FFB: Death in the Dark - Stacey Bishop

THE STORY: Three murders, all committed under seemingly impossible conditions, have decimated the Denny family in Death in the Dark (1930). A locked apartment building and a death by gunshot in a darkened bedroom, another death by gunshot done in full view of five witnesses, and a shooting in a jail cell with no one near the victim nor any gun in the cell. How has the murderer achieved these miracle crimes? Intellectual criminologist Stephan Bayard with the help of police Detective Jules and Bayard's close friend George Stacey Bishop manages to weed through the chaff and get to the heart of all the mysteries. Along the way the reader is treated to various lengthy and esoteric discussions of fine art, the state of modern music in 1930, and the criminality of thymocentric personalities. Once again, the influence of Dr. Louis Berman rears its ugly head in yet another early American detective story plagued with talk of eugenics and the bogus science of determining personality based on endocrinology.

THE CHARACTERS: Stephan Bayard is another of the many American detectives descended from C. Auguste Dupin and Philo Vance. He is as cold and rational as Dupin and enjoys his esoteric monologues like Vance. Within minutes of learning of the death of Dave Denny, a music concert promoter, Bayard is sure that the man has committed suicide. But a key left in a door when it should be hanging on a hook, one of Denny's diehard habits, will bother the criminologist until the final pages. Bayard much like Vance is also a cultural connoisseur and we get several didactic lectures on art, music, and literature with loads of name dropping of both familiar and obscure painters, sculptors, musicians and writers. Bishop is the S. S. Van Dine stand-in of the book and is both mythical author and narrator when in fact "Stacey Bishop" is the pseudonym of modern musician George Antheil.

Dr. Stein, a radical endocrinologist, is one of the many fictional doctors inspired by Louis Berman's work on controlling personality and behavior through use of hormones and surgery of the pituitary and thymus glands. Berman's radical theories and practices which flirt with controversial eugenics theory caught the imagination of many genre fiction writers at the time. Donald Clough Cameron's criminologist, Abelard Voss, for example is another fictional detective who likes to espouse Berman's theories. Antheil takes this specious science to the extremes making Stein something of a mad doctor tinkering with experiments more suited to a science fiction shocker. There is a scene where Bayard and Bishop visit Stein's lab and we see his experiments have led to the development of a bizarre machine that in its description sounds like something out of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. It seems to involve the extraction of personality via electricity and the wearing of a metal mask. I read these sections several times and still can't make sense of them. The finale of the novel is straight out of a shudder pulp magazine and is completely out of place for a story that was up till then purely cerebral and focussed on logic and ratiocination.

Floor plan of Dave Denny's murder (click to enlarge)

The suspects are mostly made up of stock characters with paper thin personas like Mrs Denny, a bed ridden wealthy matriarch; John and Frieda Alvinson, composer and his "boyishly handsome" wife who serves as the 1920s exotic female figure; a profligate brother in Aaron Denny who is financially irresponsible and hated by his stepmother; and a handful of servants who are nothing more than symbols. Bayard and Stein are the only characters in the book that approach anything remotely resembling human dimension, even if it is mostly intellectual. Even the murderer comes across as lacking in any real depth until the last couple of chapters when motivation is revealed and we get more nonsense about the thymocentric personality.

INNOVATION: Death in the Dark is overloaded with intriguing new ways to tell a detective novel. If they all tend to obfuscate the story that's no real failure. They often made me laugh in astonishment rather than in ridicule. Bayard draws up numerous fact sheets that serve as tabulation scenes highlighting the oddities that make each crime impossible. He also informs Bishop that Sir Richard Muir, the lawyer involved in the trial of Crippen, liked to compose "poems" during his case summations which he would read to the jury at the close of a trial. Bayard then composes his own series of blank verse tributes to each of the three impossible crimes pointing out each puzzling incident that is nagging his overstimulated brain. In effect we get two separate and protracted tabulation scenes: one in a bulleted list format, the other in a pseudo-poetic format.

Over the course of the book the impossibilities are each dealt with individually with each solution presented as it is discovered rather than revealed in the concluding chapter as with most detective novels. The problem of a key left in the locked door of the Denny apartment is oddly the one problem that is not explained until the novel's end. The jail cell murder -- the most ingenious of the three crimes -- is surprisingly solved almost immediately but having its roots in more pulp fiction gimmickry the bizarre method adds another incongruous element of the absurd to the overarching somber tone.

