Month: November 2014

2014 Detective Fan Christmas Gift Ideas

It’s Christmastime and finding the right gift is always a challenge if you want to find something that the recipient will enjoy. This list is for you if you have a fan of detective fiction in your life and would like some gift ideas. Below are books, movies, and audios that I’ve found enjoyable  and that I recommend as gift ideas. I’m a fan of a lot of detective fiction but I lean towards older material, but there are some newer items here as well.

In the hopes, this list will help you with your Christmas shopping. Here are some favorites I’ve enjoyed and would recommend as gifts.

Books:

1) The Greek Coffin Mystery by Ellery Queen: There are few names that say detective fiction quite like Ellery Queen. This book, while not the first Queen book published is set at the start of his mystery solving career and finds him investigating will and then a bizarre murder. Then Ellery lays out his facts-only to be proven completely wrong.  The older style of language may be a barrier to some readers, but if you can get past it, it’s great if you enjoy puzzle mysteries.

2) Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler: This is one of Chandler’s best. Marlowe’s investigation into the disappearance of a wealthy man’s wife puts his life in danger and puts him on the wrong side of a corrupt local police force. The book is stocked with some of Chandler’s most enjoyable characters. Great for lovers of hardboiled private eyes.

3) Homicide Trinity by Rex Stout. I wanted to include a Nero Wolfe book on the list and I wanted to also throw in a short fiction collection on the list, so this book is the winner. This book collects not one but three Nero Wolfe stories, all of them are good and “Counterfeit for Murder” contains the best one time character that Rex Stout ever created.

4) Back on Murder by J Mark Betrand: The Roland March mystery series by Bertrand is simply superb. This first story is a great tale of a veteran detective struggling for one last chance to make it back to the Homicide department. This is a fantastic police procedural and a great character story.

Movies:

5) The Thin Man Collection: This is the classic romantic comedy Detective film series. The chemistry between Myrna Loy and William Powell is just remarkable. The first two films are the best, but three through five are also quite good.

6) The Maltese Falcon: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre in the most iconic hard boiled detective film of all time on DVD for less than $7. A wonderful gift.

7) The George Sanders Saint Movie Collection: Many consider Sanders the definitive screen “Saint.” This collection of five films showcase the charm and style that made Sanders a star.

Television:

8) Columbo: The Complete Series: This affordable DVD collection features all 69 Columbo Telefilms from the beginning starting with the 1968 telefilm Prescription: Murder through the 2003 telefilm, Columbo Loves the Night Life. 

9) Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Series: All 39 episodes of the  very good 1950s syndicated series starring Ronald Howard and Frances Marion as Holmes and Watson.

Audio:

10) Perry Mason: The Case of the Howling Dog: This isn’t the Raymond Burr version of Perry Mason, rather a very faithful audio adaptation of Erle Stanley Gardener’s original novels. This is just a very rich and complex mystery. While all of the Colonial Theater Perry Mason adaptations are good, this one is the best.

Bonus: 

Jim French Productions offers a wide variety of Detective audio dramas on their website. Most notably, those featuring Harry Nile, a detectives whose adventures from the 1940s-1960s have been told by French in true Golden Age style for several decades, and the delightful Hillary Caine series.

Happy shopping, hope these give you some good ideas.

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EP1430: Dragnet: Truck Hijackers

Jack Webb
Friday and Romero’s investigation of a series of truck hijackings is hindered by the suicide of the prime suspect.

Original Air Date: October 1, 1949

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Book Review: Murder in the Ballpark


I’m sure Robert Goldsborough is a nice man and he’s nobly tried to carry on the Nero Wolfe stories. I bare him no animus.

That said, this is the worst mystery novel I’ve read in my life. It’s a bad novel as a Nero Wolfe book, and it’s a horrible mystery.

It begins on the cover. The cover trim is nice (only one of two good things I can say about the book), but the picture looks like a cheap public domain picture and I’m not sure what era it’s from.

