I write this review in deep sorrow. I’ve been a fan and booster of Robert K. Tanenbaum for some years now. But that’s all done, now that I’ve read Malice. Tanenbaum has lost my imprimatur. He’s become an author I can no longer support.

What hurts most is that I’m certain it’s my own fault.

If you’re an old timer here, you may recall my history with Tanenbaum. I discovered his Butch Karp/Marlene Ciampi books back in the ’80s, and enjoyed them for their vivid characters and Rabelaisian humor. But then I felt his books were getting a little raunchy for my taste, especially in terms of language, and I dropped him.

In the late ’90s I picked him up again, and it seemed to me he’d grown a great deal as an author and thinker. By this time Butch and Marlene (he’s a New York District Attorney; she’s a former lawyer, later a personal security specialist, now an independently wealthy hobby artist and dog breeder) had gotten married and were raising a family. Of particular interest was their daughter Lucie, who was both a language prodigy and a devout, practicing Catholic. Tanenbaum (like Butch Karp) is clearly Jewish himself, but he showed unusual sensitivity to Christianity in his portrayal of Lucie.

I was especially impressed with the novel True Justice, in which Karp dealt with the issues of abortion and infanticide. Although it understandably attempted to square the circle and present all sides, it depicted (through Lucie) an understanding of the pro-life position, without caricature, hard to find in contemporary literature. I was so pleased that I wrote a fan letter to Tanenbaum, telling him how much I valued his effort.

This, I’m confident, spoiled everything.

Tanenbaum, no doubt, checked out my web page, discovered what sort of a right-wing yahoo I am, and vowed on the spot to drive me, and everyone like me, away.

Not immediately. Not right off. But gradually. By stages.

First of all, he gave Lucie a boyfriend, an Arizona cowboy. And sent her happily to bed with him, without benefit of clergy. Without even any Catholic guilt.

Secondly, he introduced the character of John Jojola, a Taos Navajo reservation policeman and Native American shaman. He has led Lucie into a “deeper” spiritual understanding through his Ancient Wisdom.

And now, for the coup de grace, the first time we see Lucie in Malice, she’s taking a trip on peyote, under John Jojola’s supervision.

OK, Mr. Tanenbaum. I get the message.

The plot of this book centers on a sort of busman’s holiday for Butch Karp. On medical leave from the DA’s office (he got shot at the end of the last book), Butch is asked to help out the brother of an old teammate from his basketball playing days, a college baseball coach who’s been wrongly suspended by his college and the league.

But that’s tied to the action back in New York, where Butch’s colleagues and friends are discovering evidence of massive, world-wide criminal conspiracy. An Ancient Secret Society, a Shadow Government, an Unseen Hand behind world events.

A rip-off of The DaVinci Code, to be honest. Tanenbaum has apparently figured out that paranoia fiction is where the money is these days. Gone are the days when Butch Karp hunted down ordinary criminals and corrupt politicians. Now he’s pulling back the veil that covers the True, Occult History of the World.

You think our biggest danger today is Islamic terrorism? Ha! You’re a dupe!

The real danger is… wait for it… MANXMEN! That is, guys from the Isle of Man. (Because, I suppose, God forbid there should be any evil in the world that doesn’t spring from white males.) Islamic terrorism is just a sideshow that the Manxmen have orchestrated, to allow their puppets in the government to trample on our civil rights through the Patriot Act. (There are many references to “the loss of our civil rights” under the Patriot Act. Oddly, what rights we’ve lost is never explained.)

In other words, Tanenbaum has completely buckled to contemporary liberal dogma. Oh, he concedes, in a talky and poorly written epilogue, that the war on terror is a serious matter, but the plot as a whole gives no support to that view.

I’d probably be willing to forgive all that, because it’s still a Tanenbaum book and therefore a lot of fun.

But putting peyote into Our Lucie’s mouth?

That, sir, I cannot forgive.

Watched a few more of my renter’s crime movies this weekend, and I want to comment briefly on a couple of them.

I watched “They Made Me a Criminal,” with John Garfield. I had the idea this was considered some kind of classic, and maybe it is. But it did not impress me.

