DP54Cover - Deadly Pleasures

speed reading and the short hand notes he took for the
books he reviewed.
More serious are errors of omission or fact. Marks
says that Boucher was unpopular as a college student but
provides no documentation. Similarly, there is reference
to the Baker Street Irregulars not liking the Sherlockian
musical Baker Street, but no reasons are given. The
EQMM contests of the 1940s and 1950s were not
“readers’ contests.” The magazine’s readers contests did
not begin until 1985. Marks says that there was no United
Nations edition of EQMM; there was, the August 1948
number. It is not true that only the U.S. and Britain have
held Bouchercons; Canada held two of them. Basil Rathbone
did 14 feature films as Sherlock Holmes, not 16. “Rache”
is scrawled in blood on a wall in A Study in Scarlet, not
in The Sign of the Four.
All of these errors are easily correctable in a
second edition of this book, and make no mistake, this is
an important book and one that deserves to have a long
shelf life. Meanwhile, read it and learn about the Boucher
who was so important to the mystery well before there was
a Bouchercon named after him.
Doom with a View
Those of an age (well,
my age) may remember Ernie
Kovacs, one of the great innovators
of the 1950s, the Golden
Age of television. His imaginative
use of the camera in an age
of live television was remarkable.
Less well known is Kovacs’s
connection to the mystery. Ernie Kovacs
Kovacs started as an
announcer and radio personality for a Trenton, New
Jersey, station in the 1940s. One of his continuing series
was as private eye Paris Greene in “The Last Time I Saw
Paris.” Think of Garrison Keilor’s private eye series Guy
Noir on Prairie Home Companion.
In the early 1950s, on CBS’s TV program Kovacs
Unlimitied, Ernie and his second wife Edie Adams played
“Mr. and Mrs. South,” a take-off on the Lockridges’
characters who were then featured in a popular television
series. Kovacs also played “Martin Krutch, Public Eye” in
a take-off on another series, Martin Kane, Private Eye.
Two of Kovacs’s best roles had a tangential
connection to crime fiction. On September 26, 1957 on
Playhouse 90 he played in Marcel Pagnol’s Topaze as a
simple school teacher taken in by a con man. Henry
Slesar’s short story “Symbol of Authority” was televised on
the Desilu Playhouse on February 2, 1959; it had been
published in EQMM in May 1957. Kovacs played a mildmannered
man who wears a stethoscope and walks the
corridors of a hospital. He never pretends to practice
medicine, but the recognition he receives from strangers
gives him great satisfaction.
Deadly Pleasures
19
About two weeks later, on February 15, 1959,
Kovacs returned as a private eye, on G.E. Theater, in “I
Was a Bloodhound.” He played private eye Barney Colby
who is attempting to find a kidnaped elephant using his
well-developed powers of smell. Kovacs was Maximilian
Krob, a mystery writer accused of murder, in “Author at
Work,” which aired April 11, 1960 on Alcoa/Goodyear
Theater. It was adapted from a Friedrich Duerrenmatt
story.
Kovacs’s last crime-related television appearance
was in “Private Eye, Private Eye” on the U.S. Steel
Hour on March 8, 1961. This consisted of three sketches,
all crime-related. The first was called “The Case of the
Nairobi Safe Robbery.” (Fans of Kovacs with long memories
will recall the very funny ape group, the Nairobi Trio,
playing music on his programs.) Second was “The Private
Eye.” It was set in 1901 and featured his effete poet Percy
Dovetonsils as a detective. The third sketch was called
“The Cavendish Pilferage.”
Private detectives played a part of Kovacs’s real
life in the 1950s when, after he had been given custody of
his two little girls following a divorce, his first wife kidnaped
them. The detectives helped find them in Florida where
she had taken them.
Kovacs had always driven cars too fast. He died at
age 43, on January 12, 1962 in an auto crash that was
believed to be due to a combination of slick roads, alcohol,
and apparent inattention because he was attempting to
light one of his trademark cigars as he drove.
One of the best mystery novels I ever read, Edgar
Lustgarten’s A CASE TO ANSWER (1947; U.S. title:
ONE MORE UNFORTUNATE), could have been an
equally good film. This is the story of Arthur Groome, a
husband and father, on trial for his life on a charge of killing
a prostitute. I can recall few more dramatic handlings of a
criminal trial in a mystery. Never having visited Old Bailey,
I can only say that the setting seemed authentic to me.
(Perhaps DP contributors – and attorneys – Martin Edwards
and Philip Scowcroft can better address the issue of
authenticity.)
Lustgarten’s book was filmed in 1951 as The
Long, Dark Corridor, not a very good change of title. The
courtroom scenes – and those outside it – are atmospherically
filmed, and they prove that black and white photography
is usually best for crime films. The cast is consistently
good. Rex Harrison is well cast, from his own life experience,
as an unfaithful husband. Lilli Palmer, whose lovely
picture graced my last “Doom with a View,” is excellent as
the wife who sticks by her roving husband. Especially
noteworthy is the performance as a fanatical killer by
Anthony Dawson, known for his role in the original Broadway
production of Dial “M” for Murder. (No, I haven’t
given any surprises away.)
Why does The Long, Dark Corridor disappoint,
in addition to having a meaningless title? I can’t recall a
worse change of the ending of a mystery novel. I can’t say
too much, for fear of revealing too much about the novel,
but “sappy” is the best I can say about the movie’s ending.