* * * *
Marcia Muller, MWA Grand Master and author of the Sharon McCone mystery series
There are rumors that when Body Heat first opened in snowy climes in 1981, people ripped off their clothing to dispel their own heat as they ran from theaters. Couples headed for the nearest motels. The heat—it's a palpable force throughout the movie. But what really entrances me about this film is the excellent portrait of a self-admitted loser (played by William Hurt) collaborating in his own destruction with an amoral woman (played by Kathleen Turner). In an interesting twist in the final scene, we find that Turner's character has also been destroyed: She achieves her ambition to be rich and live in an exotic land, but the woman pictured in those last frames is totally empty. Fascinating characterization, plenty of suspense, and oh, that heat!
* * * *
Bill Pronzini, author of the Nameless Detective mystery series
* * * *
The Fugitive (c) Paramount Home Video
* * * *
The Fugitive was my favorite TV series of the ‘60s, and one of the best of all time. David Janssen was outstanding as Dr. Richard Kimble, wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, freed by a train wreck on his way to the death house, and on the run from the Javert-like police lieutenant, Philip Gerard, obsessed with his capture. Character-driven story lines that involve the viewer in Kimble's one-man-against-the-world plight make the various episodes as compelling today as they were forty-some years ago. The first season is—finally!—available on DVD, with the other four scheduled to follow shortly. A must-own set for every fan of classic TV.
* * * *
C.J. Box, author of the Joe Pickett mystery series
How sad it is that the seminal (literally) film Rancho Deluxe isn't more well known. Written by literary lion Thomas McGuane (and filmed partly on his Montana ranch), directed by Frank Perry, and starring a young Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston (as an Indian!), Elizabeth Ashley (pre-scary), Slim Pickens in his last great role as a range detective, Patti D'Arbanville (scrumptious) and Harry Dean Stanton before he was Harry Dean Stanton. It does involve crime: the indiscriminate shooting of cattle, the kidnapping of a champion seed bull (seminal, remember), and large-scale cattle rustling. Twisted cowpoke noir that's never been equaled.
* * * *
Bill Crider, author of the Sheriff Dan Rhodes mystery series
A film noir in glorious Technicolor? Why not, if it stars Arlene Dahl and Rhonda Fleming, two of Hollywood's most gorgeous redheads. In Slightly Scarlet (based on Love's Lovely Counterfeit by James M. Cain), Arlene is the bad sister, a man-crazy klepto, just out of prison. Rhonda is the good sister, John Payne is a good/bad guy who's suddenly in charge of the mob, and Kent Taylor is the reform mayor. Ted de Corsica is the crime boss who leaves town but who you can bet will be back for the big shoot-out at the end. There's even a commentary track by Max Allan Collins. How can you go wrong?
* * * *
Stuart M. Kaminsky, MWA Grand Master and author of the Toby Peters mystery series
* * * *
(c) 20th Century Fox
* * * *
I'm a sucker for the 1940s private eye definitely B movies. My all-time favorite is Lloyd Nolan as Michael Shayne. My Toby Peters owes a lot to him. The Shayne plots are full of holes, but Nolan is, for me, the quintessential wisecracking private eye. He's not quite dumb, is easily fooled, but is funny and tenacious. Would that Nolan had done more. By the way, Sleepers West is my favorite in the recently released DVD box set of Shayne movies.
* * * *
Cara Black, author of the Aimée Leduc mystery series
A film mainstream mystery fans might have overlooked, and my personal favorite, is the sly French thriller Read My Lips (Sur mes Lévres, 2001). The lead actress (Emmanuelle Devos) won a César, the French Oscar, for her performance, and the screenwriting team included Tonino Benacquista, a well-known French mystery writer. In short, Carla, a mousey secretary (Devos), is overqualified despite a disability that forces her to wear hearing aids. Still, her coworkers ridicule her for her plain looks, all the while taking credit for her work. She's on the verge of cracking until she's permitted to hire an assistant. Enter Paul, a street-smart ex-con, unqualified for the simplest of tasks in the office. But when it comes to steal a file a coworker pilfered from Carla's desk, Paul has all the skills that Carla requires. Soon Paul discovers Carla's uncanny ability to read lips, and their relationship becomes a seductive tango as Paul enlists Carla in a revenge plot against a crooked loan shark. Suspense builds, the plot twists, and all is not as it seems in true Hitchcock style.
