Bloody Murder

"Revenge should have no bounds."

- Hamlet: act iv, scene vii

During the waning years of the late 1920s, S.S. van Dine unveiled with the publication of The Bishop Murder Case (1928) the only perspicacious stratagem from his entire oeuvre, in which an imperceptible entity knocks-off members of New York City's intelligentsia with varying methods modeled on nursery rhymes – but it was Agatha Christie who popularized this plot device a decade later in one of her most popular novels, And Then There Were None (1939). Killers who patterned their crimes after nursery rhymes became a trademark of her work and some of her notable contemporaries followed suit, e.g. Jonathan Stagge's Death's Old Sweet Song (1946) and Ellery Queen's Double, Double (1950).

"Alas, poor Yorick!"

It's one of those simple, but clever, ploys that stuck around when the light from the golden epoch of the detective story began to diminish and modern interpretations can be found in a movie like Se7en (1995) or in the mini-series Messiah: The Horrowing (2005) – tho' none of these newfangled representations can hold a candle to the alternative, campy masterpiece that is Theatre of Blood (1973).

In this early slasher, Vincent Price, inimitable and sublime as always, drapes himself in the theatrical costumes of Edward Lionheart, one of the staunchest Shakespearean actors to ever come onstage, who threw himself into a river after suffering a public humiliating at the hands of a group of critics at an award ceremony. The body was never recovered and the devoted actor was presumed dead, but as Price remarked on an episode of The Simpsons, "You should know that the grave could never tame me!"

Unbeknownst to the world at large, a group of filthy, hard-drinking and drugged-up vagrants hauled Lionheart from a watery grave and adopted the thespian as one of their own – even going as far assisting him in extracting revenge on the circle of critics who unjustly maligned him for years with their poisonous pens. The gruesome murder of each critic is modeled on a death scene from one of Shakespeare's many plays with one or two rather horrific, but clever, variations.

This bare plot outline hints at a rather standard fare as far as serial killer flicks are concerned, but what makes this movie work is the fact that the actors were friends or at least well acquainted with one another – and Vincent Price evidently had the time of his life bumping-off one after another of his real-life friends and the feeling was apparently mutual. You've never seen a more eager group of potential victims enthusiastically tugging at the Sword of Damocles that is suspended above their heads, as if they're idolatrous followers of a charismatic cult of personality who's handing out bottles of cyanide laced lemonade, which rubbed off on me fairly early on the movie. I don't have much resistance when it comes to enthusiasm and I am easily contaminated with the darn stuff. And then again, it's Vincent Price who's doing the killing. Getting yourself murdered at the hands of punitive basket case will definitely put a damper on your day, but when that loony, knife-wielding madman turns out to be Vincent Price you can at least put your mind at rest that you're going out in style.  

But the coup de grâce is the campy, but exhilarating, manner in which the gruesome murders are set-up and portrayed on screen. I don't think words will do these scenes justice, but one of them involves a meticulous decapitation of a man while a romantic tune plays in the background and the demented character actor ensnarls another victim by disguising himself as a gay hairdresser with a huge afro – even flirting with the uncomfortable cop whose job it was to the protect the prospected victim! But the cartoony fencing scene that involved trampolines and summersaults easily overshadows every other scene.

With a less talented cast, this fabulous, blood drenched picture could've easily deteriorated into a horribly cheesy and silly precursor of the slasher movies from the 1980/90s, but the chummy players elevated this movie from a campy blood fest into an extremely watchable slaughter party. Shortly put, murder was never supposed to be this fun, but it was, and thankfully nobody was considering for even a single second to apologize for his or her behavior.

By the way, from what I understood, not every critic was charmed by the premise of this movie. The critics targeted and dispatched to an early grave were thoroughly unlikable and they made it impossible not to align yourself with the homicidal Lionheart, which was kinda the whole point of the movie. It's not entirely unlike a macabre comedy of manners which pokes (with a sharp blade) fun at stuffy critics with illusions of grandeur, but I guess self-deprecating humor is an acquired taste. 

The Con is On

"The con: an invisible crime build on the premise of finding someone who wants something for nothing, and then giving them nothing for something."

Recently, I've been re-watching a bunch of episodes from the first three seasons of Hustle, in which a troupe of professional confidence tricksters play the long con on credulous and avaricious marks – who expect to get something for nothing, but end up getting nothing for something.

Would these faces lie to you?

After a so-so season earlier this year, these episodes helped jog my memory as to how the stories roped me into watching this show in the first place. The convoluted plotting, facetious characters and tongue-in-cheek approach was the antidote needed after trudging through a batch, of then, recent Poirot and Miss Marple adaptations – which were very bleak, tone-wise, and suggested P.D. James rather than Agatha Christie. Needless to say, the ambitious plotting and light-hearted nature of these deft capers invigorated my downtrodden spirit.

