American slang again

Uh-oh!

Willie in trouble

Inspector Duff makes a brief appearance.  

Inspector Duff informs Charlie that he's hunting for a strangler on board a docked cruise ship among the travelers on a world tour that started in New York, along with the tour leader Dr. Suderman (the redoubtable Lionel Atwill, in full pompous stuffed shirt mode).  A New York judge was murdered by strangulation on the Atlantic leg of the journey and Duff joined the tour in England to investigate, though what his jurisdiction over the case would have been I can't see.  (It's all better rationalized in the book.)  

Duff has a plan to catch the killer and wants Charlie to come along with him to the boat.  Charlie goes alone to get his superior's permission, rather than bring Duff along with him, conveniently leaving Duff to be murdered (strangulation again) by the bearded man with glasses, obviously disguised, who was eavesdropping through a conveniently open window.  Why, it's the strangler!  

Here, in for the killer to get his strangling in, Duff had to go by the window to knock the ashes out of his pipe and then turn his back to the window.  Seems kind of a roundabout way to murder him!  (Duff suggests that the strangler might be a woman, but come on.)  

What's this?

Duff snuffed by strangler!

When Charlie returns to his office and finds his friend dead, he vows to catch the killer himself.  Jimmy and No. 7 son Willie are still hanging around the station too and you can bet dollars to donuts that Jimmy will also be showing up on that cruise ship, "helping" his Dad.

The suspect passengers on the cruise are:

Beautiful Paula Drake (Marjorie Weaver), the female half of the love interest

Handsome Dick Kenyon (Robert Lowery), the male half of the love interest, who is traveling with his wealthy uncle

Susie Watson (Cora Witherspoon), an excitable middle-aged lady boarding with Paula

James Ross (Don Beddoe), a wealthy middle-aged jewelry dealer

Professor Gordon (Leo G. Carroll), a middle-aged scholarly archaeologist

Mr. and Mrs. Walters (Charles Middleton and Claire Du Brey), who seem to be spiritualists (I was never quite sure what their religion was.)

An obviously terrified man named Gerald Pendleton, who won't come out of his cabin (Leonard Mudie).  Could he be our next murder victim?

When Charlie gets on board he finds that Dick Kenyon's uncle has been murdered (strangled!) upping out cruise body count to three already.  After the ship sets sail, Jimmy is caught as a stowaway and put to work, which Charlie allows (denying he knows him) so that Jimmy can hunt for clues at his father's direction. He actually proves pretty useful in this one.  

Some of our suspects: Paula, Dick, James, Susie and the Walters

Nothing to hide here!  Dr. Suderman and Mr. Walters

a pair of master thespians (Lionel Atwill and Leo G. Carroll)

Susie gets dramatic

Jimmy gets manhandled

Gangway!  Jimmy finally got a clue. 

Murder Cruise changes the plot around from the book quite a bit, although the basis of it--another revenge from the past deal--is the same.  Suspense is pretty well-maintained, with a shift of culpritude in the last fifteen minutes or so to three different people.  However, disappointingly for me, the film steals a device from an older Warner Oland Chan film and if you have seen that film you are going to know almost immediately who the killer is.  I'm surprised not to see reviews mention this.

On top of that the main clue to the killer is one of the verbal slip-up variety, where the killer stupidly says something that reveals himself.  Any practiced mystery fan can tell right off when it's happening, even if they do not have knowledge about the subject.  

Despite all that the film is still an enjoyable mid-range Toler Fox Chan, nowhere near the best of them, but not the worst either.  Certainly it's fun to see those fine, frequent film villains Carroll and Atwill in the same film in the same film; they even have a scene briefly just to themselves.  Marjorie Weaver, her southern accent only slightly discernible, and Robert Lowery, both 26 at the time of filming, are stronger than your usual juvenile love interests, though there's only so much you can do with those roles.   

jinx ahoy

Susie gets asked to dance

Uncle Charlie dispenses relationship advice like Papa Poirot

Then there's Charles Middleton and Claire Du Brey as the gloomy religious couple, both of whom have great presence.  Middleton is famous for having played Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon serials; out of makeup he looks and sounds a lot like John Carradine, though he doesn't have the latter's charisma.  Claire Du Brey gets all the best lines between the two, however, as his wife who is always portentously spouting spiritualistic hoodoo.  