This was important, as I was thrown by the timing of the novel. Goldsborough previous run of Wolfe novels updated Wolfe to the late 1980s and early ’90s. His most recent, Archie Meets Nero Wolfe: A Prequel to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe Mysteries was set in the 1920s when Archie first met Nero Wolfe. This one was set in the 1950s for some reason.

However, since that wasn’t clear from the get go, I didn’t think at the time that it was odd for Archie to be asking for and receiving an info dump from Saul Panzer. However, given that this is the 1950s Archie Goodwin, the same one who has read  both the Gazette and Times every day, having Saul suddenly give all the back story on a prominent State Senator for Archie’s benefit was inexplicable.

Archie and Saul are in the park and they see the selfsame Senator murdered in the state and make a bee-line for the exit. The fact that they were at the stadium to see the murder doesn’t serve any purpose for the plot, and nearly all the information that Saul Panzer dumped in Chapter 1 for some reason is later repeated by other characters throughout the book meaning the entire first Chapter was completely pointless.

From Chapters 2-26, there are key two points to address:

First of all, Archie Goodwin as written by Rex Stout is one of the most fun to read narrators in any language. Unfortunately, Goldsborough appears to have completely lost that in this book. All the rough edges and the humor that makes Archie so fun to read is gone leading to a very flat narrative that lacks personality.

This brings me to the second big complaint with the bulk of this book, it is boring. The questioning is repetitive and irrelevant, the dialogue is dull, the the characters are uninteresting and shallow, the settings aren’t interesting. The progress of the case is mostly uninteresting. There were two exceptions to this. There was a so-so scene with Archie, Saul, and some gangsters that’s okay. The sister of a veteran who committed suicide is a decent character though histrionics in the last act kind of weaken her power. But other than that, it’s a tedious tale.

We get to see totally unnecessary details. For example, Archie wants to talk to a suspect who is a candidate to replace the State Senator and so instead of making an appointment or arranging to see her when she’s not busy, Archie goes down to a long press conference about a proposed state highway that goes on for four pages.

Worst of all, nothing in the interaction between the long-standing characters sizzles. Two visits by Cramer are dull beyond belief, and there are no good moments for Archie or Wolfe.

Chapter 27 stands out as the one entertaining chapter in the book where Goldsborough did something Stout never did. He showed us in detail how Archie managed to gather all the suspects for the denouement and how he manages to get everyone including the murderer there. It was a fun chapter as Archie plays everyone. If the rest of the book where this good, this would have been a five star book.

Unfortunately, the final showdown doesn’t go well and that is a shame because in the three prior Goldsborough books I’d read, he usually finished the book strong with a good final scene for Wolfe. In this case, the drama is minor and the interruptions Wolfe allows really detract from the scene particularly after Wolfe threatens to (but doesn’t) eject the offending parties.

The solution has two problems. First, it’s far fetched particularly given that the murder weapon was a high powered rifle where the bullet traveled to its target in about a third of as second.

Not only that, but it basically means that most of the line of inquiry in the book was a waste of our time. The nature of the solution and the whole story behind the murder made it the type of story that Rex Stout might have told, but it would have been in a novella rather than a novel. The effort to stretch this story out for more tan 220 pages led to it being padded beyond reason.

I also have to comment that Goldsborough’s Wolfe was weaker than in other stories, particularly his very stilted dialogue at the end of the book. This is a shame because Goldsborough has usually had a decent grasp of Wolfe, but not so in this story.

Rating: Flummery

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Yours Truly Johnny Dollar: The Wayward Widow Matter (EP1429)

Bob Bailey

Johnny is brought in to guard an elderly widow as she transports a hideous piece of art to a cabin after the suspicious death of her husband.

Original Air Date: August 4, 1957

When making your travel plans, remember http://johnnydollarair.com

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EP1428: Nick Carter: The Case of the Persistent Beggars

Lon Clark

Nick Carter investigates a panhandling racket.

Original Air Date: January 26, 1947

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EP1427: Philip Marlowe: The Ebony Link

Gerald Mohr

Marlowe helps a disabled man whose being blackmailed over his wife for the second time in six months.

