Martin Edwards's Blog

The murder in 1943 of Sir Harry Oakes remains unsolved. It was a gruesome and sensational crime, committed in The Bahamas, where Oakes (an American by birth, but made an English baronet to reward his philanthropy) was the richest inhabitant. The case has been the subject of several books - one of them by the spy writer James Leasor - and Marshall Houts' account is the basis for the 1983 film Eureka.

When I learned that the director of Eureka was none other than Nicolas Roeg, I guessed that the film would be visually stunning (it was) and that it was likely to be far from a straightforward retelling of the events surrounding Oakes' death. And it's fair to say that Paul Mayersberg's screenplay strays a long way away from reality. 

The early part of the film is set in the snowy wastes of the Yukon. Jack McCann (Gene Hackman, at his best) is prospecting for gold. And eventually, in strange and dramatic circumstances, he finds it. We then fast-forward twenty years to find him on his island, complete with wife (Jane Lapotaire) and married daughter (Theresa Russell, at her most glamorous). Unfortunately he hates his son-in-law Claude (Rutger Haute). McCann is the film's version of Oakes, while Claude is a version of Alfred de Marigny.

The film was a flop at the box office but now it's something of a cult classic and Danny Boyle rates it very highly indeed. Viewed simplistically as a true crime story, it's hopeless - the courtroom scene in which Claude cross-examines his wife is risible. But this is a film which looks really good and which explores character and the corrupting effect of the love of money in quite an interesting way. An interesting failure, I'd say. 

I recall reading The Day of the Jackal as a teenager, just after it came out in paperback. I'd read the reviews and the book sounded fascinating. What's more, it lived up to the hype. Soon the story was filmed by Fred Zinneman, and in due course I went to see what he'd made of Frederick Forsyth's debut novel. Suffice to say that he did Forsyth - who, arguably, never matched the brilliance of his first novel - justice.

I decided to give the film another watch, to see how well it stood up, more than half a century after its original release in 1973. The short answer is that it is still extremely entertaining, partly because of the excellent cast, partly because of the pacy direction. And credit must also go to the writer of the screenplay, Kenneth Ross, about whom I don't know much. He did a great job. 

Edward Fox is exceptionally good as the assassin known as the Jackal whose doomed task is to kill Charles de Gaulle, just as Eddie Redmayne was in the recent TV version of the story. The Jackal is a shadowy figure in many ways, but Fox captures his ruthlessness as well as his meticulous attention to detail. It's a compelling performance. 

The cast includes such notable names as Alan Badel, Tony Britton, Cyril Cusack, Derek Jacobi, and Eric Porter. There are small roles for Terence Alexander, Ronald Pickup, Anton Rodgers, Donald Sinden, Bernard Archard, and Timothy West. With actors of that calibre, you can't go far wrong, and Zinneman doesn't. A word, too, for the two main female cast members, Delphine Seyrig and Olga Georges-Picot, both of whom make the most of relatively limited parts; it's sad to think that the lives of both women ended far too soon. All in all, the film still offers first-class entertainment.

 

I've mentioned before my long-term interest in the writing of Nedra Tyre, whom I first discovered through her short stories published by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Tyre (1912-90) was at one time a social worker, and - like Ann Cleeves, who also spent some time in a similar job, but is a different sort of writer - she made good use of the knowledge about human nature that she gleaned through her work.

Tyre published six novels between 1952 and 1971, but she wasn't prolific enough to become well-known, but at her best she was an incisive writer, capable of evoking menace through relatively low-key descriptions of everyday lives. Thankfully, Stark House Press have done her proud in recent times, reprinting much of her work, including Reflections on Murder, a fascinating collection of her stories which I discussed  and a single volume of two of the novels, which contains both her debut, Mouse in Eternity, and the 1960 book Hall of Death.

Hall of Death is a good read, but it's definitely not a book that you could describe as comforting, let alone cosy, and it's sobering to learn from the introduction that the story had its roots in certain real life events. The setting is a reform school for teenage girls and the narrator is a new member of staff, Miss Michaels (we never learn her first name, and this isn't an affectation; it contributes to the chilly nature of the story). She has been hired to assist the woman who is in charge, Miss Spinks.

