Los Angeles - The Novels

LOS ANGELES: THE NOVEL(S)

by Michael Mallory

Los Angeles has long emitted a siren song for writers of all stripes, particularly mystery authors and anyone concerned with the disparities of haves and have-nots, stars and nobodies, and the powerful and downtrodden. Given such a vast, contradictory, multi-tentacled megalopolis as L.A., and taking into account all of the writers who have attempted to plumb her depths, one has to ask: Is there such a thing as the Great Los Angeles Novel?

In short, no, there isn’t.

There are instead three Great Los Angeles Novels, all of them published within months of each other in 1939, and all written by transplanted Angelenos: Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep; Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and John Fante’s Ask the Dust. At the age of 85, none of them has lost their power over readers as great stories or as depictions of a city like no other. And so many decades worth of evolution, the City of Angels is still eminently recognizable in all three. (Whether that’s a good or bad thing is open for debate.)

Of the three, The Big Sleep has ascended to the status of L.A.’s unofficial pre-war biography. Raymond Chandler’s version of Los Angeles is the real Los Angeles of that time, the one built up and out from oil fields. Any references to Hollywood in the book refer to the actual, physical place, not the metonymic movie capital. Through his narrator, private eye Philip Marlowe, Chandler provides a Google Earth image of the city without seeming to do so. Rather than writing paragraphs of descriptive prose, Chandler offers snippets of the city’s characteristics such through off-handed remarks as one character’s “[having] a smile as wide as Wilshire Boulevard.” 

The notoriously convoluted plot (which inspired an even more convoluted film in 1946) was the combination of two of Chandler’s previously published short stories, “Killer in the Rain” (source of the A.G. Geiger blackmail subplot) and “Curtain” (the disappearance of Rusty Reagan). Both had appeared in Black Mask and featured powerful fathers struggling to control rebellious daughters. The L.A. of The Big Sleep is inhabited by the one percent: the wealthy, the powerful, the string-pullers, and the too-rich-to-jail class, who in turn are preyed upon by the city’s infrastructure of corruption, ranging from big-time racketeers to small-time blackmailers. At its core, The Big Sleep isn’t about power or ever murder, it’s about money. 

Standing in stark contrast to that is Ask the Dusk, which is about the lack of money. The book’s narrator is Arturo Bandini, an alter ego for author John Fante himself, who comes to Los Angeles with nothing but his dreams of being a great writer. He can only afford to live in a run-down apartment on Bunker Hill while he pursues both his dreams of fame and a beautiful, but emotionally unstable Latina waitress.

Something of a biography of Depression-era Los Angeles (while also laying the tracks for the darkly-populated noir novels that would follow), Ask the Dust is a jumble-tumble of thoughts, fantasies, fears and worries, all delivered by a protagonist with a desperate desire to fit in, but an even greater desire to rise above everybody else. Fante half-celebrates, half-condemns the dreamers of Los Angeles, those who possess a much sounder grip of the perceived future than the actual present. Along the way he fills the reader with the sights, sounds, smells, and ethnic tensions of the city as it then existed.  

Both The Big Sleep and Ask the Dust present the real Los Angeles; taken together, they span the city’s socio-economic range. The Day of the Locust, however, compensates for that by presenting a Los Angeles that is as genuinely real as a painted backdrop behind a Busby Berkeley musical number. 

Nathanael West’s short novel is almost exclusively concerned with Tinseltown in its Golden Age, and tells a story that could not possibly be set anywhere else. The picture of Hollywood it offers is not that of a puffed-up article in a movie magazine. Instead it’s a snapshot of fake imagery taken through a smudged and broken lens by a novelist who had already slogged through the trenches of Hollywood screenwriting.

The book’s protagonist Tod Hackett represents the kind of artist who lemming-rushed to Hollywood on the promise of fame and fortune, while striving to convince themselves that they will be the one who survives the seduction of the industry without selling out. (Todd’s very surname cynically indicates how that particular struggle will end.) 

Much of the story takes place within the confines of the studio, which allows the real L.A. to be seen only through windows, and even the scenes depicting Hackett’s life outside of work are influenced by the shadow of the Hollywood Sign. Virtually every character in the book is a Hollywood hanger-on, struggling to find the dream before it turns into a nightmare. A quarter-century later, a shot in the classic film Chinatown perfectly recaptured the host/parasite nature of Los Angeles/Hollywood, or Hollywood/Los Angeles that Nathanael West presented so well. It’s the scene where detective Jake Gittes is searching the court apartment of the murdered Ida Sessions, and while looking through her wallet, the tiniest glimpse of a Screen Actors Guild card can be seen. Poor Ida was one of the many hopefuls who straddled the fake and the real halves of the city, and lost in both. 

