Blacke's Magic: Revenge of the Esperanza (1986)

Over the past two years, I've come across two novels, a novella and short story that pulled the detective story down to the muted, two-colored world of the seabed littered with shipwrecks, sunken treasure and legends of the deep ocean – revealing a largely untapped basin of possibilities. Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962), Micki Browning's Adrift (2017), Desmond Reid's "Caribbean Crisis" (1962) and John Dickson Carr's "Lair of the Devil-Fish" (collected in The Island of Coffins, 2021) all demonstrated an underwater setting opened up new opportunities to play around with unbreakable alibis and impossible crimes. Something that has been explored decade earlier by Joseph Commings in his 1953 short story "Bones for Davy Jones" (collected in The Locked Room Reader, 1968). Ho-Ling Wong followed up my review of Forsyte's Diving Death by discussing the Detective Academy Q episode The Case of the Locked Room Mystery at the Bottom of the Sea, which does exactly as described on the tin. 

So these regrettably too rare deep sea detective stories have become a favorite (soggy) rabbit hole of mine to explore. Not in the least because they often combine an archaeological plot with an impossible crime, which are two of my favorite sub-categories of the detective story. There happened to be an episode of Blacke's Magic dovetailing an archaeological mystery with the miraculous disappearance of a 300-year-old Spanish seabed shipwreck. So it was high time to return to that dapper magician-sleuth and his carny father. 

Blacke's Magic was a short-lived American TV-series, created by Richard Levinson, William Link and Peter S. Fischer, which aired on NBC from January 5 to May 7, 1986, starring Hal Linden as magician-detective Alexander Blacke and Harry Morgan as his conman dad, Leonard – appearing together in thirteen episodes pitting their wits "against seemingly magical crimes." The series feels like a 1980s prototype of Jonathan Creek. 

Revenge of the Esperanza (1986) is the fifth episode of the series and begins with Alexander Blacke following “a paper trail of credit card charges, hotels, restaurants, airline tickets” to a luxurious yacht club in Florida. There he finds his father living it large, under the name Farnsworth, but he also appears to have his "feet planted firmly in quicksand." Leonard Blacke has gotten himself involved with four young treasure hunters, Maryanne Thompson, Paul Thompson, Eric Wilson and Clay, who have been trying to locate the wreck of the Esperanza for years. A Spanish galleon that sunk over three centuries ago in a storm with "untold riches" as its cargo, but the one of the investors is getting impatient with the stories about treasure ships and wants her whole one-hundred thousand dollars back. So the discovery of the wreck came in the nick of time. But not for very long.

The members agreed to camp out on the top of the wreck until they have brought up "every last ounce of gold she got," but, during the night, their equipment sounds the alarm and watched how it moved away on sonar – a nifty piece of retro-futuristic, 1980s fictitious technology (see picture). When they dived looking for it, it was gone, but "a 300-year-old shipwreck can't just get up and sail off." But that's what happened.

Alexander Blacke has to stick around to save his father's neck, because the investor has pressed charges against Farnsworth and Sheriff Tyler is becoming very suspicious of the old man. Just as the Esperanza vanished, the locals begin to see an old pirate ship, "quiet like a ghost," cutting through the fog and ships bells clanging mournfully. Finally, one of the treasure hunters is murdered with a dagger that came from the wreck.

So, yeah, there's more here than can be used in a 45-minute episode and the first murder served only to introduce an original clue. A piece of now long-lost technology known as a cassette tape with noise recorded on it and feel rather proud of myself for immediately figuring out what's really on the cassette. And how it could be played back. The second murder felt unnecessary and made the murderer standout, but was pleasantly surprised to discover (ROT13) ur unq na nppbzcyvfu uvqqra va cynva fvtug naq ur jnf chg gb tbbq hfr gb chapu hc gur raqvat. So the plot mainly hinges Sheriff Tyler nipping at Leonard Blacke's heel and the disappearance of the Esperanza, but they were both reasonably well handled. Particularly, the impossible disappearance of the wreck had a believable explanation (despite the dodgy monitoring) with that great cassette clue, but they needed more room to do them any justice. I think cutting the ghost ship and turning two murders into a single assault (leaving the victim unconscious in a hospital bed) would have made for better and much tighter episode.

All on all, Revenge of the Esperanza is a decent, fun enough episode with an intriguing premise and some good idea, but a cluttered 45-minutes were not enough to do anything meaningful with it. But, if you love impossible crimes, it's genuine pleasure to watch one unfold on screen.

Fade Away Lane

"Hm! Yes. Ruination Street. No, I don't believe I shall find it in my maps..."

