ANATOMY OF A FALL

She definitely fell. The real question is why.

Normally an author of sci-fi and supernatural fiction, Thorne Smith’s Did She Fall was the only time he turned his acclaimed typewriter to crime. It’s too bad, because this book is excellent, taking a stab at the device of murder, but adding the twist of whether or when that murder improves the world. Smith began his career way back in 1918 and died in 1943, but his creative influence rippled through the years. His posthumously published novel The Passionate Witch was even the inspiration for the television show Bewitched.

The character at the center of Did She Fall, both before and after death, is beautiful Emily-Jane Seabrook, who is thought by most to be loving and kind, but is really an amoral, grasping, extortionate gold-digger. She plans to marry into a rich Long Island family, but the groom’s brother, the brother’s wife, the brother’s best friend, and others intend to prevent the wedding. With all that hate bouncing around, when Emily-Jane ends up a stain at the bottom of a cliff, detective Scott Munson has his work cut out for him.

In terms of setting up the murder, Smith arranges for five (or maybe six) people to be at the top of that cliff at the fatal moment, yet the identity of the murderer is still in doubt. How does he manage that unrealistic feat? Darkness, confusion, certain persons protecting others, etc. It doesn’t really work as a spatial event, but we suspended disbelief and really enjoyed the book, particularly its surprising conclusion. It was originally published in 1930, with this Paperback Library edition and its Robert McGinnis cover art coming in 1962.

Each choice leads to the same dead end.

Above: another promo poster for the 1976 ninja actioner Kunoichi ninpo: Kannon biraki, aka Female Ninjas – In Bed with the Enemy. We talked about the movie a few years ago and shared its tateken poster. Shorter version: Megumi Hori, Keiko Kinugasa, and Maki Tachibana are sent on a secret mission, bad men lose pints of blood. What could be better?

Okay! I promise to stop telling you to grow up and get rid of your pointlessly huge collection of Superboy comics! Now save me!

Storms and disasters. We’re always drawn to this style of covers. Too many to point to today. But two that have almost this exact theme are here and here. My Bride in the Storm came from Theodore Pratt for Avon Publications in 1950, and had been originally published as The Big Blow in 1936. It’s about a Florida a farmer who, after all his many travails, is wiped out by a hurricane but finds redemption in the tragedy. Or some such. The novel was made into a 1938 Broadway play with Edwin Cooper, Kendall Clark, Dorothy Raymond, and Kate Cloud, so it must have been pretty good. We’re not surprised. Pratt has already delivered for us twice—with Tropical Disturbance (man loves big winds), and The Big Bubble.

She can't remember anything about the photo session—it was all such a blur.

This photo shows French actress Michèle Mercier and it was made as a promo image for her 1970 film Macédoine, about a model who experiences the highs and lows of the fashion industry. We’ll bring her back soon, completely in focus. In the meantime you can see another promo image of her here.

No sadness, no pain, no moment too intimate kept mid-century photo-journalists from their appointed intrusions.

This poignant photo, made during the era when police stations gave free rein to news photographers and arrested citizens had no privacy rights, shows a couple snared during a police raid on South Coronado Street, in the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles. Barbara Graham comforts her handcuffed boyfriend Edward Timmons in a holding room, as a Los Angeles Examiner lensman documents their tender moment. The image, while claimed by various photo media websites, actually belongs to the University of Southern California digital collection of Los Angeles Examiner negatives. It was made today in 1958.

She's such a good dancer that whenever she performs men start fondling their rods.

James Meese painted a nicely evocative cabaret dance scene for the cover of Captive in the Night, originally published in 1951 with this Crest edition coming in 1956. Dancers tend to hit the stage precisely when shootouts are imminent. Have you noticed that? Anyway, foreign intrigue is on the slate, as Donald Stokes weaves the tale of another gringo caught up in international unrest. The setting this time is Algeria, where main character Blair Hansen takes a job helping a local bigwig exploit a fortune in iron ore only to have the caper go sideways when he runs into old flame Mari Lander and her nineteen-year-old daughter Céleste, who’s consorting with a member of the Arab underground.