The Day of the Locust entwines reality, cinematic artifice, and surreal fantasizing into one troubling rope, and while not a mystery per se, the brutal murder of a child (by a character named Homer Simpson!) causes a mob to rise and incite a riot at a movie premiere, though it is hard to tell what version of reality is actually being described.

Taken independent of one another, each book delineates a different societal, economic, and industrial facet of the City of Angels, with its own rules, prejudices, and beliefs. But when read as a triptych, The Big Sleep, Ask the Dust and The Day of the Locust reveal the picture of L.A. in all its sprawling and contradictory glory, laying bare the beating heart and corruptible soul of a unique conurbation.

When Shocks Met Yocks: The Ghost and Mr. Chicken

WHEN SHOCKS MET YOCKS: THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN>

by Michael Mallory

A while back I wrote about the film that gets my vote for the worst ever made, an exercise in masochism titled Hillbillys in a Haunted House (1967). It’s a little-known “scare comedy” that’s about as scary as PAW Patrol and funny as Sophie’s Choice. But there is a film at the other end of the scale that is probably familiar to most, at least by title: The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Released in 1966, it’s an old-style family-friendly comedy that has some genuinely creepy moments. It’s not a great movie, but it might be the perfect one to show the kids on Halloween as they’re working off their first sugar rush. 

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken employs a time-honored formula: a murder mystery disguised as a horror film in which the creepy goings on are investigated by an endearing but hapless coward who, when push comes to shove, turns heroic and saves the girl. Bob Hope owed his early success in film to such a blueprint. While the concept already had whiskers by the time Mr. Chicken took a crack at it, it demonstrated that it was still possible to whip up a satisfying soufflé using old ingredients, if you knew how to mix them.

Produced on a modest budget by Universal Pictures, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken starred Don Knotts, who had recently left television’s The Andy Griffith Show. Griffith, in fact, was an uncredited story consultant on Mr. Chicken. Knotts plays Luther Heggs, the timid typesetter of a small-town Kansas newspaper who learns the background of a terrible murder that occurred in an old abandoned mansion in the town, which is reputedly haunted. He writes a filler piece about the crime that generates so much attention he is dared by the paper’s smug star reporter Ollie (Skip Homeier) to follow it up by spending the night inside the “murder house.” Luther does, and is literally scared unconscious by the horrifying sights and sounds.

Surviving the night, he publishes his experience in the paper and becomes the town celebrity overnight, even making headway with the woman he’s desperately in love with, who is also being courted by the overbearing Ollie. But then the heir of the man who built the house─ who supposedly murdered his wife and then took his own life─ shows up and, intent on razing the place, sues Luther and the paper for libel because of their coverage. Things don’t go well for Luther in court, so the judge decrees that the interested parties will visit the house themselves and decide whether Luther is lying or not. The visit takes place at night, and Luther leads the group to each location where an incident occurred…but nothing happens. After everyone has left, the dejected Luther once more hears the organ music and overcomes his fear to rush back in, and solves the secrets of the house, the ghost, and the murder.

Director Alan Rafkin and writers Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum had all worked on The Andy Griffith Show, which meant they knew how to bring out the best in Don Knotts, and his best is what he delivered. The actor plays his awkward courting scenes with the object of his affection Alma (former Playboy playmate Joan Staley) with charm and warmth, but in the main set-piece of the film, the haunted house sleepover, Knotts trucks out every shaky, quaky, nervous man shtick he’d developed since his days on The Steve Allen Show. The sequence also provides jump scares galore and very creepy organ music played on a blood-spattered keyboard by an invisible organist. Composer Vic Mizzy’s eerie theme was reused in Curtis Harrington’s genuinely disturbing chiller Games the following year.

What distinguishes The Ghost and Mr. Chicken from other films of the time (particularly for Boomers who watched a lot of TV) is its cast. Dick Sargent (Bewitched’s second “Darren”), Liam Redmond, and Philip Ober round out the main cast but practically every supporting role, down to the bit parts, is filled by a Hollywood familiar face. The parade of old pros includes George Chandler, Charles Lane, Reta Shaw, Hal Smith, Ellen Corby, Dick “Mr. Whipple” Wilson, Lurene Tuttle, Hope Summers, Harry Hickox, Jesslyn Fax, Robert Cornthwaite, Sandra Gould, Nydia Westerman, James Millhollin, Phil Arnold, Al Checco, Herbie Faye, Florence Lake, Burt Mustin, Jim Boles, J. Edward McKinley, and Eddie Quillan. Those names might not ring any bells, but if you were to go online and look up their photos, a response of, “Oh, him!/her!” is all but assured.

Each seasoned actor makes the most of their moments on camera, be it a substantial role or a sight gag. True film buffs might even recognize the haunted house façade on the Universal backlot as the Dowd family’s Victorian edifice from the 1950 film Harvey (and not the Bates house from Psycho or the home of The Munsters).