It soon becomes clear that Miss Michael's sympathies are with the girls rather than her fellow staff members and it's fair to assume that this reflects Tyre's own attitudes. There are a few disturbing moments in the early pages, and before the book is done, there have been four deaths. I don't want to say too much about the way the plot unfolds, for fear of spoilers, but although this novel focuses on psychological suspense, the 'whodunit' element is also fairly strong. A strong book, quite short, and another great find by Stark House Press.

I'm nervous about gambling and I've never put on a bet in a casino. However, I have visited a couple of casinos in the company of my good friend Doug Stewart (seen above a few years back, when he and I travelled around Arizona together). Given the subject matter of his latest novel, I asked if he'd be willing to contribute a guest blog about casinos. Here's what he came up with:

'Just the city’s name conjures up exciting images for many and abhorrence for others. I lived there for seven exciting years. Ironically, when I started writing my international thriller Deadline Vegas I had no idea I would ever live there. Now I live on the Isle of Man – rather different from the neon, glitter and noise of The Strip.

On 18th November, Deadly Descent, the follow-up to Deadline Vegas is being released. This is my 18th book. The main character is Finlay “Dex” Dexter. In Deadline Vegas, following a vow made to his murdered sister to destroy a Las Vegas casino after she was cheated big-time, Dex is thrown into the middle of a massive international fraud where only murder can suppress the truth. The fall-out from the havoc he created in Sin City is carried over to Deadly Descent.

Deadly Descent, although starting with dramatic action in Africa, takes Dex from his London home to France and Istanbul and … to Las Vegas where some people have neither forgiven nor forgotten. The theme involves an unexplained helicopter crash. Eerily, fiction follows truth and truth follows fiction. You can pre-order now on Amazon UK and USA.

'Do Casinos cheat?' This is one of the most frequent questions I get asked. The short answer is that today, in most countries, casinos are heavily regulated to prevent cheating. However, gamblers do get duped when playing in poorly regulated countries.

After Bugsy Siegal created the Flamingo in the late 1940s, organised crime had a substantial grip on Vegas casinos. It was only in the 1980s that the Mafia were cleared out. Certainly, in the early days, there was cheating. One of my oldest friends worked in a Downtown Vegas casino where he was briefed on how the roulette was fixed.

One of his jobs was also to play a fruit machine specially selected by management. This was always close to an entrance. It was primed to pay out frequently. In those days, the noise of clattering money, bells and whistles encouraged hopefuls to come in and use the other machines around him. Strangely enough, they were usually cleaned out. Those machines were set out at a very low pay-out level!

Online gambling, again, is okay when the virtual casino is operating from well-regulated centres like the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, the UK or Malta etc. However, playing casino games operating from fringe countries is a risk I would not take. It is very easy for games to be rigged or to be hard to get your winnings paid out - if you are able to win!

In online poker, the danger can be that two or three of the players may be in league with each other against you as the mug punter. Beware!'

You can find out more about Doug and his crime and adventure thrillers at: https://www.douglasstewartbooks.com/

Robert Bloch was a prolific and highly capable writer who made his name by writing Psycho. A few years later he cashed in on the success of that Alfred Hitchcock film by writing the story for a movie made by Amicus, which was a film company ploughing much the same furrow in the horror market as Hammer. This film had the somewhat unoriginal title of The Psychopath, though apparently it's also known as Schizo and it was released in 1966.

It's an odd movie, because it works quite well as a macabre thriller, making good use of that great trope of macabre movies, creepy dolls. Unfortunately, the story does descend into the same sort of barminess that affects the titular serial killer. However, the director, Freddie Francis, was adept at camera work, and some of the visual effects are impressive.

The film opens with the murder of a musician in London. He's run over repeatedly by a car and a doll bearing his likeness is found at the scene. It turns out that he collaborated with a number of other musicians who had a dark secret in their past and - guess what? - one by one, they are eliminated. The daughter of one of them, Louise, is played by the extremely attractive Judy Huxtable, making her film debut. She happens to be involved professionally with doll-making and personally with a rather wooden chap called Loftis (played, not very plausibly I'm afraid, by Don Borisenko).

Soon the trail leads to the home of a strange old woman in a wheelchair ('hysterical paralysis' is diagnosed) called Mrs Von Sturm (Margaret Johnston who succumbs to the urge to act hysterically). She lives with her weird son Mark (John Standing, a very good actor who certainly isn't seen at his best here). All in all, there is some indifferent acting and script-writing, but one of the redeeming features of the film is a strong performance by Patrick Wymark as the investigating detective. I think this film could have done with a better final twist and the latter stages were too over-the-top to be effective. And that's frustrating, because there are some good ingredients here, and a subtler approach could have paid dividends. 