- Dr. Pilgrim (John Dickson Carr's The Lost Gallows, 1931) 

In one of my recent blog-posts, I alluded to my intention to start looking at the locked room mysteries of both the silver and small screen. I found an enticing case in the comment-section in favor of Banacek, but I had an episode from another series, namely Blacke's Magic, queued since 2013 – when I reviewed Ten Tons of Trouble (1986). A very ambitiously written, if flawed, episode about the miraculous disappearance of an enormous marble statue from a closely guarded museum.

The Street That Doesn't Exist

This short-lived NBC series ran for only one season, comprising of a pilot and twelve 45-minute episodes, which starred Hal Linden as a famous stage magician, Alexander Blacke, who moonlights as an amateur sleuth. He was basically a 1980s prototype of Jonathan Creek. Harry Morgan played the Maddy Magellan to Blacke's Creek, which he did in the role of his father and as a semi-retired con artist of the old school. So they can be added to the short list of father-and-son detective teams I mentioned in my review of Clifford Orr's The Dartmouth Murders (1929). 

The episode I had queued is the seventh entry in the series, entitled Address Unknown (1986), which has a plot revolving around one of the most alluring and rarest of all impossible problems: an entire street and a alleyway that inexplicably disappears from our plain of existence! From the top of my head, I know of only two examples of vanishing streets and added one of them only recently to my TBR-pile. So there you have another reason for my renewed interest in the episode. 

During the first 15-minutes, the groundwork for the plot is laid down and concerns a potential government scandal, one with ties to the army, which runs straight to the high-placed and distinguished General Wersching – who has no compunction to (covertly) threaten Blacke when he comes to the aide of an old friend. Dale Richmond is the friend in question and hot on the trail of a corruption scandal, which he hopes to substantiate with certain documents and letters. He expects these documents from one Billy Maddox. The episode actually opens with a surreptitiously meeting between these two characters, inside a dark parking garage, but Maddox needs another day to get his hands on the incriminating papers. 

However, the details about this particular plot-thread is somewhat muddled, but the first ten minutes show the brewing scandal plays havoc with Dale's personal and professional life – as his character is slandered in the media as mentally unstable. They also planted a federal marshal across the street of his home. So Dale is understandably on edge, but a telephone call from Maddox lightened his mood. This is followed by a short sequence (i.e. filler) which sees Blacke using the misdirection of the stage magic to help Dale escape the attentive eye of the marshal on his doorstep.

Dale is lead to a dark, empty street, called Republic Lane, where Maddox waves him towards a dark alleyway and into an abandoned storehouse, but before any papers can change hands a shot is fired and Dale has to run for his life – until he sees two cops in a coffee joint called The Donut Hole (of course!). But here's where the whole situation becomes an impossible one. The police officers have never heard of Republic Lane and Dale is unable to retrace his steps. Eventually, they managed to find his car, but the street where the car is parked is not the same as the street where he left it. As Dale said himself, "the whole damn street is gone."

So who killed Billy Maddox and what happened to his body, but, equally important, how did an entire street disappeared into the dark of the night? Simply wiped off the face of the earth! The answer is very simplistic and something to be expected from cheap 1980s television, but I managed to miss the obvious. My explanation was far too complex and involved for this kind of television. I assumed Republic Lane was one of those realistic "stage sets" used for military exercises, which was put together and taken apart by a platoon of soldiers. After all, the scandal was connected to a high-ranking general and the shooting scene was very reminiscent of the witnessed shooting from Carter Dickson's "The New Invisible Man," collected in The Department of Queer Complaints (1940), which also involved a vanishing room. So I assumed the general had called upon a few of his man to put a mere civilian in his place. Well, I was very wrong.

The rest of the episode is either cluttered or not very engaging: the plot-threads about the shooting and scandal are merely ornamental, which seem to have been written around the problem of the vanishings street and meant to eat up those minutes – until Blacke can work his magic and explain how the trick was pulled off. Same can be said about the "comedic" sub-plot: Blacke's father, Leonard, enters the picture and is followed by a string of bills pertaining to their New York apartment. But the source of those costs is not revealed until the final scene, which ended the episode on a light note. Not overly hilarious, but Leonard is a fun and loveable crook. His best scene from the episode was reminiscing how he once made a banking company disappear after taking a large deposit from a bootlegger in the 1930s. 

I should also note that Blacke performed the famous bullet-catch trick when he cornered the murderer and this person attempted to shoot a way to freedom.

So, as a mystery, Address Unknown is a fairly weak and messily told detective story, which perhaps showed why the series got canned, but, regardless, I did not experience watching it as a drag. I guess the vanishing street gimmick playing out in front of me, which was the one part of the episode that was reasonably well done, intrigued me and I had fun imagining my own explanation. You've to decide for yourself whether you want to give this one a go.