There is a flaw connected to The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, but it’s not in the film itself, rather on the original poster which manages to tip off the identity of the culprit. But today’s audiences would have to seek out the poster, and there’s no reason to do so. Just enjoy the film, which after nearly sixty years is still a lot of fun.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Barrel: Hillbillys in a Haunted House

VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL: HILLBILLYS IN A HAUNTED HOUSE by Michael Mallory

If you ever find yourself striving to solve the mystery of what is the worst motion picture ever made, follow the trail no further than Hillbillys [sic] in a Haunted House. The film has everything a 1940s Poverty Row horror comedy should have: aging horror movie actors and no-talent leads; a story in which the creepy “haunted” house turns out to be a lair for foreign spies; substandard special effects, and college theatre production values. There’s even a gorilla in a cage in the basement. The problem is that it wasn’t made in the 1940s. Hillbillys in a Haunted House─ which is remembered today (if at all) for the casting of Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney Jr., and John Carradine as the spies──was shot in late 1966 and released the following year.

Even if it had been made in the 1940s (with the same cast!) it would be a wretched film, but asking audiences to accept this antiquated mess it a year before Rosemary’s Baby and Night of the Living Dead is simply insulting.

Produced specifically for the Southern theatrical circuit, the film was the follow up to producer Bernard Woolner’s 1966’s gem Las Vegas Hillbillys, which starred country singer Ferlin Husky, perennial starlet Mamie Van Doren, and novelty songwriter Don Bowman. Husky and Bowman returned for Hillbillys, but Van Doren was replaced by Joi Lansing, a road company Jayne Mansfield who never quite made it to stardom (for the record, the real Mansfield also appeared in Las Vegas Hillbillys).

While Husky was no actor, there is some entertainment value in his imitation of a werewolf transformation any time he goes for a high note. The dyspeptic Bowman is ostensibly the film’s comedy relief, and to be fair, he is funnier than Jack Lord. But only barely. As for Lansing, she can sing (if not act) and no one filled out a chambray shirt better.

Hillbillys in a Haunted House begins with these three Dixiefied “Bowery Boys” surrogates motoring their way to a Country Music Jamboree in Nashville, but before long they find themselves in the middle of a gun battle between two spies and the police─ literally in the middle. Their luxury convertible is the only thing separating the guns-a-blazin’ shooters. When the bullets stop flying, they move on and decide to shelter for the night in an old plantation house where “terrifying” things begin to happen, all orchestrated by the spies who work for a wannabe Dragon Lady named “Madame Wong” (played with Acquanetta-level incompetence by Linda Ho). The goal is to infiltrate a nearby missile factory (something every small town should have).

Having last worked together in the threadbare 1956 shocker The Black Sleep

, Rathbone, Chaney, and Carradine were by this point on the downslide, Carradine slightly less so than the others given his propensity for jumping from quality films to utter dreck and back again, stopping only long enough to cash the paychecks. Here he seems to be amusing himself by overplaying and mugging. Chaney’s stardom was over by the late 1940s, but he established a reputation as a reliable character actor throughout the ‘50s. By the ‘60s, though, he was in an alcohol-fueled descent. Still, he managed to contribute the movie’s sole dramatically effective moment by stepping out of the general silliness and into cold-blooded killer mode for a rather chilling murder scene.

The saddest part of watching Hillbillys in a Haunted House is seeing the great Basil Rathbone struggling through his last film (he died only two months after its release). Once the cinema’s top villain, then its preeminent Sherlock Holmes, Rathbone in later years found himself adrift in a changing youth-and-realism-oriented Hollywood. Always in need of money to support his wife’s legendary, extravagant party-giving, he was forced to accept roles in drive-in pictures, do spoken word records, and shill Leisy Beer on television just to keep going. Unable to muster up much energy or enthusiasm, Rathbone underplays his role and his trademark crisp speech is somewhat slurred with age and illness. But at least he appeared to have read the script, unlike Carradine, who at one point calls Rathbone’s character “George” when it’s supposed to be “Gregor.”

Once the spies are rounded up by a stalwart G-Man played by Richard “Captain Midnight” Webb, our three heroes get back on the road to Nashville, crooning the same lame song they started with (in fact, it’s the same footage). But before the viewer can thank the deity of their choice for the film being over, the action shifts to the Music Jamboree and goes on for another fifteen minutes. A parade of country “stars” take the stage, ranging from well-known Merle Haggard to somebody named Marcella Wright (maybe they knew who she was in the South). After numbers by Bowman, Husky, and Lansing, the film finally comes to an end. At least it stops.