Original Air Date: May 28, 1949

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EP1426: Crime and Peter Chambers: The Rooming House Murder

Dane Clark
Peter Chambers investigating a murder in a theatrical bordering house.

Original Air Date: April 27, 1954

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EP1425: The Saint: A Real Gone Guy

Vincent Price
Simon investigates the death of a band leader.

Original Air Date: July 2, 1950

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EP1424: Dragnet: The Brick Bat Slayer

Jack Webb
Friday and Romero investigate a series of brutal murders of women.

Original Air Date: September 24, 1949

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Telefilm Review: Murder She Wrote: The Last Free Man

Murder She Wrote: The Last Free Man was the third made for TV movie featuring Jessica Fletcher following the cancellation of the long-time hit TV mystery show. This is definitely not your typical Murder She Wrote story.

In the film, while in Virgina, Jessica (Angela Lansbury) strikes up a conversation with Cassandra Hawkins (Phylicia Rashad) who is looking into the case of one of her ancestors Samuel Pickney who was labeled a murderer in the waning days of the antebellum South. To add to the mystery, he has not one but two gravemarkers with two different dates of death. Jessica and Cassandra uncover accounts left behind by Jessica’s Great Great Aunt Sarah (also played by Lansbury) who was a slaveowner who owned Sam Pickney (Michael Jace) but considered him a friend.

Through the journal entries, the audience is transported back to the late 1850s and we witness the events leading up to the murder and see how Sarah tries to solve it while dealing with prejudice and tense politics of the era.

The telefilm can be divided into two parts: The framing story and the Antebellum story that takes up most of the movie.

The latter is very well done. The cinemotography is solid and captures the feel of the era quite nicely. Lansbury has a nice turn as the proper but determined Aunt Sarah. Jace has a great emotional performance as Sam. The mystery is an interesting puzzle. It’s not great, but certainly worth watching.

The framing story is far more problematic. There are four scenes in the twenty-first century around the three larger scenes in the 19th century and the first three scenes involve uncovering letters and journals written by Aunt Sarah that tell the story of the murder and its investigation. In no case is the search actually interesting. There’s no one trying to stop them from finding the information. Their search is simply finding a location, digging through boxes, and finding the documents for the next part of the main story. Where the final journal entry is found is not only easy to get to, it’s absurd to imagine that something of that nature would not have already been found in the location they had it in.

Unfortunately, the framing story serves mainly to offer some ham-fisted political commentary about the modern South (the film clumsily suggests a link between Civil War re-enactors and people who spray paint racially motivated graffiti on cars) and debates over the history of the Civil War.  In some ways, it feels like the purpose of the modern day scenes isn’t to tell a good story but to tell us how we should feel about the scenes from the 19th century, which is the definition of bad writing.

The historical portion with the antebellum mystery is enjoyable and evocative. but the weak writing on the modern day portions leads to wasted performances by Rashad, as well as David Ogden Stiers.

Rating: 3.0 out of 5.0

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EP1423: Yours Truly Johnny Dollar: The Markham Matter

Bob Bailey
Johnny is called in when a wealthy insured woman disappears and her husband begins taking control of her finances.

Original Air Date: November 18, 1956

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EP1422: Nick Carter: The Case of the Gold Headed Cane

Lon Clark

Nick Carter is hired  to recover jewels stolen from a foreign mine.

Original Air Date: January 19, 1947

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EP1421: Philip Marlowe: Night Tide

Gerald Mohr
Marlowe is hired by a businessman who is concerned that a dock worker he sent to prison is out for vengeance.

Original Air Date: May 21, 1949

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EP1420: Crime and Peter Chambers: The Sandra Mantel Murder

Dane Clark
Peter Chambers delivers ransom money and becomes a target for murder.

Original Air Date: April 20, 1954

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EP1419: The Saint: Sonata for a Slayer

Vincent Price
The Saint investigates the murder of a composer where the named suspect is Beethoven.

Original Air Date: June 18, 1950

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