A few years back, I acquired a copy of The Uncounted Hour (1936) by Herbert Warner Allen, inscribed to the wine buff, merchant, and writer Charles Walter Berry, but I've only this year got round to reading it. Warner Allen himself was a wine expert who wrote several books about the subject. He was evidently an interesting character, who seems, among other things, to have developed an interest in mysticism. But our concern is with his contribution to detective fiction.
Part of that contribution was to encourage his friend (and fellow journalist) Edmund Clerihew Bentley to write a belated follow-up novel to Trent's Last Case. Trent's Own Case appeared under their joint names in 1936; my guess is that the bulk of the plotting was done by Allen and the bulk of the writing by Bentley, but I might be mistaken; it just seems a logical assumption. A wine merchant called Mr Clerihew, who featured in Allen's other work, appears in the story. Presumably encouraged by the experience, Warner Allen promptly published The Uncounted Hour, described on the jacket as a 'murder story', although for much of the story the characters debate whether Sir Godric FitzWaren committed suicide.
This is in some ways an odd book, which starts out as a conventional country house mystery, narrated by a doctor called Kenelm Kinglake, and develops into something rather different. There are some interesting ideas in the story and also some excellent turns of phrase: Warner Allen was an intelligent man, of that there is no doubt. But his storytelling methods in this book were a bit clunky, clues to his inexperience as a novelist. To some extent, this results, I think, from the ingenious (if by no means original) plot idea at the heart of the book. But he handles it unevenly.
Indeed, at one point in the story, I found my attention drifting away because of the number of rather self-indulgent digressions. But Warner Allen redeems things, to some extent, in the latter part of the book, as more deaths occur, with some unusual plot twists. I must say that I didn't like his portrayal of one Jewish character, which resorts to some of the tedious stereotypes that were a regrettable feature of some Golden Age fiction. Yet despite the book's flaws, by the end of the story the author had at the very least recaptured my attention. I commend the ambition of the concept, even if I'm a bit lukewarm about the way it was executed.     

Curtis Hanson was a highly capable movie director and I belatedly caught up with a film of his from 1990, Bad Influence. Thirty-five years on, it is still a good watch, and one of its incidental pleasures is seeing David Duchovny in a small part before his career took off with The X-Files. The lead actors, Rob Lowe and James Spader, are very good in their respective roles, and the script by David Koepp is strong. Koepp takes a familiar premise and shakes it up very effectively; he has, in the intervening years, developed into a top-class screenwriter and Bad Influence is clearly the work of a young and high-calibre writer.

Spader plays Michael, a highly-paid young man who is expert in high finance. He is engaged to a pretty and rich (if irritating) young woman but there seems to be a void in his life. It doesn't help that his older brother is a clueless guy with a drugs conviction who keeps borrowing money from him. Into Michael's life comes Lowe, playing Alex, a handsome and charismatic guy who introduces him to a life of hedonism.

At first Michael is excited to join in Alex's fun, but it's foreseeable that Bad Things Will Happen, and sure enough they do. What I liked about Koepp's screenplay was what happened as Michael's life begins to unravel. So often a film of this sort begins well and then deteriorates. That's not the case here. I wondered how some of the moral dilemmas Koepp had set up would play out, and I think the way he handled this was first-rate. My one reservation is that I'd have liked a deeper psychological understanding of Alex's character. The final scene in the film, although low-key, struck me as highly effective.

Reviews have often compared this movie to Strangers of a Train, and there's no doubt that the idea of a strong man exerting his will on a weaker associate has enduring appeal. For me, one of the finest examples of this kind of story is a book I've written about more than once - Hugh Walpole's The Killer and the Slain. Bad Influence is a very different story, but it also makes for good, and occasionally though-provoking entertainment.