Someone named Duke Yelton wrote Hillbillys in a Haunted House, making it a compendium of every hokey, cornball Halloween gag in the book, from the ubiquitous ape in the basement to flying a sheet around a string to simulate a ghost. Yelton never scripted another film (for which we should all be grateful). Jean Yarbrough, the picture’s director, on the other hand, was a prolific Hollywood hack whose most notorious movie is 1940’s The Devil Bat, featuring Bela Lugosi and a giant rubber bat wobbling around on wires. Yarbrough is best remembered for his work with Abbott and Costello, particularly in their television series, but here his clumsy staging and inability to elicit any convincing performances falls short of even the TV standards of the time short of even the TV standards of the time.

If nothing else, suffering through 86 minutes of Hillbillys in a Haunted House makes one realize that, despite his best efforts, the legendary Ed Wood, Jr. did not make the worst film ever. Reportedly, a 1969 epic called The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals, also with Carradine, is every bit as atrocious as Hillbillys in a Haunted House. But I have no interest in finding that out for myself.

The Mystery of Hamhock Jones

THE MYSTERY OF HAMHOCK JONES

by Michael Mallory

It is safe to say that most people have never heard of the TV show Hamhock Jones ─ The World’s Most Amazing Detective, even though its inspiration is obvious. While there have been myriad Sherlock Holmes parodies in all media over the past century, this particular iteration has a unique place in television history: in 1948, during television’s infancy, Hamhock Jones was poised to become TV’s very first original cartoon character. 

While Hamhock Jones dressed like Sherlock Holmes, smoked a pipe, carried a magnifying glass, and spoke in an imitation of Ronald Colman, he was more like the big city detective stereotype that was popular in the late 1940s. He lived on the 234th (!) floor of the Greystone Building (alone; he had no “Watson”) and wielded a snub-nosed revolver. His was one segment of a proposed series called The Comic Strips of Television. 

The project was devised by a young San Francisco animator named Alex Anderson ─ the nephew of Paul Terry, founder of Terrytoons, which produced “Mighty Mouse” and “Heckle and Jeckle” cartoons ─ and his longtime friend Jay Ward. The two dubbed their fledgling company Television Arts.

Hamhock’s sole recorded adventure, from the series pilot, was titled “The Case of the Siamese Twins.” It involved a diminutive client named “Professor Soufflé” who told Jones the bizarre story of conjoined brothers, one a world-famous scientist named “Otto,” and the other a bad-to-the-bone criminal named “Blotto.” 

Working with the good twin, Soufflé invented a gas called “Votaine” which can turn Republicans into Democrats and vice versa, and allow campaigning politicians to gas babies instead of kissing them. The problem with Votaine (outside of its off-the-wall absurdity), was that if it were to fall into the wrong hands, the results could be catastrophic. Needless to say, evil twin Blotto fully intends to put Votaine into the wrong hands, chiefly an unnamed foreign power (but in 1948, there was little doubt who it was supposed to be). He kidnaps Otto…not difficult, since they are conjoined…and makes off with the formula. 

What will the World’s Most Amazing Detective do to save the American political system, if not the world? Well, that’s the problem: the pilot segment was nothing more than a teaser for the story, which ends there, so we’ll never know. 

While The Comic Strips of Television is the first attempt by anyone at an animated TV series (and until William Hanna and Joseph Barbera devised the template for successful television animation in 1957, tooning was most frequently seen in commercials), there’s a reason it was not called The Cartoons of Television. It was animated only in the most rudimentary definition of the term. The pilot was little more than a story reel──a series of stationary drawings photographed and edited to present the story visually. Voices were heard without the characters’ lips moving, and except for a couple shots in which quick-cuts between two poses were done to give the illusion of animation, any movement in the show was accomplished by panning or zooming the camera. 

Which one of the four credited voice actors, all Bay Area radio performers, played Hamhock has been lost to time, though it’s safe to assume it was not Lucille Bliss, who decades later earned fame as “Smurfette” on Hanna-Barbera’s The Smurfs. Bliss’s major contribution to the pilot was as the voice of “Crusader Rabbit,” one of the other pilot segments. The third component was a seminal version of “Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties.” Producer Anderson felt that Hamhock Jones had the best chance of becoming a series, perhaps because of the parody name recognition, but he was wrong. After looking at the pilot with an eye for syndicating it to their affiliate markets, NBC was interested only in Crusader Rabbit. 

The first Crusader Rabbit series suffered from erratic scheduling and did not last long, though it was revived in 1959, with better animation, but without Anderson and Ward. By then Anderson had drifted out of animation altogether and into advertising, while Ward was about to launch a new career as the producer of a string of witty, intelligent cartoon shows beginning with The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. Even though Hanna and Barbera would become the kings of TV animation, Ward would carve a major niche in the medium through such mordantly funny and pun-filled shows as George of the Jungle, Super Chicken, and Hoppity Hooper. With his new partner, writer and actor Bill Scott, he would also successfully repackage Dudley Do-Right. Hamhock Jones, however, was never heard from again.