THINGS I LEARNED: I absorbed a lot about early American and European modern music and contemporary modern art of the late 1920s. Among the artists mentioned is sculptor Constantin Brancusi and his abstract series known as Bird in Flight. Bayard talks about this shape and the fascination with all things streamlined and draws analogies to the evolving trend of women's physiques becoming more boyish, less shapely. He compares the differences between curvaceous American Gertrude Denny and Russian emigre Frieda Alvinson repeatedly throughout the story. At one point Frieda is compared to a "transvestant" which Bishop points out is a type that is appearing with increasing frequency in New York. (In a brief note after Bishop's preface reprint publisher John Pugmire points out that Antheil's eccentric punctuation and spelling has been preserved so the reader may "experience the full flavor of the original." )

THE AUTHOR: George Antheil was an aspiring modern music composer during the 1920s who is now best remembered, not for his concert work, but for his music scores of movies like Repeat Performance, Knock on Any Door and House by the River. Death in the Dark is supposedly a cathartic revenge book which Antheil wrote in reaction to his disastrous Carnegie Hall debut in 1927 of Ballet Mécanique. Each of the victims in the murder mystery is a thinly disguised version of the people Antheil held responsible for his public humiliation. The story of the novel's creation, the concert and the people who served as the inspiration for the characters is told in an Afterword by Mauro Piccinini. In passing Piccinini also touches on Antheil's other claim to fame -- his physics work and the development of the "frequency hopping spread spectrum" invented in tandem with actress Hedy Lamarr.

EASY TO FIND? John Pugmire has reprinted this extremely rare detective novel as part of his Locked Room International imprint. It's available only as a paperback via amazon.com and nowhere else. LRI does not distribute to bookstores as it is a print-on-demand operation utilizing Amazon's CreateSpace self-publishing platform. Don't hold your breath trying to find an original 1930 edition published only in the UK by Faber and Faber in a very small print run. The only copy I've ever seen offered for sale was back in 2010 and was priced at $1500. Currently, the only copies are in a much more affordable $25 paperback edition just released a few weeks ago. Click here to go the book's sale page on amazon.

We Danced and Swallowed the Night...

Just learned that crime writer Adrian McKinty finds inspiration in Tom Waits songs.


Review of McKinty's excellent locked room mystery Rain Dogs coming soon...

FFB: Garnett Weston, Screenplay Writer & Mystery Novelist

Before the perverse fascination of stories about psychopathic serial killers all but ruined crime fiction, mystery writers liked to indulge in stories about crazed multiple murderers. Free from contemporary psychological profiling that luridly told of abusive twisted past lives the vintage tales where an entire cast seems to be knocked off one by one nevertheless managed to convey the paranoia and fear known to modern readers. Sometimes the emotions are raised to a fever pitch and escalate to a level of hysteria as in the work of Garnett Weston, a Canadian screenplay writer who got his start in silent cinema. Weston was particularly adept at whipping up variations of these histrionic and preposterous murder mysteries. I'll look at two of his mystery novels both of which deal with multiple murder and coincidentally use the old "someone is after the heirs" plot structure.

Weston's first novel Murder on Shadow Island (1933) is an odd story of a group of friends who travel from Manhattan to a remote island in the St. Lawrence river off the coast of Ontario, Canada in order to rescue one of their own from the hands of a mad killer. A glance at a newspaper headline announcing a murder of an artist on Shadow Island sends them off to find out what happened. When they arrive they learn that Tay Burgess, their artist friend, was most likely mistaken for his host Court Mallory, another friend of the NYC trio. Also they learn that a group of British relatives have suddenly descended upon the household on Shadow Island all claiming to be heirs to the fortune of Lady Mary, Court's aunt. The reader is expecting a story in which the heirs start to kill each other off, one by one, but Weston has something altogether in mind as the weird story progresses.

There are several murders but instead of the heirs being targeted it is the group of New Yorkers who start dropping like flies. The friends all turn sleuths and as each gets closer to the truth it is the amateur detective who meets his end. Oddly, the group of squabbling unlikeable heirs (all but the doe-eyed Cora Holland, who serves as rudimentary love interest for our protagonist Kim Hayward) all turn out to be the biggest group of red herrings I've encountered in a mystery novel. The five heirs, more stereotyped sketches than characters, serve no other purpose but to misdirect the reader into thinking one conspiracy plot is taking place when in fact the true murderer and motivation for all the crimes has nothing to do with inheriting Lady Mary's money and house.

A back story involving Court's childhood, how he was adopted by the Holland family, and how he was foster brother to two other boys in the Holland family is at the heart of the overworked plot. The involved story concerns parents dying in accidents and children apparently drowning in a seashore accident. The backstory is so strange and filled with familiar mystery novel trappings that the reader cannot discount it as mere filler. A veteran devotee of detective fiction knows for certain that one if not all of the missing people from the Holland Family past will turn up later as one of the characters in the present day murder mystery. This proves to be true, but it all comes to be revealed in the most convoluted and macabre manner when Kim and Cora learn of a hidden seashore cavern accessible only by swimming through an underwater chamber. The discovery of what is hidden in the cave adds another level of horror to an already incredulous murder story.