Finally, allow me to draw your attention to my previous blog-post from yesterday, which is a review of Paul Halter's Le cercle invisible (The Invisible Circle, 1996).

Vigil of the Shepherds

"I just need you to figure out how to... fake a miracle."

- Nathan Ford (The Miracle Job, Leverage)

Recently, I learned that BBC One commissioned a fifth semi-series of Jonathan Creek, comprising of three brand new episodes, which are planned for broadcast in 2014, making this years Easter Special, The Clue of the Savant's Thumb (2013), a hors d'oeuvre to the next batch of episodes!

Unfortunately, I still have to muster up some patience before Savant's Thumb airs and we're still a year removed from the new season. However, the news got me in the mood for a touch of crooked magic and decided to take a crack at a series that I wanted to sample for ages – Blacke's Magic. The series ran for twelve episodes, from January to May 1986, starring Hal Linden as stage magician/amateur sleuth Alex Blacke and Harry Morgan as his carny/conman father Leonard. He basically plays the Adam Klaus to Alex Blacke's Jonathan Creek, but apart from that, Blacke is a throwback to detectives like Philo Vance and Ellery Queen with a hint of Ed and Ambrose Hunter.

Ten Tons of Trouble (1986) opens with Blacke being roused from his sleep by a phone call from his dad, who, moments later, is knocking on his door to move in after a misunderstanding at the retirement community he was staying at. Leonard had set up a death-lottery, which is exactly what you think it’s, but was caught peeking at the medical files he always consults before taking a gamble. Needless to say, I took an immediately liking to the old man, but in my defense, I have been heavily indoctrinated by Hustle and Leverage. Anyway, a dandy looking bachelor in a lavishly styled apartment may give the impression of a modern-day Philo Vance, but Blacke has a much friendlier attitude and a sense of humor – and is glad to help his cop buddy when he comes to him with a peculiar problem that might interest him.

The Manhattan Renaissance Museum has a ten-ton marble statue, Vigil of the Shephards, on loan from the Italian government as part of a world exhibition tour and the sculptor is said to have been the best known protégé of Michelangelo and is well protected from theft. A sealed box of bullet-resistant glass covers the sculpture and a CCTV CAM surveys the room like a hawk, and if that wasn't enough, one of the security guards monitoring the screens patrols the room every sixteen minutes, but, of course, it's biggest protection is it's own weight. It's simply humanly impossible to whisk out a chunk of marble under the stated conditions, but that's exactly what appears to have happened and the empty display case is an impressive calling card in itself. But the cut-off marble finger and picture of the stolen statue with that day's newspaper stuck to it was a nice touch as well. 

Vigil of the Shepherds

Chief of Security, Ben McGuire, is held accountable and a rival detective shows up, Elisa Leigh from Empire Fidelity Insurance, but her only contribution was picking a television network for the news coverage and look very modest into a rolling camera once Blacke had solved the case. I want false solutions from my rival detectives! There was a false solution offered for the disappearing statue, the first one that will probably pop into your head, and Blacke presents it with some crummy television magic (*) to lure the thief/murderer (there's a body halfway through the episode pretty much confirming who the culprit is) out of hiding and this should've been a move on Leigh's part – like a cop-out on the insurance.

Oh, not that it was a ruse that should’ve work on anyone who bothers to look and think before acting, but it would've solidified her as the antagonist.

Blacke's reconstruction of the disappearance, staged at the scene of the crime with all suspects gathered around the display case, shows an impressive amount of trickery and tended to like it at first, however, once you begin to think about it a lot of details begin to bother you – like the size of the sculpture and the narrow sixteen minute window. Why didn't Blacke found the same clues in the museum that he found in the ship? Remember... only sixteen minutes! And if you know the solution, re-watching the opening becomes really bothersome. It’s a good trick to make something of that size disappear, if it takes place in the staged and controlled environment of a magic show. I have the suspicion that the writers reworked illusions and hung everything on those tricks, without even attempting to make them come across as plausible and with very little eye for everything else.

I did not entirely dislike Ten Tons of Trouble, like Leonard applying his griftering skills to help his son nap the killer/thief and the old-fashioned set-up, but it's basically just 50-minute vanishing act with a bit of acting to distract us.

(*): Blacke made the marble finger, cut-off from the statue and mailed to them, levitate and fly across the room, but he never explains how he managed to do that. It reminded me of Clayton Rawson’s magician-sleuth, "The Great Merlini," who demonstrated a trick in his magic shop in "From Another World," which involved pulling the trigger of gun without touching it. I suspect it was a wind-up gun, pulling back the hammer puts a wind-up mechanism in work, but Blacke’s trick seems pure TV magic.