The contemporary Robin Hood, who leads this modern-day band of merry men, is the infamous, all-round confidence trickster Michael "Mickey Bricks" Stone, who is best described as a cross-breed between the charming gentleman rogue and the brilliant amateur detective. He has a labyrinthine mind that is capable of devising the most intricate schemes with the outward appearance of seemingly random, unrelated events and very few are able to outthink or even second-guess him. This talent is not only employed to separate a mark from his money, but also to help them escape from tight situations.

This craft for deceiving was discovered and cultivated by his mentor, Albert Stroller, a semi-retired, legendary conmen from the US (played brilliantly by Robert Vaughn) who acts as the crew's roper by enmeshing potential marks in one of their traps – and my favorite character in the series. A cunning old fox if there ever was one! Ash "Three Socks" Morgan's main job is that of the teams fixer by turning Mickey's elaborate schemes into workable plans, but he's also a talented grifter in his own right and I love the episodes in which he impersonates a Dutchman. It's so bad it's good!

Mickey, Albert and Ash are the core members of this criminal enterprise, but in the first four seasons their business partners were Danny Blue and Stacie Monroe. The former is an ex-short con artist turned long con rookie and apprentice of Mickey, in spite of regularly challenging his leadership, while the latter is a beautiful, all-round-grifster and potential love interest to both Mickey and Danny. They were replaced in the fifth season by the brother-and-sister team of Sean and Emma Kennedy.

Regardless of their status as professional criminals, this gang isn't made up of hardened thugs who support their millionaire lifestyle with narcotics or running a protection racket, but by skinning fat cats who are a public nuisance or a holy terror to their immediate surroundings. In the episode The Hustler's News of Today, they take down a tabloid paper after one of their targets, a friend of Stacie's, attempted suicide due to false accusations of embezzling funds, while in Missions they face-off with a bend copper who wants to cut-in on their profits.

However, not every episode is modeled on this pattern and the crew often has to deal with authority figures, who want to use their unlawful expertise to further their own cause, and the best example can be found in Law and Corruption – in which an over ambitious cop plants a suitcase full of cocaine on Mickey and blackmails him into capturing a famous gentleman thief for him. A similar situation arises in Cops and Robbers when a head of security, an ex-cop who once beat Albert Stroller at his own game, strong-arms them into entrapping a bank-burglar who has been targeting branch offices and his employers are not amused. 

And then there are the Ocean's Eleven knock-offs, in which they meticulous plan daring heists and impossible escapes. Big Daddy Calling has them visiting grifters heaven, Las Vegas, where they plan to loot the publicly displayed, $5 million jackpot of the Big Daddy Fruit Machine. There's just one tiny problem: it's situated in a tightly secured casino run by a ruthless mob boss, but then again, this is the same team who successfully burgled The Tower of London in Eye of the Beholder! 

In New Recruits and Tiger Troubles, they try their hands at the locked room illusion as they made a painting disappear from a gallery protected with a perfect security system and spirited a diamond encrusted statue from a sealed bank vault – but I've seen these tricks before, although, they were cleverly executed here.

If you haven't got the idea already, these stories are a delicious, crafty criminal fantasies that purposely stretch probability, occasionally knocking down the fourth wall and refuses to apologize for giving viewers like me 60-minutes of unadulterated entertainment – and I highly recommend this comical capers to everyone bored with the current crop of crime shows. Just bear through the introductory pilot episode. It's necessary to establish the characters.

Finally, checkout my review of Freeman's The Stoneware Monkey (1939), which, for some reason, failed to pop-up on numerous blog feeds.

Columbo: Final Questions

"You pass yourself off as a puppy in a raincoat happily running around the yard digging holes all up in the garden, only you're laying a mine field and wagging your tail."

- How the Dial a Murder.

Peter Falk (1927 – 2011)

It has been a busy week here, with new material popping-up at the top of the page nearly every day and the plan was to trickle down the outpour of activity a little bit after uploading the review of Patrick Quentin's Puzzle for Puppets (1944). But then the news broke that Peter Falk, whose disheveled appearance, from the rumpled raincoat, stumpy cigar and a tousled head of hair, was as iconic as the deerstalker and the underslung pipe, had passed away – and I just knew I had to watch and discuss a Columbo episode in his honor. 

Columbo slipped into his wrinkled raincoat, to doggedly pursue murderers, long before I was born, but I catch-up with the decades that preceded my existence in just few short years – as I watched well-nigh every episode on DVD and enjoyed almost every minute of it. There were a few clunkers (the embarrassing episode with the robot immediately springs to mind), but even they rarely had a dull moment. But this also left me with a dilemma: should I revisit one of my favorite episodes, like Try and Catch Me and Columbo Goes to the Guillotines, or watch one I hadn't seen yet? After an internal monologue, which turned into a heated debate, I decided it would be fitting to settle on Columbo Likes the Nightlife – as it was the final episode filmed and shows this to be a series that simply will never age and that Columbo is as timeless as Sherlock Holmes.

The episode was shot in 2002 and aired in early 2003, and gives the series a fresh paint job. Remember the opening credits from the 1970/80s, in which the yellow-colored, typewritten opening credits were somewhat shakily superimposed on the screen? Here they've been substituted for flashy computer graphics and techno music, but the set-up succeeding this new opening still follows the same, unaltered classic Columbo format that we all fell in love with. 