The acting was consistently over the top. The character arcs (Busby Berkeley directed it, and it bears all the psychological insight of his average musical) follow plot points, but don’t seem to proceed from any actual change in the characters. In other words, the characters change their behavior because “it’s time for them to change,” but it’s hard to say why they do that from their own perspective. Also present are The Dead End Kids, who fill the sort of place in the film that a rap artist would fill in a movie today (and about as effectively), and even Claude Raines, as the Inspector Jauvert-like detective, nearly mugs his teeth out.

I hated it.

Raines gave a much more subdued, and effective, performance in his most famous role, that of Capt. Renault in “Casablanca.” We all know “Casablanca.” A perfect, small, jewel of a film that tells a tight, heartfelt story that somehow seems inevitable, inescapable, unforgettable. It sits in your memory and colors all your experience forever after.

But are you familiar with the film that inspired the makers of “Casablanca?” A film that also inspired a thousand bad French dialect imitations, chief among which was “Pepe le Pew” in the Warner Brothers cartoons?

That movie was “Algiers,” with Charles Boyer and Hedy Lamar. I’d seen it in bits and pieces on TV years ago, but this was the first time I watched it from beginning to end, and I was completely enthralled.

Charles Boyer plays Pepe le Moko, a Parisian gangster who has fled to Algiers and is hiding in the native quarter called the Casbah, where the police dare not follow. He has made himself, for all practical purposes, king of the Casbah. He controls crime there, deals out justice, and enjoys the favors of a beautiful mistress (who seems to be a gypsy or something, though she was played by Sigrid Gurie, a Norwegian).

The French authorities are frustrated by their inability to lay hands on Pepe. Only Inspector Slimane (wonderfully played by Joseph Calleia), apparently a despised “half-caste,” understands Pepe’s essential weakness. Slimane is a patient man, and knows that he will catch Pepe, and even how he will do it.

Because he understands that Pepe cannot stay forever in the Casbah. That tortuous tangle of streets and stairways, where even the roads have walls, is in itself a kind of prison. Pepe’s confinement there is slowly, insidiously, driving him out of his mind. Driving him to forget his own safety. He looks out over the sea and dreams of Paris.

And it all comes to a head when he meets Gaby (Hedy Lamar), a gorgeous young woman from home who has come on holiday with her fiancé, a fat, unpleasant, but rich man whom she is marrying purely for his money. Pepe and Gaby see in each other the fulfillment of their mutual forbidden dreams.

There’s a scene at the end, when Pepe looks through a barred gate in the harbor and gets just a glimpse of Gaby on the ship’s deck, sailing away to her loveless marriage, and you see her through his eyes and it goes through your heart like a knife.

Old movies and old movie techniques can be ridiculous and dated, or sublime and timeless, depending on the skill and vision of the moviemakers. “Algiers” is a classic by any definition.

And no, he never says, “Come with me to the Casbah!”



Addendum: Here’s a bit of trivia. Sigrid Gurie (refenced above), who played Pepe’s mistress, was the twin sister of Knut Haukelid, one of the leaders of the Norwegian resistance group that blew up the German heavy water operation at Vermork, Norway, thus denying important nuclear technology to the Nazis. Richard Harris’ character in the movie “Heroes of Telemark,” seems to have been based in part on Knut Haukelid.

Do the really good detectives ever retire? I doubt it. They’re always pulled back into a crime case by circumstances or fans of their past work. That’s what happened with Nick Charles, who had managed to marry a gorgeous woman with tons of money. He didn’t need detective work to pay the bills. He had a few accounts to manage, some stocks to buy, and some martinis to drink. So he didn’t want to get involved with the murder of the secretary of a man for whom he once worked. But I doubt he could turn off his curiosity or sense of justice any more than he could stop observing the world like a detective. Even when he was sharing a cheap champagne at a speakeasy with a man he had sent up the river several years ago and a small fight broke out, he couldn’t help notice that the more-or-less-former thug still led with his right. It was that mistake which the two men had agree allowed Nick to bag the thug back when they were on opposite sides of the law.

The Thin Man is a great crime novel. It’s very funny in parts, and if you have seen the movie series based on Nick and Nora Charles, both movie and book characters are alike in the sexy wit that has appealed to many readers and viewers for decades. This is Hammett’s last novel, and it’s recommended.