The locked room mystery has played a significant part in the evolution of the detective story. The very first detective story proper (by general consent), 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' was a locked room mystery, and even before that there were a couple of notable tales involving a locked room/impossibility element which I discussed in The Life of Crime.
Locked room mysteries and impossible crime stories have continued to be written ever since, and the late Bob Adey, the supreme expert on the subject, listed over two thousand of them. But the inherent artificiality of the locked room puzzle has meant that at times, it's been in the doldrums, at least so far as critics are concerned. Howard Haycraft, a generally shrewd critic, was advising writers against this type of story way back in the 1940s, even at a time when John Dickson Carr was still at his peak!
Fortunately, despite the vagaries of critical fashion, people have continued to enjoy reading locked room mysteries - and indeed writing them. And now they are very much back in favour - so much so that publishers scramble to label crime novels as 'locked room mysteries' when really they are no such thing! I've written some locked room/impossible crime short stories (a couple of them long ago, before the current vogue for them) and I've also included locked room sub-plots in a couple of the Rachel Savernake novels, Blackstone Fell and Hemlock Bay.  
But I've never written a full-scale locked room mystery novel. One young writer has, however, emerged in the past few years who does just that. This is Tom Mead, author so far of four novels as well as some equally entertaining short stories - I wrote an introduction to his enjoyable collection The Indian Rope Trick, published by Crippen & Landru. He also wrote an excellent story which I included in Midsummer Mysteries.
His latest novel, The House at Devil's Neck, published by Head of Zeus in the UK, is possibly his most accomplished book to date. It's another case for Joseph Spector and again the plot is extremely intricate - but fairly clued, and with cluefinder footnotes, I'm delighted to say. Like John Dickson Carr, Tom achieves many of his most successful effects through the creation of a suitably macabre atmosphere, and the eerie nature of the eponymous house and its setting on an island with a causeway to the mainland is well evoked. He also shows considerable skill in misdirecting the reader's attention away from vital information in the text. I've often thought that the locked room concept works best in the short form, but this novel shows that, as in Carr's day, there are some very agreeable exceptions to the 'rule'. Great fun.

When Harry Carmichael's Of Unsound Mind was published in 1960, the blurb writer for Collins Crime Club didn't stint on the hype: 'This is an original novel of exceptional ingenuity. Seven human documents have been woven into one...It is a story that grips and never lets go, a story which displays Harry Carmichael's rare talent for mystery at its best.'

I found the story highly readable and entertaining. Insurance man Peter Piper comes across a sequence of apparently inexplicable suicides and enlists the help of his friend Quinn, a journalist, to make sense of the puzzles. I did figure out quite a lot of the plot early on, although this didn't detract from enjoyment, as the pace is lightning-fast from start to finish.

One reason I was able to make sense of the puzzle so quickly was that, in some key respects it resembles the central puzzle in a very good novel by John Bingham,  - but Bingham's book was published in 1961. Did Carmichael's central idea influence Bingham? It's possible, but it's also fair to emphasise that in other respects the books are totally different. And I enjoyed both of them.

Another thing that the two stories have in common is that the culprit is thinly characterised. I'd have liked a bit more about the murderer's character in both books, but this isn't a major complaint. Carmichael specialised in page-turners and although, when viewed in the cold light of day, his books often have flaws, they make such smooth reading that those weaknesses are easy to forgive and, sometimes, to overlook completely.

The Wasp is a film with a script by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, who adapted her own stage play. Those theatrical origins are fairly evident, given that there are only three significant characters (and one of those is only lightly sketched) and much of the action takes place in one location. But this is not something that detracted from my enjoyment of a movie that supplies a number of unexpected twists and turns.

Thirty years ago, Heather (Naomie Harris) and Carla (Natalie Dormer) were, for a short time, school friends. However, a shocking incident in which Carla killed a pigeon heralded the collapse of their relationship, with profound consequences. And then, Heather gets in touch with Carla, wanting to meet her urgently.

Since their schooldays, the pair have led contrasting lives. Heather is married to Simon (Dominic Allburn); they are wealthy but childless, and his behaviour is concerning. Heather is also bothered by the presence of a wasps' nest in their posh house. Carla is a mother of four who works on a till in a supermarket and is now pregnant again and very short of money. But Heather has a proposition for her that could change her life forever.

This is a dark film, well directed by the very talented Guillem Morales, and it benefits from a superb performance (in a challenging part) by Naomie Harris; Natalie Dormer is also very good. One slight weakness is that Simon is pretty much a cipher; I'm not sure I believed in him as a collector of obscure and rather unpleasant insects. Malcolm's real interest is in the shifting power dynamics of the relationship of the two women and she handles this very well. I like the way she avoids the obvious in the storyline, and the film is consistently watchable.