Murder on Shadow Island was Weston's first mystery novel, most likely his first novel as well. Primarily a screenplay writer from 1927 through the 1930s his novel is filled with formulaic incidents and plots gimmicks as well as simplistic romance inspired by the movies. Kim and Cora are the love-at-first-sight couple who woo one another during an incongruous fishing trip scene followed by a picnic by the river. Their dialogue is grossly sentimental peppered with sweethearts and darlings in the way only people in the movies talk to one another when falling in love. All this only hours after one of Kim's friends was brutally killed!

Weston's attempts to make the mystery a detective novel never arise above the obligatory Q&A sessions with a load of repetitive alibi breaking scenes. Much of the dialogue consists in badgering the survivors with "Where were you? What were you doing? Who was with you?" each time a corpse is found. The heirs all vehemently deny any murderous actions while Cora cringes and wrings her hands in the corner begging Kim to find the murderer before he gets her too. She's not very bright as it should be obvious to all involved that the killer is only interested in killing men from New York. Soon all the friends are dead. Kim is attacked twice and Cora nearly killed merely because she happened to be standing next to him. It becomes more contrived and implausible with each new dead body.

The most exciting part of the book is saved for the final quarter of the book when it should become clear to all the characters, as well as the reader, who the culprit really is and why only the men from New York were murdered. Prior to these genuinely exciting and imaginatively executed scenes the book is something of a drag with too much reliance on hoary old clichés taken from "old dark house" cliffhangers.

Apparently not satisfied with what he committed on Shadow Island Weston tried his hand once more with the basic outline of a group of greedy heirs at one another's throats in Dead Men Are Dangerous (1937). This time melodrama and cliffhanger serial action set pieces are replaced with mad hysteria and a ruthlessness more suited to a Jacobean tragedy. Our hero and heroine fair much worse than brave Kim and wishy-washy Cora from Shadow Island. A bigger group of avaricious, back stabbing liars and thieves were never gathered in one household since the 17th century murderous characters stabbed, poisoned and strangled their way to the top of the food chain in the revenge tragedies of Middleton, Ford and Webster.

Phil and Marion Acres and their son Herbert have been riding the rails with hoboes and tramps in the boxcars of freight trains as they make their way to California with the hope of starting a new life with greater job opportunities. With only $200 in savings preciously guarded in a money belt strapped underneath Marion's dress they endure indignities and assaults from a variety of drifters and vagrants on and off the trains. At their latest campsite on the grounds of an orange grove they are rescued from two thuggish tramps by Captain Rome and taken into his home as guests. There they are bathed, dressed and treated as guests of honor at a dinner where Rome's family have gathered to hear of news of his will. Rome's three daughters, each with a different mother from his sexual dalliances as a globetrotting sailor, and their men are puzzled by the appearance of the two strangers and the boy. Puzzlement gives way to shock when the captain announces that he has disinherited everyone and made Herbert Acres his sole heir and his parents executors of his estate. Oh yes, that means the Acres family just became targets of the greedy heirs.

No sooner than Captain Rome has made out the new will, had it signed and witnessed, he is shot dead. But by who and how? He is found in a room with one open window on a higher floor and no one was seen to enter the room from inside or outside. The gun is nowhere in sight and a search of the house and grounds fails to locate the weapon. And of course the will has apparently vanished. Has it been destroyed? Stolen? Hidden? What follows is an explosion of hate and violence as the members of Captain Rome's family tear apart the house in search of the will while alternately threatening the Acres with torture, then bargaining with them for a share of the estate. Shootings and stabbings escalate, the bodies pile up, but amazingly Marion and her son survive each murderous assault. It seems the room where Captain Rome kept his safe is a death trap. Anyone who tries to open the safe dies. A duplicitous and equally avaricious lawyer serves as the novel's Machiavellian mastermind manipulating everyone he can and playing each character against one another with loathsome ingenuity.

Art work by Emil Sitka, circa 1930s,
 depicting he and his brother "riding the rails"

While the plot itself is clearly preposterous, Weston's devilish and ingenious death traps notwithstanding, the real interest of the book is in its compassionate depiction of homeless life in depression era America. The Acres, like Steinbeck's Joad family, represent the marginalized population that no one wanted to be reminded of in the 1930s. Phil Acres has dreams of owning his own ranch, Marion tends to her men and guards their savings with tenacious dignity, and Herbert drifts into a land of make believe never answering to his own name but instead demanding his parents indulge his fanciful alter egos like Orange Eagle, a tough Indian chief. Weston's tendency to sentimentalize his family threatens to cheapen this likeable trio but Weston gives them enough troubles to stave off the treacle. He lays it on a bit heavy with the survivalist instincts of two hoboes who antagonize the Acres family. One would have to believe that the tramps and hoboes were not willing to steal and kill for a scrap of food or clothing but were an interconnected underworld of devious criminals. The sheriff of Dead Men Are Dangerous actually believes the Acres are part of such a thieving gang of killer tramps.