Du Brey is enjoyably paired off against the film's primary comic relief, Cora Witherspoon, who spends the film either screaming or getting off catty one-liners.  She's a lot of fun and reminded me a lot of Mrs. Howell from Gilligan's Island, the late, great Natalie Schafer.  Unsurprisingly both women frequently played haughty society matrons on film in the Thirties and Forties.  

at the mortuary

Gotcha, biatch!

At the end of the film when Witherspoon tells tells Charlie he can find her at the San Francisco YWCA, day or night, there's a real poignancy to her delivery.  She's had fun on this cruise, even with (or perhaps because of) all the murders, and now it's back to the boring everyday life of the unmarried woman of a certain age.  (On the cruise she even got to dance with hunky Lowery, an actor almost half her age.)  

The lengthy resolution of the film (where a new character is brought in to give necessary exposition) takes place at the San Francisco morgue, allowing Susie to get off her best zinger to Mrs. Walters.  There's also a nice comic turn by Harlan Briggs as the coroner, who just wants to get this all done with and eat his sandwiches.  Jimmy has his best comic "bit" at the very end, taking both the coroner and his pop by surprise.  Detractors can say what they will, I think Sen Yung was a terrific actor.  

Sidney Toler did eleven Chan films for Fox and it seems to me the clear standouts from that tenure are Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939), Charlie Chan in the Wax Museum (1940), Dead Men Tell (1941) and Castle in the Desert (1942).  Pretty close to these are Charlie Chan in Reno (1939) and Charlie Chan in Panama (1940).  All but Reno were written by John Francis Larkin, who really seems to have blossomed with his quintet of Chan films.  Murder Cruise is not in the same league as those but it's still an enjoyable B mystery trip, particularly if you are a fan of the genre, and of the inimitable Charlie Chan.  

Around the World in Deadly Days: Charlie Chan Carries On (1930) by Earl Derr Biggers and The Small World of Murder by Elizabeth Ferrars (1973)

Are there enough world tour mysteries to create a subgenre?  At the moment the only two, separated by nearly half a century, that I can think of are Charlie Chan Carries On by Earl Derr Biggers and The Small World of Murder by Elizabeth Ferrars.  And even the latter is a bit of cheat because the main characters travel by plane from England to Australia, stopping off in Mexico, Fiji and New Zealand.  Then there are a couple of nice murders--or unnatural deaths shall we say--and the surviving main characters return to London, where the brief, violent climax of the tale occurs.  So that's more like halfway around the world and back.  

During the world tour by boat and train in Charlie Chan Carries On, there's a murder in a hotel room London, followed by one in France and another in Italy, and yet another, as I recollect, in coastal China (this time the Scotland Yard investigator of the original London murder), before a second Scotland Yard man investigating the first murder is shot in Charlie Chan's own office in Honolulu.  (This book has a very bloodthirsty murderer!)  This last fiendish act results in Charlie finally getting in on the case, for the final leg of the world tour, by boat, to San Francisco.  Of course Charlie bags the culprit in short order.

I read Earl Biggers' slightly earlier Chan mystery, The Black Camel (1929), last year and I wish I had blogged it because I thought it arguably a classic of the genre.  Biggers--a bestselling author of his day who died comparatively young at the age of forty-eight and who before his death had only completed a half-dozen Chan detective novels (and no short stories)--seems undervalued to me today.  