* * * *
Kat Richardson, author of the Greywalker supernatural thriller series
Gotham (a k a The Dead Can't Lie) is a guilty pleasure of mine. Made for cable in 1988 with low production values and a silly script, this mix of hardboiled detective and urban ghost story is still ridiculously entertaining. Who can't love watching Tommy Lee Jones, as a down-at-heels New York P.I., pursue and fall victim to the ultimate femme fatale: his obnoxious yuppie client's ghostly ex-wife? Even big hair and shoulder pads can't mar Virginia Madsen's luminous beauty as the manipulative ghost, and Jones is wonderfully hang-dog as the possibly doomed detective.
* * * *
Ken Bruen, author of the Jack Taylor mystery/noir series
* * * *
The Shield [TM] FX
* * * *
Ask any mystery writer about their favorite TV cop show, and ninety percent will say The Wire. For me, The Shield is closer to true noir. The story lines from the off were dark, very, and as the seasons progressed, darker they got. There are no heroes in this show. The star, Michael Chiklis, leads his own team of vigilante cops: They're on the take, and in one memorable episode even killed one of their own who was being turned by the FBI. The series moved into top gear with the introduction of an Internal Affairs investigator (Forest Whitaker) who's determined to bring down the rogue cops—and who's as ruthless as any of the bad guys. And such is the sheer power of the series that you're rooting for the bad cops. They're greedy, vain, violent, and yet they have a sort of moral code—bent all out of shape, yes, but understandable from their point of view. This is essential viewing in all its dark glory.
Copyright (c) 2007 by Steve Hockensmith
[Back to Table of Contents]
Mystery Classic: THE ADVENTURE OF THE RED CIRCLE by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle annotated by Leslie S. Klinger
The release of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes was one of the publishing events of 2004. Leslie S. Klinger's masterfully annotated, two-volume edition of the fifty-six short stories of the Sherlockian canon won the Edgar Award for best critical work of the year and was followed in 2005 by Mr. Klinger's annotated edition of the novels. This month, we are delighted to offer a classic Sherlock Holmes story with Mr. Klinger's enlightening notes (including a few, set in italics, which are updated from their original publication in book form).
* * * *
Long before Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, and The Sopranos romanticized the Mafia for the American public, “The Red Circle” involved Sherlock Holmes with an Italian secret society so powerful that Dr. Watson was compelled to disguise its name. The “Italian colony” in London, although a distinct feature of the landscape, by and large kept itself apart from the rest of the population, and only one other case of Holmes's, “The Six Napoleons,” involves Italians. Here, the Great Detective accidentally joins forces with the Pinkertons, America's premier private detective agency of the nineteenth century, to capture a cross-Atlantic killer. The Pinkertons appear again in the Sherlockian Canon in The Valley of Fear (1915), but this is the only record of Holmes working with them.
* * * *
"Well, Mrs. Warren, I cannot see that you have any particular cause for uneasiness, nor do I understand why I, whose time is of some value, should interfere in the matter. I really have other things to engage me.” So spoke Sherlock Holmes, and turned back to the great scrapbook in which he was arrang
ing and indexing some of his recent material.
But the landlady had the pertinacity, and also the cunning, of her sex. She held her ground firmly.
"You arranged an affair for a lodger of mine last year,” she said—"Mr. Fairdale Hobbs."
"Ah, yes—a simple matter."
"But he would never cease talking of it—your kindness, sir, and the way in which you brought light into the darkness. I remembered his words when I was in doubt and darkness myself. I know you could if you only would."
Holmes was accessible upon the side of flattery, and also, to do him justice, upon the side of kindliness. The two forces made him lay down his gum-brush with a sigh of resignation and push back his chair.