The Hamhock Jones segment of The Comic Strips of Television can currently be found on Vimeo, and watching it reveals just how far TV tooning has come over the last 75 years. Its most startling revelation, though, is the plot device of a foreign power seeking to influence U.S. elections.

The more things change…

Keep It Under Your Hat (Your Crimesolving Ability, That Is)

by Michael Mallory

Paget's Original Deerstalker Illustration

Here’s a simple experiment: draw a stick figure, like a “Hangman” victim, and then ask anyone who it is. 

They will not know. How could they?

Now cover the round circle head in a cap with a front and back brim and a bow on top, and ask again.

The reply is guaranteed to be “Sherlock Holmes.” 

Once a symbol of country life, the common deerstalker──a tweed cap with ear-flaps worn by hunters in rural areas of England as they (wait for it…) stalk deer──has incongruously become synonymous with one of the most renowned Londoners of all time.

How did this turn of events come about?

Blame it on the illustrator. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never mentioned a deerstalker by name in any of his 60 Holmes adventures, though in the 1891 short story “The Boscombe Valley Mystery,” Dr. Watson described Holmes as traveling to a village in Hertfordshire wearing “a close-fitting cloth cap.” That could, of course, just as easily have signified a flat “newsboy” cap. But one year later, when “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” first appeared, Watson got a little more specific in describing Holmes’s headgear, stating he wore “his ear-flapped travelling cap” to Dartmoor. While flat caps of the era sometimes came with ear protectors, the “Silver Blaze” description certainly sounds like a deerstalker, so Strand Magazine illustrator Sidney Paget took the inference and ran with it. 

Paget first depicted Sherlock Holmes wearing a deerstalker for “Boscombe Valley,” and then recreated that illustration nearly verbatim for “Silver Blaze.” As a result, the cap immediately became shorthand for the appearance of Holmes, so much so that he was rarely depicted in any stage or film incarnation without it. This was despite the fact that a deerstalker in London would have looked as out-of-place to a fashionable Victorian as would a Native American war bonnet.

Bernhardt in Fedora

A half-century after Sidney Paget’s iconic drawings of Holmes, another form of headgear started to be identified with a detective, albeit a tougher, harder-boiled one. This was the fedora, whose origins were anything but tough…or even male.

French stage star Sarah Bernhardt wore a unique hat in her starring role in a popular 1882 play by Victorien Sardou: it was a soft felt hat with a narrow brim (narrower than most women’s hats of the time, anyway), and rather lavishly decorated. 

The play was called Fedora and the hat caused a sensation. Parisian women raced to their milliners to request “a Fedora hat,” which is how the name got pasted to the style. In short order the chapeau became unisex, though men’s fedoras tended to be less-showy, except for the one sported by Oscar Wilde. His signature version of the fedora, which was always worn at a dramatic angle, featured a tall, dented crown and a wide, turned-down brim.

Bogart in The Big Sleep

By the 1920s, the fedora was well on its way to becoming the default hat for city men, edging out the derby, the more formal homburg, and the straw boater. By the ‘30s, it was hard to find a man who was not wearing a fedora, either a weather-durable felt one for autumn and winter, or a chic Panama straw fedora for spring and summer. Derbies and boaters were more commonly seen on film comedians of the era than the average man on the street.

How, then, did the fedora become de rigueur for a 20th century gumshoe──usually accompanied by a trench coat? The answer is time plus the march of fashion.

In the period between the two World Wars, fedora hats were so universal that they were not even referred to as such. One could read every novel written between 1930 and 1960, and watch every film produced within that time, and encounter the word “fedora” less than two-dozen times. The lids were referred to simply as “men’s hats” or “soft hats.” As widespread as they had been, though, by the late 1950s, classic fedoras were on the way out.

Andrews in Laura

Many blame President John F. Kennedy for this since he famously chose not to wear hats (he did carry a Cavanagh brand fedora for photo ops, though, since the head of the Cavanagh Hat Company was an old Navy friend of the president’s). But the truth is that fashion sense had been changing for some time prior to Camelot. 

The porkpie hat──not the comically flat one worn by Buster Keaton, but taller ones made of felt or straw that also bore snap brims──had become prevalent. What remained of the fedora morphed into the “trilby,” a hat that was similar in shape but with a shorter, tapered crown and a much narrower brim, and sometimes made of leather.

By the end of the 1960s, most men did not wear hats at all, and those who did often preferred the more casual lids such as fishing hats, bucket hats, or “skipper” hats.

