TV Quote of the Day (‘Harry O,’ As a Detective Counters a Potential Client’s Suspicions About His Intentions)

Gertrude Blainey [played by Julie Sommars]: “I don't think you're the right detective for me.”

Harry Orwell [played by David Janssen]: “Gertrude, all detectives are immoral. And we all drink alcoholic beverages.”— Harry O, Season 1, Episode 1, “Gertrude,” original air date Sept 12, 1974, teleplay by Howard Rodman, directed by Jerry Thorpe

Quote of the Day (Dashiell Hammett, on a Curious Episode in His Time as a Pinkerton Detective)

“The chief of police of a Southern city once gave me a description of a man, complete even to the mole on his neck, but neglected to mention that he had only one arm.”—American crime novelist and former Pinkerton operative Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), “From the Memoirs of a Private Detective,” originally published in The Smart Set, March 1923, reprinted in Dashiell Hammett: Crime Stories and Other Writings (Library of America anthology, 2001)

Quote of the Day (Arthur Conan Doyle, on Mediocrity and Genius)

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.”— British mystery writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), The Valley of Fear (1915)

(The image accompanying this post shows Basil Rathbone as Doyle’s great literary creation: Sherlock Holmes. Countless others have played the great detective, but—perhaps because I grew up knowing him first in the role—nobody embodied him so well as Rathbone. Need I say that Inspector Lestrade symbolizes mediocrity and Holmes genius?)

Appreciations: P. D. James’ Holiday Crime Fiction

You can have your sunny Christmas entertainments. As the holiday comes just as the cold, dark winter season descends, it seems to me that the literature of the season has to somehow acknowledge the darkness inside and outside ourselves.

It took her husband’s mental illness and her consequent need to provide for her family that led P.D. James (1920-2014) to work for Britain’s National Health Service and the Police Department, where she developed the medical and criminal expertise that underlay her detective novels. Well into middle age when her first novel was published, she continued until her death a half century later.

I don’t know why I haven’t read more of James’ work, since I have enjoyed what I have gotten around to—notably, The Black Tower and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Maybe it’s because she wrote so many Adam Dalgliesh novels, and the prospect of reading another, after seeing Roy Marsden on TV in the role of the solitary, depressed poetry-loving detective, was more than I could take.

But when I saw James’ posthumous collection, Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales offered on sale as a used hardcover at Barnes & Noble recently, I snapped it up quickly. Reading it has made me anxious to try to get hold of a similarly themed holiday collection of hers, The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories.

One friend has told me she prefers  up in an entirely different world. In contrast, I find that short fiction—from the simple tale to the more complex novella—suits my schedule better. And, truth be told, it is easier for an author to achieve perfection on a small than a sprawling scale.

Unlike Agatha Christie, James creates suspense not so much through carefully planted clues and artful indirection, but through setting and psychology. These virtues transferred from the Dalgleish and Charlotte Grey detective novels that made her reputation to more general crime fiction—like the novel Innocent Blood and the tales (which appeared originally in various anthologies from 1976 to 2006) in this slender volume. 

Two of the six tales in Sleep No More are set in the holiday season. With extraordinary vividness in these two tales, James evokes a time and place shadowed by a gathering storm: specifically, the class-conscious England of the late 1930s, with the desperation and evil of politics paralleling the same qualities in individuals. 

“The Yo-Yo” is narrated by a 73-year-old lawyer and judge whose discovery of the title object leads him to recall a murder he witnessed 60 years before. That crime involves, at least initially, a decidedly unsympathetic victim: Michael Michaelmass, or “Mike the Menace,” “easily the most unpopular master in the school, pedantic, over-strict and given to that biting sarcasm which boys find more difficult to bear than shouted insults.”

But by the time the tale is over, all will be changed utterly:

“I began to grow up during that Christmas week. I realized for the first time the insidious temptations of power, the exhilaration of feeling in control of people and events, the power of patronage. I learnt another lesson, best expressed by Henry James: ‘Never say you know the last word about any human heart.’”