I noticed that neither Julian Symons nor Jacques Barzun (those two great I-am's-and-you-arent's of mystery criticism), though they disagreed about so much in mystery criticism, thought Biggers worth more than the most cursory of notices in their books.  I don't know why, unless in Symons' case it was a latent anti-American bias that sometimes came to surface and in Barzun's his marked dislike for what he deemed "meek," or self-effacing, detectives.  If Barzun read Chan as such, that's his mistake, because of course Chan's meekness, if that's what it is, is in the form of surface Asian politeness, concealing the incisive mind and steely will of the Great Detective beneath.

Of course Biggers' creation carries the added baggage of being a Chinese detective who was created and given tongue by a Caucasian and additionally on film for decades was played by a succession of white men.  I doubt that either Symons or Barzun, neither of whom was the most "woke" of men, would have been concerned about this, but many people have been vexed by it in modern times.  

The last of the Caucasian Chans on film was English actor Peter Ustinov, in the film Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, which was made in 1980.  By the time this flick rolled round, racial, ethnic and sexual minority groups in the United States had organized to demand better treatment and representation from the American film and television industry and the makers of this final Chan film actually found themselves, due to pressure from a Chinese-American rights group, blocked from filming in San Francisco.  

Peter Ustinov, who over his distinguished career (he was a double Oscar winner) had specialized in playing "ethnic" parts--despite his English nationality he was actually part Polish, Jewish, Russian, Ethiopian, surprisingly enough, as well as German, Italian and French--took offense at what decades later (he died in 2004) he likely would have dismissed as political correctness or wokeness. In a widely-circulated newspaper interview he dismissed the outrage over his playing a Chinese man as simply another tiresome example of America;s puritanical self-righteousness.  (He took time to denounce the American boycott of the Moscow Olympics as well).  

All of which probably didn't help the cause of the film any!  Even without modern social media.

Also probably undermining Biggers' reputation as a detective writer are two other factors: the fact that the success of the films overshadowed the books and that Biggers died at the height of the detective series success in 1933, which meant no more books in the series.  There are only six actual Chan novels, compared to the once seemingly endless parade of films.  Let's face it, had Agatha Christie died in 1933 after publishing six Poirot mysteries (Styles to End House), she wouldn't be the phenomenon she is today, even with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd under her belt.  

When I read The Black Camel, however, I had to admit that this was a very well-wrought mystery.  Unfortunately, I was not as enthusiastic about Charlie Chan Carries On.  It's not bad--Biggers was quite a good writer and could spin a yarn--but I definitely had some issues with it.  

Kete Luke is on the cover of
this 1973 pb reprint but there's no
Chan son to be found in the novel

A great part of the problem for me is that Biggers hands off so much of the story to the Yard's Chief Inspector Duff, who effectively stands in for Chan for most of the novel.  Indeed, you could call this a Duff mystery as much as a Chan mystery, except for the fact that Duff is something of a blithering incompetent, ot so it struck me.  Which is another problem I had with the book.  

Duff had appeared in an earlier Chan novel, Behind That Curtain (1928), and apparently the fans liked him so much they wanted the stalwart Yard man and Charlie to solve a mystery in London together.  Instead Biggers had his initial murder in CCCO take place in London and had Duff investigate it solo.  The two friends only appear together briefly in Honolulu.  

I found this whole structure rather unsatisfying.  Let me explain.

The opening of the novel concerns a world tour of wealthy Americans (the Depression has started but none of them seem to be feeling the pinch) that has decamped in a posh London hotel.  Biggers' description of the place made it sound a lot like Brown's, the ultra-respectable lodgment that Agatha Christie fictionalized many years later in At Bertram's Hotel (or in Christie's case--or Biggers' too for that matter--it may have been Fleming's, I have learned).  

Old Duff-er never saw it coming

Duff fails to pursue a point which would have elucidated much of the mystery much earlier, which results in further deaths in France and Italy.  But it's the murder in Italy which really bugs me.  Duff desperately needs to talk to this woman, the estranged wife of the second murder victim, at her hotel, and he knows the killer is literally gunning for her.  But does he meet the woman in her room?  Of course not!