Yet the images from the movies remained. Humphrey Bogart decked out in a fedora and trench coat in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1943), and The Big Sleep (1946), plus Dana Andrews similarly attired in Laura (1944), solidified the connection. Just as “ten-gallon” hats defined the look of the Westerner in people’s eyes (the classic “cowboy hat” being more a product of Hollywood than reality), so did the fedora and trench coat become the de facto uniform for a private eye on screen, though that connection would not really enter into the collective consciousness until a generation after the fact.

Eddie Constantine in Alphaville

As the wartime trench coat gave way to sleeker rain coat, and the classic straight-crowned, wide-brimmed fedora went the way of pocket watches and spats, what was normal daily dress evolved into a costume, one that was resurrected by later filmmakers who wanted to evoke that lost time. 

French director Jean-Luc Godard revived the look in Alphaville (1965), his bizarre, futuristic homage to film noir, while Peter Sellers lampooned it as Inspector Clouseau.

And while some might argue that Indiana Jones rescued the fedora from total association with detectives, it was the kind of rescue that lasted only until the next Indy film. 

Downey in Sherlock Holmes

Through no fault of their own, the humble, practical deerstalker and the once-ubiquitous fedora defined more than a century of fictional sleuths. So iconic have they become to their archetypal characters that the decision to put Robert Downey, Jr. in a Wildean fedora in Sherlock Holmes (2009) seemed somewhere between an anachronism and a sacrilege.

Dr. Watson Had How Many Wives?

DR. WATSON HAD HOW MANY WIVES?

by Michael Mallory

How many wives did Dr. John H. Watson, of Sherlock Holmes fame, actually have? The fact that so many people even care about this is a trait of those devoted Sherlockians who like to purport that Holmes and Watson were real people, not iconic fictional characters. That is the “grand game” as put forth by today’s Baker Street Irregulars (BSI), an organization of devoted Holmesophiles who pretend that Watson actually participated in and recorded the adventures of his singular friend, and that this Arthur Conan Doyle chap was simply his literary agent.

My personal opinion of this mindset is that it rather disrespects a major Victorian author, but for these purposes, that is neither here nor there (other than the acknowledgement that by humbugging the grand game, I will never be invited to join the BSI). My purpose is to speak about how many trips the good Dr. Watson made to the altar and why it is even in question.

For nearly 30 years now I have been turning out stories, novels, and even one full-length play featuring Amelia Pettigrew Watson, whom I call “the Second Mrs. Watson.” There is a sound reason for this, to my way of thinking, but many Sherlockians disagree. I have heard theories that Watson was married a total of six times, and once encountered a Sherlockian who claimed to have evidence that the real number of wives was 13! Since this would paint Watson as either the second coming of Bluebeard or the first coming of Mickey Rooney, I did not take him very seriously. For most faithful Sherlockians, however, the number is three, though we only have details of one of them.

Watson’s only indisputably-documented wife was Mary Morstan, the heroine of the novel The Sign of the Four. Mary is mentioned in another half-dozen short stories, and while her union with Watson appeared to be very happy, it was short; she died “off-stage” during Holmes’s “Great Hiatus,” his multi-year disappearance after presumably being killed by Professor Moriarty.

The only other mention of Watson remarrying comes from the story “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier,” which was published in The Strand Magazine in 1926 and collected in The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes the next year. In it, Holmes himself writes: “I find from my notebook that it was in January, 1903, just after the conclusion of the Boer War, that I had my visit from Mr. James M. Dodd, a big, fresh, sunburned, upstanding Briton. The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action which I can recall in our association.” One of only two short stories narrated by Holmes himself, “Blanched Soldier” reveals a surprisingly vulnerable detective who, based on the above comment, is hurt and angry over Watson’s abdication for a woman. It also generated one of the biggest mysteries within the Holmesian canon, since this mystery woman was not identified and was never heard from again.

In 1992 I began playing around with the idea of writing a Holmes and Watson pastiche told from a woman’s point of view. Using Irene Adler seemed too obvious, while Mary Watson never seemed to engender such a feeling of replacement in Holmes’s life. Then I remembered the “second,” unknown Mrs. Watson, and from that single reference to her developed Amelia Watson. She is not only Watson’s devoted, slightly younger wife, but I present her as something of a foil to Sherlock, particularly if she believes Holmes is using her husband.