Garnett Weston, circa 1970
(photo ©Tony Archer)

There are police aplenty to assist Sheriff Buller but none of them, like most policemen in detective fiction of this era, are very good at their jobs. The real detective and hero of the novel is a hobo with a secret past vaguely hinted at as being related to a failure in law enforcement. He goes by the nickname "Highway" and he is Marions's sole ally after the unexpected murder of her husband leaves her alone with Herbert and at the mercy of the gang of conspiring heirs. Highway does legitimate detective work, some of it fair play, but most of it done offstage with dramatic revelations and damning evidence produced at the eleventh hour. The story is almost entirely told through the viewpoint of Marion Acre. She appears in every scene and while not always the focus it is basically through her observations that we watch the story unfold. Highway can only speak out if Marion is present. If he leaves a scene and Marion stays behind, then we never get to see where he goes or what he does which is, I think, a major flaw of the book. When he is on stage he lends a delightful air of sophistication, intelligence and wit to a story burdened with base motives and ugly displays of class prejudice, racial prejudice and deceitful, dirty liars evading the truth.

QUOTES: Seedler, the lawyer: "Do you really think I have to be honorable and respectable because the community thinks I am? What's the advantage of being above suspicion if you don't make use of your position?"
Marion: "You're a horrible villain."
Seedler: "No, I'm a thoroughly honorable and respectable and successful attorney."

Michael Lady, reporter: "Screwy things happen in this world. Two guys killed a man the other day in Los Angeles for six dollars. Last year a guy hired himself out for seventy-five cents to a tired husband who wanted his wife out of the way. He was to get five dollars later. The guy did the job for the six bits and never collected the rest. If people kill for chicken feed what'll they do when there's a wad like the Rome money lying around?"

Highway: "I'm a solitary man; I've gone my way with little enough thought of others. But sometimes there comes a thing I can't let pass and hold my head up as a man should. This is one of them. What I do is for my own self-respect as much as for you, ma'am. So you see there's a grain of selfishness in it."

THE AUTHOR: Garnett Weston was born in born in Toronto in 1890. He started writing titles for silent movies in 1927 with The Yankee Clipper. He went on to write stories, scenarios, and screenplay adaptations of novels and plays from 1929 through 1941. Probably best known for his story of the cult horror movie White Zombie (1932) starring Bela Lugosi he also wrote or adapted the scripts for Supernatural (1933) starring Carole Lombard, The Ninth Guest (1934) based on the murder mystery The Invisible Host (1930), the first sound film version of The Mill on the Floss (1936), and several entries in the Bulldog Drummond series. In 1942 he left Hollywood, abandoned screenwriting, and moved with his wife and son to East Sooke on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. He continued to write novels, short stories and poetry throughout the 1940s and early 1950s. He died at his Canadian home in 1980.

Garnett Weston's Crime & Mystery Fiction
Murder on Shadow Island (1933)
Murder in Haste (1935) (UK title: Death Never Forgets)
Dead Men Are Dangerous (1937)
The Man with the Monocle (1943) (UK title: Citizens - To Arms!)
Poldrate Street (1944) (UK title: The Undertaker Dies - 1940)
The Hidden Portal (1946)
Legacy of Fear (1950)
Death Is a Private Affair (1970) (poetry)

FFB: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? - Henry Farrell

On March 5 the first episode of Feud aired on the FX cable network. This mini-series features Susan Sarandon as Bette Davis and Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford and over the course of the next eight weeks viewers will watch as they re-enact the turmoil and havoc created by those two diva movie actresses on and off the set of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? I’ve seen that cult classic, the grandmother of the badass biddy or hagsploitation suspense movies of the 1960s and 1970s, dozens of times. But I’ve never read the book. Now is as good a time as any to see how closely the movie script sticks to the original forgotten novel.