The first-person narrator of “The Murder of Santa Claus” is even more ironic—just what one might expect from a writer of second-tier detective fiction who does “a workmanlike job on the old conventions.” (In an aside that must have greatly amused his creator, this author remarks, “I’m no H.R.F. Keating, no Dick Francis, not even a P.D. James.”)

My only complaint is that the description that follows is too deft to have come from a hack like Charles Mickledore:

“My arrival at Marston station, the silent drive through the darkening village, the school with the Christmas chains of coloured paper gleaming against the windows. The first sight of my uncle’s dark judgemental face. The carol singers creeping out under the blackout curtain. The game of hunt the hare. The silent figure of Santa Claus at the foot of my bed.”

Just as the elderly lawyer recounting “The Yo-Yo” reveals how his schoolboy self displayed the ability to explain away the unjustifiable that would inform his future profession, Charles Mickledore—described by another character as a “shy, unattractive, secretive boy”—shows the capacity to link action and circumstance that underlay his writing career. He figures out the culprit, then coolly deals with both the killer and the policeman investigating the case.

James can also render an appearance concisely but unforgettably, as in the second impression that Mickledore receives when he manages to raise his eyes from the decolletage of a famous actress—his wealthy uncle’s mistress, Gloria Belsize—to her face: 

“Now I saw what tactful touching-up had concealed: the deepening lines under the eyes, the sagging jawline, the hectic flush under the remarkable eyes. Then I wondered why she should be so excited by Christmas. Now I realise that she was half-drunk for most of the day and that my uncle saw it, was amused by it, and made no attempt to curb her.”

Above all, James depicts the devastating impact of crime on the human personality—including an impression that can scar the young for life.

In the last few years, British crime fiction has lost two female titans: James and contemporary Ruth Rendell. Both were geographers of human landscapes touched by violence: its perpetrators, its witnesses, and its victims. In particular, James’ Sleep No More reminds readers that death—very much including the kind associated with mayhem—never takes a holiday, even the one that mall jingles invariably remind us is the “most wonderful time of the year.”

 

Flashback, September 1957: ‘Perry Mason,’ TV Noir Classic, Premieres

Erle Stanley Gardner was displeased by what Hollywood had done to his most famous character in several films of the 1930s. But he reached a far more positive verdict about the series Perry Mason, which premiered this month 60 years ago on CBS. In fact, in the show’s final episode nine seasons later, the bestselling mystery writer made a cameo appearance as a judge.

Many would say that Gardner should have been pleased. After all, the astonishingly prolific and bestselling whodunnit writer had formed his own production company, Paisano Productions, to create the series; each episode had to go through his hands for approval; and he earned a reputation as a demanding though grateful creative supervisor.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, from my boyhood to tweens, I tried never to miss an episode of the series when the New York syndicated channel WPIX aired reruns. Raymond Burr, Barbara Hale, William Tallman, William Hopper, and Ray Collins may have been a more familiar cast than any other I could think of then. 

At the time, I was simply intrigued by the question of how lawyer-sleuth Mason would unmask the real killer. All these years later, I remain fascinated, but for additional reasons.

One is simply that the series is one of the best examples of television noir, the new medium’s attempt to graft the stark black-and-white images of the film noir genre spotlighting crime and punishment. I couldn’t have told you this at the time, but I sensed very dark things going on in the adult world through all the murders occurring in the series. Millions of other viewers watched similar images, from the late Fifties to mid Sixties, in shows like Peter Gunn, The Twilight Zone, and The Naked City (which I’ve only started to watch and appreciate now, through season DVD sets).