I remain grateful that faithful Sherlockians have enjoyed her adventures, particularly since I have at times treated the legend rather playfully through her POV, the chanciest conceit being that maybe Watson was a better writer than Holmes was an infallible detective, and he fixes his friend’s mistakes in print.  The only point of contention I’ve encountered from the faithful is in presenting Amelia as Watson’s second wife instead of the third. But if Mary Morstan was Watson’s second wife, not his first, and Amelia was his third, not his second, who was the first? The answer to that can be found only outside the canon of 56 short stories and four novels written by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sometime in the late 1940s, author and Sherlockian John Dickson Carr was granted permission to look through Conan Doyle’s private papers in preparation for writing his biography. One thing Carr discovered shocked him. Around 1889, in between the publication of the first Sherlock Holmes adventure A Study in Scarlet (1887) and the second, The Sign of Four (1890), Conan Doyle wrote a three-act play titled Angels of Darkness, which dramatized the American scenes from A Study in Scarlet. Holmes was nowhere to be found in it; instead Watson was the main character. By the play’s end the good doctor was headed toward the altar with a woman named Lucy Ferrier, who was a character from the flashback section of the source novel.

Carr’s dilemma was that this previously unknown work, which Conan Doyle never intended to see the light of day, upended the “facts” of Watson’s life. “Those who have suspected Watson of black perfidy in his relations with women will find their worst suspicions justified,” Carr wrote of his discovery. “Either he had a wife before he married Mary Morstan, or else he heartlessly jilted the poor girl whom he holds in his arms as the curtain falls on Angels in [sic] Darkness.”  

Making the problem even murkier for grand gamers, Lucy Ferrier could not be the first Mrs. Watson since The Sign of the Four has her dying in Utah sometime in the 1860s, when Watson would have still been a schoolboy. In light of this stunning discovery, Carr’s felt he had only one option: keep it to himself. He wrote that revealing the woman’s identity would “would upset the whole saga, and pose a problem which the keenest deductive wits of the Baker Street Irregulars could not unravel.” One man, however, accepted the Gordian challenge.

William S. Baring-Gould (1913-1967) was not only the leading Sherlockian of his time; he became something of the St. Paul of Sherlockania, a writer who fashioned the outer-canonical Gospel of Baker Street which is accepted by the faithful to this day. Realizing that John Dickson Carr was right in his assessment that the Watson-Ferrier match would turn the entire saga on its head, he did what all good authors do: he made things up. Baring-Gould put forth the notion that Watson had traveled to San Francisco in the early 1880s and there met a woman whom he subsequently married, but it was not Lucy Ferrier. It was someone named Constance Adams.

Who?

The first mention of Constance Adams appears in Baring-Gould’s 1962 “biography” of Holmes titled Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, and although she exists nowhere in the writings of Conan Doyle ─ not even in Angels of Darkness ─ having the Baring-Gould imprimatur meant that her existence was taken as a given by many.

Even so, I maintain that Mary was Mrs. Watson #1 and Amelia is #2, and for a very simple reason: in crafting Amelia and John’s adventures, I rely on the Holmesian canon rather than later interpolations by others. The same is true when I write a Holmes pastiche that does not feature Amelia. While I take playful liberties here and there, the guidebook for me begins and ends with those 56 stories and four novels, occasional contradictions and all. (For the record, I also ignore Dorothy L. Sayers’s speculation that the “H” in John H. Watson’s name stood for “Hamish,” which is now acknowledged dogma.) In the Amelia universe, she is the Second Mrs. Watson (though in British editions, she is “the OTHER Mrs. Watson,” which I’ve rather come to like as well).

That said, I have not ignored Constance altogether. In a bow to the non-canonical mythology, I included her in my short story “The Adventure of the Japanese Sword,” which is set in San Francisco, and fully explains her youthful association with Watson which is misinterpreted as matrimonial.

You see, two can play the grand revisionist game.

Murder in Wackyland: "The Frozen Ghost"

 My friend Michael Mallory is the author of 30 books, fiction and nonfiction (including Universal Studios Monsters: A Legacy of Horror), and 160 short stories, mostly mystery. His most recent mystery novel is Dig That Crazy Sphinx!, part of his Dave Beauchamp Hollywood mystery series. A former actor, he works as an L.A.-based entertainment journalist, and as such has written more than 650 magazine, newspaper, and online articles.  -Robert Lopresti

MURDER IN WACKYLAND: “THE FROZEN GHOST”

by Michael Mallory

With the possible exception of the Western, there was no more plentiful motion picture genre in the 1940s than the murder mystery. Literally countless mysteries, crime thrillers, and whodunits were churned out during the decade, ranging from the breezy, and pseudo-romcom puzzlers of the decade’s early years to the hard-hitting noir crime dramas that came to prominence after the war.

Of them all, none was as wild, wacky, and brazenly loony as 1945’s The Frozen Ghost…at least none that was not intended as a vehicle for a comedian. A delirious, almost surreal convolution of a B-movie,

Lon Chaney, Evelyn Ankers, Martin Kosleck, and Elena Verdugo.

The Frozen Ghost was released by Universal Pictures as part of its low-low budget “Inner Sanctum” series, which was inspired by both the eponymous Simon & Schuster book imprint and the then-popular radio show. Their primary purpose was to promote Lon Chaney, Jr., who was usually encrusted in monster make-up, as a romantic leading man.