I expected some similarities but I didn’t expect such a reverent translation from page to screen. The first two thirds of the book are literally exactly the same as the movie, from prologue at the turn of the century to the unexpected murder of a supporting character in the Hudson house. There are minor tweaks here and there like the 50ish housekeeper Mrs. Edna Stitt who has a much larger part in the book being transformed on screen into a younger African American housekeeper named Elvira now relegated to the background with only two key scenes. Edwin Flagg also has a larger supporting part in the book and we learn a lot more of his pathetic unambitious slacker life and his sick co-dependent relationship with his mother Del. But other than those minor alterations, the addition in the movie script of one extra surprise meal for Blanche, and a more interestingly rendered finale at the beach in the last two chapters what you see in the movie is exactly what’s in the book. Which is better? If I’m allowed I'd like to take one half of each -- preferring the movie version of Baby Jane and the book version of Blanche. Overall, I’d say that the movie improves upon the story of the book immensely. Lucas Heller, the scriptwriter and adapter, definitely understands suspense in cinematic terms much better than Farrell does in his novel.

For those of you uninitiated here’s my briefest possible summary.  (Those who know the story already can skip this paragraph.) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1960) tells the story of two sisters who live together in relative seclusion following their previous success as actresses. Blanche Hudson, the older sister, now crippled for life as the result of a car accident and confined to a wheelchair is under the care of Jane, a former child actress. Jane was a headliner throughout her childhood and the breadwinner for the Hudson family in the days of vaudeville but her fame quickly faded as the sisters grew older.  Blanche became a star of Hollywood romantic comedies, had a much longer career in the 30s and 40s while Jane was consigned to bit parts thanks to a charitable clause written into all of Blanche’s movie contracts that gave her sister those jobs.  Now in their twilight years Jane finds herself acting as nursemaid and waitress to her invalid sister and resenting her more and more each day. A bitter rivalry and jealousy long dormant will now explode in a display of cruel psychological and physical tortures as Jane prepares to make her comeback in a delusional belief that she will finally outshine Blanche though both their stars have long since been extinguished from the Hollywood firmament.

Henry Farrell’s novel offers the reader a chance to know both Blanche and Jane in ways that Davis and Crawford only hinted at in the movie. There are long passages of interior monologues in which their present lives and former lives are described. We know their thoughts more than a close-up can provide. Blanche as an invalid has a rich interior life in which she retreats into her past just as Jane does, but it seems to be more of a longing for what could have been if not for the crippling accident. Jane as depicted in the novel is actually less interesting than what Davis brought to the screen. She’s more loathsome in her delusions rather than the pitiful creature Davis managed to make Baby Jane in the movie. What little empathy we can conjure up for her comes far too late in the final heartbreaking scene in which the truth about the car accident is finally made known.

Jane has one section that I think is the triumph of the novel. She has a true epiphany about how her retreat from reality and immersion in a fantasy life was actually a descent into madness. Her horror of the realization at the monster she has become, how what she valued most -- the love of her sister -- was perverted and abused, and how she has reached a point where she cannot ever go back and try to repair what could have been mended between the two women. The book has a subtly nihilistic viewpoint at this point and it succeeds as a true noir. Prior to those few pages in Chapter 14 (out of a total of eighteen) the book sustains its momentum and macabre fascination with scenes intended alternately to shock and repulse.

QUOTES:  Blanche turned her gaze upward to the ceiling and her lips twisted in a smile of wry amusement. Against a field of vivid blue an artful scattering of stars winked down at her dully. Her smile faded, and she let her eyes fall to the mantel and the framed photograph of the blank-faced girl who had once believed she could actually possess the sky and the stars and had ordered them fixed upon her ceiling. What a vain, profligate child that one had been. What a contemptible fraud, really. And hardly in a position to charge Jane with poor taste.

[Jane] had dwelt for a time in a world removed, utterly, from reality. [...] She was like a child who had shocked herself out of her own temper tantrums by inadvertently breaking a treasured piece of china; the angry delirium was past, but the calm present was made even worse by the imminent threat of some terrible retribution.

She was lost in hell, she told herself in sudden anguish, lost and doomed forever to a burning hell of unavailing remorse. Her madness had begun in her fear of losing Blanche, of losing, at last, Blanche's forgiveness. [...] What was the use of anything? Of anything at all?

The only real criticism I have are in the sections where we see the physical struggles and the intense agony that Blanche suffers in doing something as simple as getting out of her wheelchair. There are three separate scenes where she must act quickly in order that Jane not catch her out of the chair or out of her room or both but her paralysis is her curse. Blanche can't move quickly at all obviously. Farrell goes into intricate detail describing every minute movement as she raises herself up, slips, falls, stumbles, misses a handrail... One scene lasts four pages describing her arduous journey from the gallery on the second floor to the first floor hallway where the only working phone is kept. Another scene goes on for two pages as she lifts herself out of her chair and clutches at the grillwork barring her bedroom window while simultaneously trying to get the attention of the neighbor working in her garden below to whom Blanche wants to toss a handwritten note. I guess this is Farrell's idea of suspense, but those sections are extremely unnerving to read. A few paragraphs could easily have conveyed what Farrell chooses to spread out over pages. There's a kind of sadism on display in his lurid focus on her pain and agony.