"Well, well, Mrs. Warren, let us hear about it, then. You don't object to tobacco, I take it? Thank you, Watson—the matches! You are uneasy, as I understand, because your new lodger remains in his rooms and you cannot see him. Why, bless you, Mrs. Warren, if I were your lodger you often would not see me for weeks on end."
"No doubt, sir; but this is different. It frightens me, Mr. Holmes. I can't sleep for fright. To hear his quick step moving here and moving there from early morning to late at night, and yet never to catch so much as a glimpse of him—it's more than I can stand. My husband is as nervous over it as I am, but he is out at his work all day, while I get no rest from it. What is he hiding for? What has he done? Except for the girl,[2] I am all alone in the house with him, and it's more than my nerves can stand."
Holmes leaned forward and laid his long, thin fingers upon the woman's shoulder. He had an almost hypnotic power of soothing when he wished. The scared look faded from her eyes, and her agitated features smoothed into their usual commonplace. She sat down in the chair which he had indicated. “If I take it up I must understand every detail,” said he. “Take time to consider. The smallest point may be the most essential. You say that the man came ten days ago, and paid you for a fortnight's board and lodging?"
"He asked my terms, sir. I said fifty shillings a week.[3] There is a small sitting-room and bedroom, and all complete, at the top of the house."[4]
"Well?"
"He said, ‘I'll pay you five pounds a week if I can have it on my own terms.’ I'm a poor woman, sir, and Mr. Warren earns little, and the money meant much to me. He took out a ten-pound note, and he held it out to me then and there. ‘You can have the same every fortnight for a long time to come if you keep the terms,’ he said. ‘If not, I'll have no more to do with you.’”
"What were the terms?"
"Well, sir, they were that he was to have a key of the house. That was all right. Lodgers often have them. Also that he was to be left entirely to himself and never, upon any excuse, to be disturbed."
"Nothing wonderful in that, surely?"
"Not in reason, sir. But this is out of all reason. He has been there for ten days, and neither Mr. Warren, nor I, nor the girl has once set eyes upon him. We can hear that quick step of his pacing up and down, up and down, night, morning, and noon; but except on that first night he has never once gone out of the house."
"Oh, he went out the first night, did he?"
"Yes, sir, and returned very late—after we were all in bed. He told me after he had taken the rooms that he would do so, and asked me not to bar the door. I heard him come up the stair after midnight."
"But his meals?"
"It was his particular direction that we should always, when he rang, leave his meal upon a chair, outside his door. Then he rings again when he has finished and we take it down from the same chair. If he wants anything else he prints it on a slip of paper and leaves it."
"Prints it?"
"Yes, sir; prints it in pencil. Just the word, nothing more. Here's one I brought to show you—soap. Here's another—match. This is one he left the first morning—daily gazette.[5] I leave that paper with his breakfast every morning."
"Dear me, Watson,” said Holmes, staring with great curiosity at the slips of foolscap which the landlady had handed to him, “this is certainly a little unusual. Seclusion I can understand; but why print? Printing is a clumsy process. Why not write? What would it suggest, Watson?"
"That he desired to conceal his handwriting."
"But why? What can it matter to him that his landlady should have a word of his writing? Still, it may be as you say. Then, again, why such laconic messages?"
"I cannot imagine."
"It opens a pleasing field for intelligent speculation. The words are written with a broad-pointed, violet-tinted pencil of a not unusual pattern. You will observe that the paper is torn away at the side here after the printing was done, so that the ‘s’ of ‘soap’ is partly gone. Suggestive, Watson, is it not?"
"Of caution?"
"Exactly. There was evidently some mark, some thumbprint, something which might give a clue to the person's identity. Now, Mrs. Warren, you say that the man was of middle size, dark, and bearded. What age would he be?"
"Youngish, sir—not over thirty."
"Well, can you give me no further indications?"
"He spoke good English, sir, and yet I thought he was a foreigner by his accent."
"And he was well dressed?"
"Very smartly dressed, sir—quite the gentleman. Dark clothes—nothing you would note."
"He gave no name?"
"No, sir."
"And has had no letters or callers?"
"None."
"But surely you or the girl enter his room of a morning?"
"No, sir; he looks after himself entirely."