I’m still working my way through my renter’s collection of old mystery movies, and this weekend I was pleasantly impressed by a fairly obscure 1949 production called “Impact,” starring Brian Donlevy.

“Impact” is technically classed as Film Noir, but in honesty it must be about the least noirish Noir film ever made. Instead of the angular shadows and cramped urban settings we expect in Noir, this film is largely set in the sunny outdoors and bright interiors. More importantly, instead of the fatalism and cynicism so characteristic of the form, this movie is about redemption and mercy. As a matter of fact, this one is so saturated with Christian values that you almost expect to see World Wide Pictures in the credits.

Donlevy plays Walter Williams, the head of engineering for a major corporation. At work he’s an alpha male, aggressive, savvy and a risk-taker.

But at home, in the company of his young, beautiful wife, Irene (played by Helen Walker [no relation]) he’s a pussycat. He defers to her, spoils her, and actually simpers in her presence. (By the way, this movie made me revise upward my estimation of Donlevy as an actor. I always had a hard time buying him as a tough guy. He struck me as a shrimp with an attitude, all swagger and no punch, especially when cast as a heavy against tall guys like Joel McCrae and Gary Cooper. But here he’s given other things to do than strut around trying to be intimidating, and he does a very creditable job in the vulnerable scenes). Irene bestows on him the nickname “Softy,” and he thinks it’s an endearment (I know what that suggests, I wouldn’t be surprised if the writers intended it, but this was 1949, when Hollywood still understood subtlety).

So poor Walter hasn’t the least suspicion when Irene suddenly begs off accompanying him on a road trip to Denver on business. Instead she asks him to give a lift to her “cousin.” The cousin is actually her lover, a man named Jim Torrance, and he and Irene have worked out a plan for him to murder Walter on the way and make it look like an accident.

But fate intervenes. Jim fails to finish Walter off, and then is himself killed in a fiery crash. The charred remains in Walter’s car are assumed to be his.

Hitching a ride in a passing moving van after regaining consciousness, Walter soon figures out, through newspaper stories and a couple strategic phone calls, that he’s been betrayed in the worst possible way. When he reads in the papers that his wife has been arrested for his murder, he figures it would be both just and satisfying to let the law take its course. So he hits the road.

Soon he fetches up in the pretty town of Larkspur, Idaho, where he gets a job as a mechanic at a gas station owned by the fetching Marsha Peters (Ella Raines). And it’s here that simple, small town (Christian) virtues begin to wear away at his anger and bitterness. Two significant scenes involve Walter’s first evening as a boarder with Marsha and her mother (where he reaches for the food, only to discover that they’ve bowed their heads to say grace. Imagine that happening in a movie today), and a Sunday church service (after which Walter breaks down and tells Marsha his true story).

Walter’s difficult (also well-scripted and acted) decision to do the right thing plunges him into the final conflict of the film, in which he finds himself on trial for his own life. His only hope is Marsha’s (and a cop’s, played by the old, reliable character actor Charles Coburn, who keeps forgetting to keep up his Irish accent) faith in him and determination to prove his innocence.

A preachy, spoken introduction and epilogue are a weakness in the story, but they used to do that sort of thing a lot in those days.

Rent “Impact” if you get the chance. I think you’ll like it.

The weekend was beautiful, and so was today. High temperatures around, or above, freezing. We may not really deserve a mild stretch like this, but we feel as if we do.

In church on Sunday, among the praise songs our worship team had chosen for us was a number which contained (I’m not making this up) the following lines:

So much holy

So divine

Yours and so much mine….

Our God reigns

Over the heavens

Over the earth

Our God reigns

Praise His name

All still standing

All that was

All that remains

Our God reigns

I can feel my brain cells atrophying just on account of transcribing those inane lyrics. In what way, I ask, is singing such content-free drivel (over and over, of course) any different from chanting “Om” in a Transcendental Meditation center?

Commenter Aitchmark told me about T. Jefferson Parker’s mystery novel, Silent Joe, and I ordered it out of curiosity. I found it a compelling book. Flawed, but as fascinating as any novel I’ve read in a long time.