MOVIE:  Davis fares more successfully in her grotesque portrayal of the overweight, slovenly, and alcoholic Jane Hudson. Paradoxically poignant in her childish regressions into her past and a fury of hatred in her explosions of unrestrained violence. She was willing to let herself go in way I think she never had in her early career. She understood the character thoroughly, even better than Henry Farrell. Deservedly, she earned her 11th and final Academy Award nomination as Best Actress for her performance as Jane Hudson. The bizarre business surrounding her Oscar nomination for this movie while Crawford got nothing is the focus of one of the episodes in Feud.

Crawford, always more of a movie star than an actress, does a fine job but there's something missing. Her acting has always struck me as artificial style consisting of her limited gallery of facial expressions and vocal tricks. She was belittled by Davis for wanting to appear glamorous even though her character is a recluse confined to a wheelchair who had never been outside her home in over twenty years. Crawford's obsession with her looks and her reliance on camera close-ups to do her acting for her were her undoing. She never fully inhabits Blanche, there's a surface element that is more apparent with repeated viewings of the movie. Crawford is too self-conscious of her performance, never surrendered, and wore a mask of fear and paranoia while adopting poses.

Victor Buono made his movie debut in a supporting role in this movie. He brings to life everything that Edwin Flagg is in the novel and moreso. Buono succeeds in making Flagg a lot more human and humorous than Farrell's caricature of a morose, cynical, mother hating boy-man.

In adapting the novel to the screen Lucas Heller (who would go on to collaborate with director Robert Aldrich on five more movies) masterfully makes use of the novel's best scenes, does a little tinkering with story chronology by moving some scenes that occur late in the novel to earlier points in the movie. And he structures the script with parallel storytelling and editing to make the most of cinematic suspense. The movie is pretty much all about Jane and her transformation from bully to murderer to madwoman. Blanche still has her important dramatic scenes as well, but Jane's story as performed by Bette Davis is what everyone remembers even after one viewing.

EASY TO FIND? Approximately 50 copies, mostly of paperback reprints, are available for sale at the usual bookselling sites. Both US and UK hardcover editions are scarce and are not surprisingly priced in the "collectible range" primarily due to the cult status of the movie. I imagine some unscrupulous sellers will raise the prices as soon as they find out about the TV series. No recent reissue came up in my research which seems a genuine missed opportunity for a new edition as a tie-in with the series.

Feud is airing every Sunday night from March 5 to April 23 on the FX cable station. Though the story in the first episode sometimes drags to a standstill in the interview sequences which serve as superfluous narration, whenever Sarandon and Lange are on screen they are riveting. Episodes can be watched after their initial air date via streaming on the FX network website.

FFB: Requiem at Rogano - Stephen Knight

THE STORY: Having just retired from the police force Inspector Reginald Brough is not finding a life of leisure to his liking. Fortuitously, he receives a letter from his nephew Nicholas who invites him to collaborate on a book called The History of Murder. Their research leads them to the discovery that a series of murders in London attributed to a killer dubbed "the Deptford Strangler" by the tabloid press are actually replications of murders that were committed in an Italian village called Rogano in the 15th century. Further research links the prophecies of Nostradamus to both sets of murders, and some startling revelations that lead them to believe that the present day victims as well as the Deptford Strangler are reincarnations of the Italian victims and killer.

CHARACTERS: In Requiem at Rogano (1979) Inspector Brough and Nicholas Calvin meet a variety of eccentrics all of whom uncannily have information related to the murders in Rogano. From Dr. Orchard who telephones Brough with an urgent message and arranges to meet with him privately to the strange old man who gives Nicholas his personal translation of some obscure passages in Nostradamus' book of eerie prophecies everyone seems to be privy to the disturbing parallels between the Deptford Strangler and the murders in Rogano. Nicholas has been having blackouts and weird dreams which he vaguely recalls. He says he was putting his hands on the necks of people he has never seen. Then Nicholas is told that he is the reincarnation of Antonio Aquilina, one of two brothers executed for the Rogano murders centuries ago. Adding to overall paranoia of the novel Nicholas keeps encountering a mysterious figure he calls "The Man with Odd Eyes" who seems to be following him everywhere. Eventually the mystery man steps out of the shadows to introduce himself as Rudolf van Galen. Galen joins forces with the two researchers when he reveals that he is the reincarnation of Giuseppe Aquilina, brother of Antonio.