"Dear me! That is certainly remarkable. What about his luggage?"
"He had one big brown bag with him—nothing else."
"Well, we don't seem to have much material to help us. Do you say nothing has come out of that room—absolutely nothing?"
The landlady drew an envelope from her bag; from it she shook out two burnt matches and a cigarette-end upon the table.
"They were on his tray this morning. I brought them because I had heard that you can read great things out of small ones."
Holmes shrugged his shoulders.
"There is nothing here,” said he. “The matches have, of course, been used to light cigarettes. That is obvious from the shortness of the burnt end. Half the match is consumed in lighting a pipe or cigar. But, dear me! This cigarette stub is certainly remarkable. The gentleman was bearded and moustached, you say?"
"Yes, sir."
"I don't understand that. I should say that only a clean-shaven man could have smoked this. Why, Watson, even your modest moustache would have been singed."
"A holder?” I suggested.
"No, no; the end is matted. I suppose there could not be two people in your rooms, Mrs. Warren?"
"No, sir. He eats so little that I often wonder it can keep life in one."
"Well, I think we must wait for a little more material. After all, you have nothing to complain of. You have received your rent, and he is not a troublesome lodger, though he is certainly an unusual one. He pays you well, and if he chooses to lie concealed it is no direct business of yours. We have no excuse for an intrusion upon his privacy until we have some reason to think that there is a guilty reason for it. I've taken up the matter, and I won't lose sight of it. Report to me if anything fresh occurs, and rely upon my assistance if it should be needed.
"There are certainly some points of interest in this case, Watson,” he remarked, when the landlady had left us. “It may, of course, be trivial—individual eccentricity; or it may be very much deeper than appears on the surface. The first thing that strikes one is the obvious possibility that the person now in the rooms may be entirely different from the one who engaged them."
"Why should you think so?"
"Well, apart from this cigarette-end, was it not suggestive that the only time the lodger went out was immediately after his taking the rooms? He came back—or someone came back—when all witnesses were out of the way. We have no proof that the person who came back was the person who w
ent out. Then, again, the man who took the rooms spoke English well. This other, however, prints ‘match’ when it should have been ‘matches.’ I can imagine that the word was taken out of a dictionary, which would give the noun but not the plural. The laconic style may be to conceal the absence of knowledge of English. Yes, Watson, there are good reasons to suspect that there has been a substitution of lodgers."
"But for what possible end?"
"Ah! there lies our problem. There is one rather obvious line of investigation.” He took down the great book in which, day by day, he filed the agony columns of the various London journals. “Dear me!” said he, turning over the pages, “what a chorus of groans, cries, and bleatings! What a rag-bag of singular happenings! But surely the most valuable hunting-ground that ever was given to a student of the unusual! This person is alone and cannot be approached by letter without a breach of that absolute secrecy which is desired. How is any news or any message to reach him from without? Obviously by advertisement through a newspaper.[6] There seems no other way, and fortunately we need concern ourselves with the one paper only. Here are the Daily Gazetteextracts of the last fortnight.[7] ‘Lady with a black boa at Prince's Skating Club'—that we may pass. ‘Surely Jimmy will not break his mother's heart'—that appears to be irrelevant. ‘If the lady who fainted in the Brixton bus'—she does not interest me. ‘Every day my heart longs—’ Bleat, Watson—unmitigated bleat! Ah, this is a little more possible. Listen to this: ‘Be patient. Will find some sure means of communication. Meanwhile, this column.—G.’ That is two days after Mrs. Warren's lodger arrived. It sounds plausible, does it not? The mysterious one could understand English, even if he could not print it. Let us see if we can pick up the trace again. Yes, here we are—three days later. ‘Am making successful arrangements. Patience and prudence. The clouds will pass.—G.’ Nothing for a week after that. Then comes something much more definite: ‘The path is clearing. If I find chance signal message remember code agreed—one A, two B, and so on. You will hear soon.—G.’ That was in yesterday's paper, and there is nothing in to-day's. It's all very appropriate to Mrs. Warren's lodger. If we wait a little, Watson, I don't doubt that the affair will grow more intelligible."
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