Joe Trona, the narrator and hero of the book, is the adopted son of Will Trona, an Orange County (California) supervisor. He works as a jailer, on his way to a police career, but at night he helps Will with “delicate” business—serving as his driver and bodyguard for trips and meetings and exchanges that he doesn’t want publicly known. Joe has no problem with this. He has complete faith that Will is a good man, and any corners he cuts are cut in a good cause.

Joe is tall, strong, a trained martial artist and a crack shot. He’s handsome, except that an act of abuse by his birth father left him with a serious scar on his face. Joe has cultivated good manners in order to be unthreatening, and he generally wears a hat to shade his features, but he’s profoundly self-conscious.

One night he and Will make a mysterious run that involves delivering some money and picking up a little girl. Then they are ambushed. Although Joe manages to kill two of the attackers and get the girl out of the line of fire, he can’t protect Will, who is shot to death. The rest of the book chronicles Joe’s quest to learn who set up the murder, and why it was done.

As a pure mystery, I can’t give Silent Joe the highest marks. Although political affiliations are not explicitly stated, it becomes clear pretty early on who are the Democrats and who are the Republicans. And once you’ve identified the Republicans, you know who’s guilty. Only the details remain to be worked out.

By the way, here’s a tip (but only a minor spoiler) for any liberal mystery novelists who happen by—it’s been about forty years since unmasking a white, male Christian clergyman as a hypocrite and degenerate has had any surprise value. We figured out a long time ago that whenever you introduce a white, male Christian clergyman, he’s going to turn out to be a hypocrite and a degenerate. If you want to actually surprise anyone, try doing something we haven’t seen a thousand times. Show us an ethical clergyman, or a sympathetic Republican, or a Muslim terrorist. Mix it up a little.

Although the mystery was no great shakes, the writing and the characterizations in Silent Joe were absolutely top level. Parker writes prose with great precision and grace. Not a word is misplaced. And although I probably identify more with Joe Trona than most people do, I think everyone will find him a fascinating character, at once tough and vulnerable, dangerous and child-like, smart and innocent.

There’s a particular section where Joe meets a woman, finds her attractive, and works up his nerve to ask her out. I actually had to put down this un-put-downable book a couple times because I had a hard time handling the tension. Those of you who can’t, like me, strongly identify with Joe’s shame issues will still (I think) find it an effective and moving episode.

I generally just drop liberal novels if I find them politically strident or condescending. I never had much trouble with Silent Joe. The story and the characters kept me riveted, and I enjoyed it very much.

Some rough language. Some sex, but not explicit (rather well handled, I thought) and violence. Not a perfect book, but a very, very, good one.

I had a vision today. For a moment the veil of the future was swept aside, and I received an impression of things to come.

Bear in mind when I say that that my predictions are pretty much always wrong. If there’s such a thing as Second Sight, I was third in line.

But I had a vision of a possible scenario. Imagine (it isn’t hard to do) that Hillary Clinton doesn’t win the Democratic nomination this year.

I can see her turning on her party. I can see her becoming a Republican, writing nasty books about her years with Bill (whom she will have also dumped by then), and showing up regularly on Rush Limbaugh to comment on Democratic politics from the perspective of a former insider. Kind of the same thing Dick Morris is doing now.

Remember, you read it here first.

Not long ago I made a reference to my interest in Wild Bill Hickok. This led me to glance at my bookshelf, and I noticed that I had a book on Wild Bill there that I hadn’t read yet. More surprisingly, it was a book by Joseph G. Rosa, the foremost Hickok authority today (oddly enough, an Englishman), and a man with whom I once exchanged a couple letters.

So I read Wild Bill Hickok: Gunfighter. It was a good book, as I expected, and Rosa has done his usual yeoman work uncovering obscure sources previously unseen. The copy editing could have been better, but that’s pretty much a universal problem in publishing nowadays.

What particularly interested me was his comments on one of Hickok’s most famous photographs. You can see a small version here. It’s the picture at the top, where he’s standing in a buckskin shirt.