All three of our main characters find it necessary to travel to Rogano to complete their research. The novel comes alive in this section. The lecturing and info dropping gives way to thrilling incidents of adventure hearkening back to cliffhanger thrillers of silent cinema and Victorian sensation novel plotting. The story increasingly becomes more and more paranoid, imbued with sinister occult influences. All the time Knight has been concocting a clever murder mystery. The final three chapters deliver several unexpected turns of events that make the book something of a tour de force in supernatural and mystery fiction.

INNOVATIONS: For the first half of the book I could not stop thinking that this fell into a subgenre of reincarnation thrillers that were so popular in the 1970s with The Reincarnation of Peter Proud and Audrey Rose probably the most well remembered thanks to their movie adaptations. Knight tries his best to put forth his understanding of reincarnation by drawing parallels from the German legend of the Doppelgänger to the Norwegian myth of the fylgja, "a soul or spirit as mortal and physical as the body itself" that emerges and forms alongside every human from the minute they are conceived. At first the notion that every character in the book is a reincarnated soul from 15th century beggars belief. And yet by the time the characters set foot in Rogano Knight manages to make sense of his idea because the novel really belongs to conspiracy theory fiction.

Knight's universe is one in which no human is controlled by free will, but rather at the mercy of a previous life. Behavior and personality are predetermined by an ominous force that allows for this transference of souls over the ages. Some specific examples: Nicholas finds himself repulsed by the sight and smell of meat. He learns he has visited a male brothel and apparently had sex with another man. Why? Because Antonio Aquilina, his former soul, was both a vegetarian and a gay man. Or so he learns from Rudolf van Galen. The truth behind Nicholas' strange behavior transformation is, in fact, much more bizarre.

If the reader fully embraces that Requiem at Rogano is actually a form of conspiracy theory fiction, then the book that readers may find it easier to draw comparisons to is The Da Vinci Code. It is not only Knight's obsession with Nostradamus's writings that made me think of Dan Brown. The climactic revelation about the motivation for the Rogano murders having to do with the viability of Christianity was his crowning touch. The solution and killer's motive are jaw dropping quite frankly. It made me reassess the entire structure of the novel. When Brough delivers the truly shocking conclusion the reader discovers that all along the novel was an ingeniously plotted detective novel with all the evidence and clues right there in front of him.

QUOTES: "The idea of the fetch, once prevalent in Great Britain, is revived every time we read newspaper reports of ghosts of the living appearing at the moment of death to relatives and or dear friends. In Ireland the fetch is often thought to haunt its own human double."

"I am inured against shock in such cases. [...] The great lesson I learned [in India] from first-hand experience was that almost anything is possible."

"Herr van Galen has only demonstrated what you say you have believed all your life, what Christians have been taught for nineteen hundred years. Man has a soul. What's so monstrous about that?"

"We speak of enormous issues, far beyond our comprehension, and yet we use words like certainty and truth with such confidence. Most of us don't even know for certain that our heart will make its next beat. Do we, in fact, really know anything at all?"

THINGS I LEARNED: As mentioned above Nostradamus and his oracular writing are featured prominently. I learned that there are numerous translations, some of which tinker with his original wording in order to make the prophecies more adaptable to modern events and historical figures. Knight draws on some of these translations but also treats us to literal translations and his own interpretation of those sentences. Much of it is laughable, but some of it is clever. Reading someone's interpretation of a prophecy applied to a man called Hitler who will rise to power in the year 1939 in a book set in 1902 and yet published in 1979 is hardly impressive or awe inspiring as was probably his intent. The characters are impressed, but I was not.

Learning about the fylgja was an eye-opener for me. Knight only briefly mentions it in the novel, but further online research was enlightening. The word means "follower" in Norwegian. The concept as I learned on a Norse mythology website is more akin to the idea of a witch's familiar and the fylgja is always in the form of an animal. In some variations of the myth the human can actually shapeshift into the fylgja.

Towards the end of the book there is a lot of talk about the Inquisition which I learned was not geographically confined to Spain. There were acolytes of the Inquisition carrying out punishments, torture and executions on heretics all over Europe including Italy, France and even England.

Stephen Knight in 1979 as seen on
the rear DJ of the US edition
(photo: Fay Godwin)

THE AUTHOR: Stephen Knight was a reporter for most of his life. Requiem at Rogano was his only novel. Prior to this book he was known for his non-fiction true crime book, Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976), quite the bestseller during his lifetime. While working as a reporter he met a man who claimed to know the truth behind the murders and the identity of the infamous serial killer. Clearly that investigative work influenced the conspiracy theory aspect that permeates Requiem at Rogano. I think his 1976 book was the work that started the mad obsession with solving the Ripper case; it certainly was one of the earliest and best selling versions. It has had multiple printings since 1976 with the most recent being a reissue in 2000 from HarperCollins.