This is a typical tale of its type in the sense that an American will be central to events of historical importance, but most such novels aren’t written at nearly the same elevated level. The drama is high and the action swift, as nothing Hansen does goes quite according to plan in the powder keg of Algiers on the brink of a violent eruption. We doubt anyone of Arab descent will love this book—nearly all novels from this period have aged poorly in terms of understanding that colonialism is just a stand-in word for invasion, but considering how this tale eventually shakes out you don’t feel too negatively toward Hansen. In revolutions, when in doubt blow some shit up. It works in adventure novels too. Stokes did a bang-up job here.

The Woman from Tangier started unravelling about the time the studio signed off on the budget.

Above is a poster in six-sheet format for the adventure The Woman from Tangier, along with a nice, mystery-laden promo from Italian artist Anselmo Ballester. We talked briefly about this movie a while back, but didn’t have a copy to watch. Now we do, and we checked it out last night. It stars Stephen Dunne as an insurance investigator looking into the death of a ship’s purser gunned down trying to abscond with the boat’s earnings—fifty-thousand pounds. As viewers we see in the first minutes of the film that this tale is false, and is actually a frame-up and murder staged by the ship’s captain.

Adele Jergens co-stars as a dancer named—we’re not making this up—Nylon, who had been trying to flee Tangier for Gibraltar but is now stuck in port while Dunne’s investigation plays out. When the captain’s criminal partner, who is a murderer too, uses the unwitting Nylon to hide from the cops, she’s soon caught between the two killers and deemed a loose end. She holds the key to Dunne’s investigation, but will she go to him for help? Or run to the police? Or maybe the U.S. embassy?

To us it didn’t matter because The Woman from Tangier is a throwaway thriller too b-level to offer much fun. We’re always drawn to movies and books sets outside the U.S., particularly in exotic lands. And having been to Tangier, we hoped for at least a little authentic Moroccan flavor, but it was too much to ask from a cheapie potboiler shot by Columbia Pictures entirely in Los Angeles featuring the lightweight Dunne and his mustache in the lead role. In its favor, The Woman from Tangier is short. Sixty-six minutes. So it certainly won’t cost much of your life should you decide to queue it up. It premiered this week in 1948.

She traveled to the opposite side of the world and probably never knew.

Above is another celebrity cover from Horwitz Publications of Australia, this one for Marc Brody’s, aka William H. Williams’ 1956 thriller Cover Girl Cries Murder, featuring a front with U.S. actress Dani Crayne. You also see the original shot used by Horwitz, which probably came to them as a handout publicity photo.

Crayne made her first film appearances in 1955, but her roles were small, and she never became well known. That made her perfect for Horwitz. She joined numerous ingenues to grace the company’s covers without prior permission (we suspect), including Joan Collins, Elke Sommer, Bettie Page, and others. Click the company’s keywords below and scroll to discover those examples.

I can feel her looking at me. The sad and vulnerable act is totally working.

Lonely Boy Blues, eh? It’s kind of a cheesy title, but it may have come from the old Jay McShann/Walter Brown song, in which case nice call-back. Originally published in 1944, this edition of Alan Kapelner’s book came in 1961 with George Ziel cover art. We wondered whether it was a bad sign that Belmont had to range all all the way to the Louisville Courier-Journal for a cover blurb. “Reminds one of Farrell and Hemingway.” Reading that, we thought, “Yeah, we bet it reminded one of Hemingway. And we know who that one was.” We checked the critical assessments and they were amazingly mixed. Kirkus Reviews destroyed this book, dismissing it as “pathetically inept.” But The Philadelphia Enquirer called it “overpoweringly brilliant.” When heavyweights disagree that strongly, something interesting is happening, maybe even something Hemingwayesque. We may take a stab at this one, if we can find it.

She was always the hottest ticket in town.

The meaning is always in the emphasis. There’s a Super Bowl extravaganza, and a super bowl extravaganza. Exemplifying the latter is Lili St. Cyr, seated in a cold concave container and striking a nicely elegant pose, which is hard to do when a shift in your center of gravity could send you rolling out of the room. We appreciate her athleticism, as always.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1933—Franklin Roosevelt Survives Assassination Attempt

In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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