No, he has her come down an open cage elevator to meet him in sitting room.  And of course the poor woman, dressed in white, is dramatically shot and killed in the cage and can't give Duff her information.  Dramatic, yes, and it would film well, but rather intolerably silly.

Why on earth did Duff not go meet her in her room.  Evidently because it would be improper for a man to be alone with a woman, not his wife or relation, in her room.  At least that's all I could I figure out.  If you have another idea, let me know. 

In short, I just felt like Biggers was draaaaging the story out.  This feeling lengthened when Biggers killed off the Scotland Yard and shot (though didn't kill off) Duff.  There was just too much mayhem in this story.  Also I suspicioned the murderer the moment I was introduced to this person, not from deduction, but because of a certain quality to them, which naturally I cannot name.  

And then Charlie just plays too small of a role in the whole thing, probably because the basic problem (one of those revenge from this distant past deals, which is made clear early on), is not really that complex, despite all the murders.  So I would have to tate this tour as a bit of miss.  It also stretches credulity that the tour would have continued with all this mayhem.  I would rather Charlie had just solved another murder on Hawaii.  But then the territory had such a regrettably low crime rate in those days!

*****

eerie combo photograph-art jacket 
for the American hardcover edition 
by Roger Zimmerman

Elizabeth Ferrars' The Small World of Murder also felt to me a bit too thrillerish.  In this one a couple, Jocelyn and Nicola Foley, goes on a plane trip to Australia for Christmas to try and get over the kidnapping, some six months earlier, of their baby daughter.  The most shocking thing about this book to me was that the mother left the baby unattended in her pram outside the grocery store while she did her shopping.  My, how things have changed in fifty years!

You might be reminded of the tragic Madeleine McCann mystery, where in 2007 young Madeleine, then nearly four, evidently was kidnapped from her hotel room in Portugal while harparents dined very close nearby.  The mystery of Madeleine's disappearance remains unsolved today.  But fear not, dear readers and true crime followers, Ferrars' mystery has a solution.  

The wealthy Foleys have brought along with them on their own dime pretty Nina Hemslow, a "resting" actress who is Nicola's friend and Jocelyn's former lover, and she serves as the novel's viewpoint character.  And things quickly get dramatic.  

During stops at Mexico, Fiji and New Zealand, Nicola claims, Jocelyn has tried to kill her (mostly by pushing her into or off things).  She tells Nina he blames her for their baby Brigid's abduction, but Nina thinks her friend is surely just paranoid.  Is she?  

Things come to a head in Australia, where the threesome spends Christmas with Jocelyn's relations in the wine business at their Victorian country house.  At a certain point you surely will think you see the explanation of the kidnapping conundrum and you will indeed be right--though there is one extra twist back in London when Nina returns with a male friend involved in the affair, which resolves the murder/murders as well as the abduction.  

This is not a bad story--Ferrars rarely wrote a genuinely bad one, particularly in these years--but like a lot of travelogue mysteries it's pretty superficial in the treatments of the settings, particularly the short stops in Mexico, Fiji and New Zealand.  There's a good bit of time spent in international airports and on planes and I was reminded a little of Christie's slightly earlier Passenger to Frankfurt. 

I lived in Mexico City for three months in 1974 when I was eight so I was especially interested in the Mexico section, but the color is mostly about how aggressive the shoeshine boys and the like are with tourists (which was true enough as I recall).  With Australia it's mostly about the houses all having corrugated iron roofs and trim.  but Ferrars had traveled to these places and had a right to make copy, even superficial, of it.  Everything is grist to the writer's mill!  She set a couple of later novels in Australia as I recall, and additional ones over the years in other foreign parts.  Same like Christie.  

One thing The Small World of Murder has going for it is brevity.  It doesn't outsay its welcome, allowing us to engage ourselves for a time with its suspenseful little Ruth Rendellish tale of crime and cruelty that does not take a Great Detective to solve.  Sorry Charlie, you weren't needed for this one!