EASY TO FIND? The quick answer is the best answer for the majority of you out there. Valancourt Books has reprinted the book under its original British title Requiem at Rogano. Their reprint includes a brief foreword by Bernard Taylor, horror writer and one time collaborator with Knight on a true crime book. As with most small press distribution methods these days the book is available only through internet book sites. My experience says that they unfortunately do not distribute to brick and mortar stores. For those of you who like the smell and feel of an old book I found 55 copies of the 1979 edition for sale, a mix of US and UK editions, and nearly all of them offered at less than $5. Such a deal!

The Hex Murder has been reprinted!

Back in October 2016 I wrote an enthusiastic review on an obscure mystery novel about the Amish and powwow men. It's called The Hex Murder by Forrester Hazard who in reality was Alexander Williams, Jr. Much to my surprise the book has been reprinted by Coachwhip Publications thanks in large part to my review. It's been reissued under Williams' real name rather than his pseudonym, something of a standard practice in vintage mystery reprinting these days.

Curt Evans had a hand in it all, of course. I give him yet another digital standing ovation for his great work in reissuing out of print books -- especially very rare titles -- for the readers and fans like you who crave them.

Go buy a copy now!  (I've been saying this a lot lately.)

And to make it all the easier for you just click on this link and you'll be taken to the page instantly.

NEW STUFF: Cat Out of Hell - Lynne Truss

While browsing in a Barnes & Noble bookstore (one of three left in the entire city of Chicago) I came across Cat Out of Hell (2014) by Lynne Truss. The blurb on the book was enticing enough for me to make an impulsive purchase and I started it that very day. I didn't stop until I was finished. I can tell you that never happens with me reading a new book any more. What made it such an "un-put-downable" read? It's 100% original, 100% unpredictable, and 100% just plain fun.

On the dedication page Truss has this public notice: "To Gemma, who loves proper horror, with apologies". I don't know who Gemma is, a relative or friend of Lynne Truss, but she's a girl (or woman) after my own heart. I love proper horror, too. And this is the real thing. Plus, it's funny! Why Truss finds it necessary to tack on an apology I don't really know. Maybe because the book is about a talking cat? A couple of them, in fact.

Roger is a cat who has literally lived nine lives. He has suffered eight torturous deaths at the hands of his surrogate father -- a wiser, older, somewhat sinister and utterly intimidating black cat who goes by the moniker "the Captain." There is a mystery about The Captain and Roger isn't telling his present owner, a middling actor who makes a living touring in a production of that British farce chestnut See How They Run! The first part of the story -- the bizarre life of Roger and his owner Will Caton-Pines, the actor -- is told through a series of documents and emails sent to Alec Charlesworth a retired librarian who is getting over his wife's recent death. It's all a bit hard to swallow for Alec. Is the story a hoax? Much of it is told in the form of a bad screenplay. And why has Alec been sent these documents about a talking cat who seems to have been responsible for the deaths of several humans? Alec has several mysteries to solve. But all will be explained as this exceptional, brightly funny, and often bloodcurdlingly gory black comedy makes its way to the inevitable battle of good vs. evil in the final pages.

When a book is this good I cannot begin to summarize the plot. I don't want to. The thrill of this kind of popular fiction so well done, so imaginatively thought out, and suspensefully told is in the actual reading. Cats have always been a source of sinister inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe to Sax Rohmer to Stephen King. The movies also are filled with tales of villainous or murderous cats with Cat People, The Uncanny, and Eye of the Cat some excellent examples that come immediately to mind. Even heroic cats have been depicted trying to thwart evil human deeds as in the nasty revenge story Shadow of the Cat with a screenplay by George Baxt. But here is a horror story in which a cat is an anti-hero, a sort of feline Tom Ripley. You can't help but like this rather unlikeable, potentially murderous ball of fur. For much of this short and briskly told novel there is a Highsmithian air of ambiguity about the proceedings. Are the villains the cats or the humans? Is it all a coincidence that Roger's previous owners have all died in a series of bizarre accidents? How do Roger and the Captain figure into Alec's life? The denouement is completely unexpected and reminded me of Dennis Wheatley, Sax Rohmer, Aleister Crowley and a dash of H. P. Lovecraft all rolled into one weird hodgepodge in the insane blood-soaked finale.

For a thoroughly original spin on familiar horror themes, an ingeniously thought out feline conspiracy theory about the purpose of cats in the world, and a well plotted multiple murder mystery Cat Out of Hell gets high marks from me. I feel like reading it all over again. Rush out and get a copy right now!