Several reasons made Perry Mason a particularly striking example of television noir:

*Innocent people fell into the clutches of evil week after week, with law enforcement invariably picking the wrong man or woman, with the real killer often pulling the strings;

*Double-dealing femme fatales, almost a requirement of the genre, were a frequent plot element of the show;

*Actors familiar from film noir—the likes of Elisha Cook Jr. (the “gunsel” from The Maltese Falcon), Marie Windsor, Steve Brodie, Marvin Miller and Audrey Totter—appeared as guests;

* Black and white images, an original limitation of the first TV sets, lent themselves to stark cinematography by the likes of the series’ Frank Redman, a 40-year industry veteran who had worked on a number of B-movie film noirs;

*The distinctive opening theme music by Fred Steiner, shot through with a sophisticated urban sensibility,courtesy of swaggering jazz notes, also, through its propulsive piano, evoked a mood of dark desperation—perfectly appropriate for cases that, at that time in the U.S., involved the gas chamber. (By the way, the theme is formally known as "Park Avenue Beat"--a bit of an anomaly, given that the series is set in California.)

*One man was called on, again and again, to make matters right, Mason—the courtroom version of Philip Marlowe, whose creator, Raymond Chandler, noted that “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.”

Particularly when I watched Season 1 episodes on DVD, I was struck even more strongly by how, with scripts stretched a bit longer, an episode could easily have made for a B-movie noir. Consider:

*Outdoor locations, such as Red's Reef Bar and Grill and Plummer Park in West Hollywood, were used quite a bit in the first seasons, giving the series an authentic grittiness (later, to cut costs, such location shooting became somewhat less frequent—as did Mason’s appearances before full juries, which required paying 12 extras a full day’s salary for not doing anything, and which were reduced courtesy of preliminary or “evidentiary” hearings);

*Sgt. Holcomb, a ruthless cop—the kind of officer who invariably threatened to throw the book at private eyes in film noir—opposed Mason in the Season 1 episode, “The Case of the Fan-Dancer’s Horse”;

* Mason himself was less likely to be smooth with police or clients early in the series, and more willing to employ tricks that barely stayed on the right side of the law.

I would be remiss in writing about the show without discussing the part played by Gail Patrick Jackson in its success. An actress in classic 1930s and 1940s films such as My Man Godfrey (1936), Stage Door (1937), and My Favorite Wife (1940), Jackson—the wife of Gardner’s literary agent, Cornwell Jackson—impressed the author so much with her efficiency that he urged her to take on the role of Mason’s devoted secretary, Della Street. Instead, she turned down this high-profile, on-camera role for a less conspicuous but more important offscreen one as executive producer. 

Ms. Jackson was the indispensable intermediary between Gardner on the one hand and the cast, crew, and network “suits” on the other. “She was a dynamic young woman who not only knew Hollywood inside and out, but who had purpose, energy, charm, and as indefatigable a devotion to work as Gardner himself,” observed Dorothy B. Hughes (herself a mystery writer of great distinction) in her biography of Gardner, The Case of the Real Perry Mason (1978).

Having been sidelined from law school by a screen test that led to her Hollywood career, Ms. Jackson had enough intelligence and interest in legal matters to understand the point of view of Gardner (himself a practicing attorney for two decades before he began writing about Mason). It was great practice for her job, which involved, as Gardner put it in a letter, “battling with all sorts of people who are arrogant and conceited, using tact, ingenuity and stamina…carrying all the responsibility of getting Perry Mason on the air.”

During the show’s run, Ms. Jackson was the only female executive producer of a primetime TV series. Modern female "showrunners" such as Marta Kauffman (Friends), Amy Sherman-Palladino (Gilmore Girls) and Shonda Rimes (Scandal) owe her an immense amount for clearing a space for women in the "Mad Men" era.

The influence of the show was widespread. Although it left audiences with unreal expectations that real killers would be exposed in the end, it also reminded them that defendants were innocent until proven guilty and that they had the right to an attorney. And it presented an image of the U.S. legal system as a place where even the lowliest could obtain justice. One young listener especially absorbed this message: Sonia Sotomayor, the future Supreme Court Justice.

At her confirmation hearing in 2009, she recalled an exchange when Mason consoled D.A. Hamilton Burger for losing a case (something the latter did in all but three cases on the show—and even in two of those, they were reversed on appeal):

"No, my job as a prosecutor is to do justice, and justice is served when a guilty man is convicted and an innocent man is not," she quoted the prosecutor as saying.

"That TV character said something that motivated my choices in life," Sotomayor recalled.