Columbo Likes the Nightlife kicks off with the, more or less, accidental demise of Tony Galper at the hands of his ex-wife Venessa – a two-bit actress who employs her new boyfriend, rave promoter and future club owner Justin Price, to obscure the body. Their operation goes without hitch until they start receiving blackmail demands from a notorious tabloid journalist and they realize that he leaves them with only one recourse: murder!

At the scene of the crime

The murder of this two-penny mudracker is another indication that the series has moved along with the times. The on-screen killings were always very clean, usually a single gunshot aimed at the torso of the intended victim, but here we have a particular messy and graphic murder – which commences when Justin Price pretends he's dropping off the blackmail money. He slaps a cord around his neck and chokes him into semi-unconsciousness, ties the cord to a rusty old radiator and when he struggles to his feet he hurtles him out of an open window – at which the radiator is torn from the wall and plummets with its attached weight four floors to an ugly mess on the pavement. You'd almost think you're watching an episode from CSI at this point, but that delusion is quickly dispelled with Columbo's arrival on the scene – who does a top-notch job deducing, by the smell of mouthwash and toe-nail clippings, that the man was murdered and the look on the officers face as the disheveled lieutenant crawls all over the body is just funny. Note that Columbo touches everything with his bare hands and you can only imagine the apologetic shock the crew of CSI would have if they saw him "processing" this crime scene. 


From here on out, the ruffled veteran policeman does what he knows best: driving the felons with their backs up against the wall and he does it with the same playfulness as a cat before pouncing on a mouse – demonstrating that even the passing of three decades wasn't enough the blunt the edge of this old coated bobcat.

Last year, Crippen & Landru carried Columbo into the current decade with the publication of The Columbo Collection, penned by series creator William Link, and this new batch of stories impressed upon me that, even though Peter Falk is no more, the character he portrayed is still out there pursuing murderers who were laboring under the naïve assumption that they were getting away with a perfectly executed murder – and he will be on that job long after you and me have been consumed by the earth or blown to dust by the incinerator.

Oh, just one more thing... Peter Falk, thanks for more than three decades worth of quality television and may you rest in peace!

A Night at the Monastery

When this blog embarked on its journey through the brittle pages of venerable paperback editions and pass hefty hardcover volumes with crackled spines, I did not anticipate that less than ten posts later I would be critiquing my first detective movie – and a pretty obscure one at that. It's not that I didn't want to do the same hack job at reviewing movies as I do with books, it's just that I'm already familiar with the well-covered, critically acclaimed magna opera of cinematic mysteries, such as Green for Danger, The Murder on the Orient-Express and The Maltese Falcon, that doing movies simply wasn't in the short term plans for this place.

I was, therefore, pleasantly surprised and greatly impressed by Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders (1974), an adaptation of Robert van Gulik's 1961 novel The Haunted Monastery with screenplay by Nicholas Meyer (of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution fame), which starred an almost all-Asian cast – only the character of Judge Dee was played by Khigh Dhiegh, who was of mixed North African ancestry. This was quite a different approach from an earlier attempt to adapt the Judge Dee stories to the small screen, an ephemeral series made for British television in the late 1960s, which had a cast without a single Asian actor among them.

But the pleasure of watching this fine movie isn't just derived from its ethnic authenticity; it also treats its source material with the respect it deserves, even reusing many of the books dialogue, and did a splendid job at recreating the locale of the book: an old and musty monastery, plagued by ghostly apparitions and infested with death, during a heavy thunderstorm.

That's not to say that there aren't some minor changes, here and there, but for the most part the plot follows the book like a shadow – and both start off with a somewhat familiar trope of the detective being overcome by a sudden storm, which forces him to seek shelter in a dark and a dreary monastery on the night of its anniversary. But the festivities can't muffle the whispers of murder echoing through its darkened hallways and endless staircases. 

And although it's more a story of suspense than one of ratiocination, Dee still does an excellent job at uncovering the truth behind the former abbots death, deducing the truth from the man's final drawing of a cat, and the way in which he disposes an unsavory character, who murdered several innocent women, would've received the nodding approval of both Reggie Fortune and Mrs. Bradley. The story also contains a subplot involving a ghost window, appearing and disappearing in front of the Judge's eyes, however, the solution is very crude and antiquated – so don't expect too much from it.

On the whole, there's not much that can be said against this film, except that they pulled a Peter Ustinov by casting an actor who does not at all resemble the Judge Dee from Van Gulik's illustrations, and that one would wish they had either picked a better, more detection orientated, book (e.g. The Chinese Gold Murders) or simply had made more than one episode. But these are minor quibbles, really, that pale measured against the overall quality and enjoyability of the movie.

The one thing I don't understand, though, is why it's relatively a little-known film, even though it's one of the most faithful adaptations I have ever seen and was even nominated for an Edgar! 

In closing, I can only say that I hope that Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders will become available on DVD at some point in the future. It's too good to languish in obscurity!