While most of the Inner Sanctum films tend to be a bit dull, that criticism cannot be leveled at The Frozen Ghost, which speedily blasts through enough plot for three movies in as many genres. Fronting the picture is the series’ trademark opening, a shot of a creepy séance room containing a crystal ball, inside which a disembodied head (played by cadaverous David Hoffman) who lectures us about how anyone can commit murder. For the next hour, the filmmakers try to get away with it.

The story centers on Alex Gregor, a.k.a. “Gregor the Great” (Chaney), a wealthy radio hypnotist whose act consists of placing The Amazing Maura (scream queen Evelyn Ankers) in a state of “telepathic receptivity” from which she reads the minds of the studio audience members. Since neither Gregor nor Maura speak into a microphone, their every move is described by an announcer. Somehow, this less than riveting presentation is judged one of the hottest acts on radio. 

During one fateful broadcast a belligerent drunk from the audience disrupts the act, provoking Gregor to mutter (off mic): “I could kill him!” He then turns his hypnotic gaze on the heckler…and the man falls over dead! 

Gregor confess to murder, but Homicide Inspector Brant (Douglass Dumbrille) isn’t buying it since the coroner ruled the death a heart attack. But Gregor’s overwhelming guilt cannot be assuaged. Unable to face Maura, who is also his girlfriend, or anyone else, he goes into hiding. His business manager George Keane (Milburn Stone) recommends the perfect sanctuary for one with a troubled, guilty mind: a dark, cold, creepy old wax museum!

Gregor promptly seeks asylum (in all senses of the world) there and is accepted with open, hungry arms by the proprietress of the place, Madame Valerie Monet (Viennese actress Tala Birrell). Also living at the place are Valerie’s virginal, teenage niece Nina (Elena Verdugo) and a person no wax museum should ever be without, a wild-eyed, lunatic sculptor named Rudi (German actor Martin Kosleck). When he’s not slavering after Nina, Rudi talks to the figures as though they are alive and throws knives at everyone else.

While ostensibly good for business, having Gregor serve as the museum’s tour guide (so much for hiding) wreaks havoc on the personal lives of the museum staff. Both Valerie and Nina have fallen madly in love with him and when the jilted Maura suddenly shows up to reclaim him for herself, she and Valerie have it out. On top of that, Rudi maliciously lies to Valerie that Gregor has the hots for Nina, which causes her to angrily confront the oblivious mentalist, who in turn levels his “murder gaze” on her. She immediately falls down dead! At least she looks dead. Returning home, guiltier than ever, Gregor tells his manager Keane that he has killed yet another person with his eyes, but Keane scoffs at the idea, going so far as to tell Gregor that he never believed in his abilities (but thanks for the 10%). Returning to the wax museum, the two learn that Valerie Monet has vanished without a trace, and now Inspector Brant does suspect Gregor.

Evelyn Ankers, Milburn Stone, and Lon Chaney 

Things really start rolling at this point. 

Rudi, it turns out, is not just your average artistic, blade-lobbing whack job; he’s a former plastic surgeon who changed careers after making a society matron look like Quasimodo. But his talents don’t stop there: he is also an expert at putting people into a state of suspended animation, making them…frozen ghosts. What’s more, Valerie has not disappeared at all; she’s now a figure in the museum, plainly visible to the audience if not the police. 

There are plenty more plot machinations before The Frozen Ghost’s sixty-one minutes run out, and without spoiling the mystery, the upshot is that it’s all a plot to gaslight Gregor. However, by the time the culprit is finally revealed, any presumption of logic has gone through the shredder (particularly how one goes about staging death-by-staring murders on cue).  

Somehow the cast of The Frozen Ghost gets through it all with straight faces, even though most are playing the wrong roles. Urbane Douglass Dumbrille is better suited for the manager part, while Milburn Stone should have played the detective. A decade before Stone took on the role of crusty Doc Adams on TV’s Gunsmoke, he looked like a detective. Similarly, the roles played by Elena Verdugo and Evelyn Ankers would have made more sense if switched, with the teenager the lovesick assistant and Ankers a more mature niece to the matronly Birrell. As for Lon Chaney (who was stripped of the designation “Jr.” by the studio a couple years earlier), he achieved his goal of proving he could function without being covered in yak hair or mummy wrappings, or incessantly asking about rabbits. But the idea that all women from 15-to-50 take one glance at his craggy face and burly frame and start fighting over him like they might Errol Flynn is simply too much to swallow.   

None of the above should be construed to imply that The Frozen Ghost is unwatchable. On the contrary, it is a howling hoot of a whodunnit/horror film/wax museum thriller whose sheer nonsense makes for fine entertainment. Perhaps not in the way Universal intended, but fine nonetheless.