Somewhere, and I think it must have been in his magnum opus, They Called Him Wild Bill (the second edition came out in 1974), Rosa had identified that picture as probably coming from late in Hickok’s life, when he was traveling with the original stage production that Buffalo Bill Cody produced before he went whole hog with his “Wild West” show.

When I wrote a letter of appreciation to Rosa, I said that I thought the picture must be earlier, probably from Hickok’s time as an army scout. I noted, first of all, that Hickok looks quite thin in this picture. Anybody who’s studied the photographs (and Hickok liked getting photographed) knows that he put on weight as he got older.

Secondly, I noted that his mustache looks pretty modest, compared to the flowing affair he sported later on.

And I mentioned that his hair was parted in the middle. In his later pictures, his hair (when he’s bareheaded) is combed straight back.

Rosa replied (I have the letter somewhere, though I can’t put my hand on it right now) that the head-brace Hickok would have worn to hold him still for such a photograph would have stretched out his head and neck, making him look thinner; that the mustache length would probably have varied frequently; and the same would be true with the hair part.

In his comments on this photograph on page 35 of this new book, Rosa now identifies the picture as an early one, and says, “…a close examination of the photograph reveals that he wears his hair parted in the middle, an affectation he had discarded by 1870.”

I don’t claim that it was my argument alone that changed the biographer’s mind. He also notes that identification of the original photographer helps to date the picture. And doubtless I wasn’t the first person to study the picture closely and come to the same conclusion.

But I feel vindicated!

Another comment I made (and Rosa obviously hasn’t yet come around on this) is that I think the pair of Colt pistols Hickok is wearing here are not Navies (.36 caliber) but Armies (.44 caliber). I say that just because I’ve done a lot of shooting with a Navy replica, and they have rather small handles, about right for my hands, which are also pretty small. Hickok was a fairly tall man, and in proportion to his size, those pistol grips just look too large for Navies, to my eyes. The grips on an Army are a little bigger.

The flaw in this theory is that it’s known that Hickok owned at least one matched pair of nickel-plated, ivory-handled Navies. But there’s no record of a similar pair of Armies belonging to him.

But this is my night for bold theories. So make a note that you read this here first, too.

Vera Gamble goes to Winter Haven, an isolated island 50 miles off the coast of Maine, in response to a surprising call. Her brother’s body has been found on a beach there. She hasn’t seen him for years and had hoped he wasn’t dead, but at the same time, she has been trying to forget him. How did he get across the country and ocean to die on Winter Haven’s beach? Her initial questions seem irrelevant once she gets to the island, because the body isn’t her brother’s. At least, if it is her brother’s body, how could he be the same age he was when she last saw him?

That’s the primary mystery of Athol Dickson’s new novel, Winter Haven, coming in April. Vera must stay on Winter Haven until some facts on her brother’s death are collected, but the village folk aren’t warm people, particularly the widow with the only spare room for her sleep in (cash in advance, two night minimum). And she shouldn’t leave the village, because the local witch could kill her, the ancient trees could trap her, or one of the ghosts could drive her mad—if she isn’t actually mad now.

It’s an interesting, uncomplicated story which I enjoyed, but it has one weakness. You know how authors often hint at something troubling without telling you what it is until later? Sometimes it’s an undefined danger, something the characters only understand enough to see the danger or suspect it. Naturally the reader does not know what’s coming because the characters don’t. But when the character does know and simply doesn’t tell you, the story arc feels different.

That’s the weakness of one character in Winter Haven. Throughout the story, she hints at troubling memories, perhaps past abuse which she can’t allow herself to dwell on, and she won’t tell the reader until much later. It doesn’t feel like undefined danger; it feels like obstruction. Perhaps if we see her worry and fear when she does remember something and hear much less that she doesn’t want to relive the worse memories (the ones that come later in the book), then the suspense would be maintained. As it is, I was a little tired, in fact a bit disappointed, at the artificial suspense of her refusal to level with me.

Despite that, the book is fun and well-written. Several times I wondered if Dickson was describing the actual landscape of Maine or an island in that area of the continent or if he was imagining the setting with rich detail. Everything in Winter Haven feels authentic from the ghostly fog to the discovery of . . . well, I shouldn’t tell you that part.