PAUL THOMAS' DEATH ON DEMAND

I have to confess; I pulled Paul Thomas' novel off the 'to read' shelf as soon as I returned from a too-short trip to New Zealand, and tore through it. It may be the most Chandlerian detective novel I've read in a long time. This is a compliment, but not in the way you might think.

What Death on Demand is not is descriptive of Aotearoa, neither the land nor the cities in which the action takes place. Neighbourhoods are barely sketched in, there's little of the background life, and even individual locations have none of the detail which Chandler uses to give clues about the nature of his characters and the character and the nature of Los Angeles. Nor is it written in the kind of wise-cracking first-person prose, full of evocative similies and wry commentary that translated so well into the mouths of actors like Bogart, or closer to Marlowe himself, Dick Powell or James Garner.

Tito Ihaka shares with Marlowe is a healthy disrespect for authority—though unlike Chandler's idealist, he is a realist who has stayed in his job in the police, because, as one character puts it, what else would he do? Plus, Tito is a Maori, and as such has a healthy outsider's scepticism about the pakeha who run New Zealand. Scepticism, in Marlowe's case, is idealism smashed on the shores of reality, but Ihaka was never an idealist. This seems to appeal to women; like Marlowe he sometimes has them throwing themselves at him, but where Marlowe, ever the schoolboyish knight of Chandler's imagination, usually keeps them at arm's length, always aware of the potential for ulterior motives, Ihaka again is more realistic.

But what made me think of Chandler was the depth of the story, the way it works back in time, through layers of society, through people who are not the people they seem, and through intense corruption, personal and institutional, at every layer. Thomas' picture of New Zealand society is drawn through the aspirations and limitations of the characters, through the goals of success they've been set within their society, and the brilliant way every personal conversation can have many layers. This works best when Ihaka is involved, and as I write this, it strikes me that he bears more relation to Hammett's Continental Op than to Chandler's Marlowe, but Ihaka is, in effect, a sounding-board for all sections of the society he protects.

Not least in the police department itself. I'm partial to tales of the infighting within the police, the way the bureaucracy often works against crime-solving, especially as one moves up the social strata. In that sense New Zealand is a small town, and you very much get the sense that to some cops, 'it's Chinatown', that, as in the best hard-boiled fictions, many crimes cannot be solved, or if solved, cannot be punished.

Ihaka is brought back to Auckland from exile in Greytown (both places I know) because a well-connected man Ihaka was convinced had staged his wife's accidental death wants to speak to him. Ihaka's refusal to leave the man alone was what had hime shipped to the Wairapa in the first place, that and knocking out his police nemesis in a men's room and pissing, literally, all over him. Now he's back, and he's looking for an anonymous hitman who did commit that murder, and others besides. The story is as compicated as the best of Chandler, with as many twists; I thought of The Little Sister, Farewell My Lovely, and The Lady In The Lake at various times, and that is high praise indeed. As I said, it's told in the third person, with the narration jumping times and characters, but the prose works best when Ihaka's on stage, and he's drawn well enough to get the reader identifying with him, and making it almost like the first-person when you see through Marlowe's eyes. The first three Ihaka novels appeared in the mid-1990s; is so good I'd lobby for Bitter Lemon to bring them all back into print in this country.

Death On Demand

Death On Demand by Paul Thomas

Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99, ISBN 9781908524171

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

ANDY GRIFFITH: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Andy Griffith is up at the Guardian website, you can link to it here, and with any luck it will be in the paper paper tomorrow (Thursday). The most interesting thing I discovered was that the great character actor R.G. Armstrong was originally a student of his, though other sources that say he was a classmate, which seems more likely. They remained friends all their lives, but I didn't see anything they did together on the screen.

I have to say that in my youth I never warmed to The Andy Griffith Show, and I still feel suspicious of Ron Howard because of Opie. While writing the obit, it occured to me that Griffith first made his name playing a hick, but found his role as the shrewdly wise folksy good ol'boy, and he was smart enough to leave the pure hick stuff to Jim Nabors (and the broad comedy to Don Knotts). One of the great anomalies of TAGS was Knotts, who was so obviously not southern at all, and didn't really try to be (the same was true of Judy Norton on The Waltons, her nasal California voice belieing everyone else trying to sound southern--in fact thinking about it wasn't Richard Thomas kind of the thinking goober's Opie?).

But from the first time I saw A Face In The Crowd I had the greatest respect for Griffith's talents--the pity is they were stretched so little. Hearts Of The West is a much under-appreciated movie, and he is excellent in it--he virtually reprised the role ten years later opposite Tom Berenger in Rustler's Rhapsody. Think of the kind of roles James Garner played in Twilight, or Slim Pickens in Rancho Deluxe and they would have been perfect for Griffith as well.

I liked the way he returned to Roanoke Island, where he had played Sir Walter Raleigh every summer with his first wife, and lived his life there and got engaged in North Carolina (and national) politics in what seems to be a good way. He even moved Matlock to Wilmington, NC, probably to be closer to home, but also in a sign of loyalty to his home state.

BLAKE EDWARDS AND CRIME

Although Blake Edwards' British obituaries mostly mentioned Peter Gunn, if only for the Henry Mancini music, his television crime work deserves more attention. I wrote about the Brian Keith Mike Hammer in Crime Time 2.6, the Mickey Spillane special issue, and about City Heat in my Pocket Essential Clint Eastwood. It's nice to bring it all together here, because Richard Diamond and Peter Gunn were among my favourites when I was a kid, and impressionable...

In 1999, the National Film Theatre's Crime Scene festival honoured Mickey Spillane, and showed the rare 1954 pilot for a Mike Hammer TV series, written and directed by Blake Edwards. Edwards' got the job because he had created the radio private eye Richard Diamond, played by Dick Powell, which had cashed in on the wise-cracking hard-boiled quality which made his Philip Marlowe so convincing. Edwards' Hammer, Brian Keith, played the part with what I called at the time 'the right mix of violence and affability', tapping into some of Spillane's often-overlooked humour, and though the show wasn't picked up, the pilot became the basis of the Darren McGavin more tongue-in-cheek series a few years later, whose tone prefigured the Stacy Keach Hammer from its many different incarnations.

In 1957, when television asked for a Richard Diamond series, Powell wasn't interested, so Edwards cast David Janssen in his first major role. Diamond was a cool presence moving through a shadowy world, to which he was linked by 'Sam' the operator at his answering service, whom he called from his car phone! Seen only from the waist down, her legs, and voice, belonged to an equally unknown Mary Tyler Moore. But the real star was Henry Mancini's music, which began his long association with Edwards. When reruns were syndicated, they emphasised Sam by retitling the show 'Call Mr. D.' Diamond moved from NBC to CBS, and from New York to a less noirish Los Angeles, but Edwards had already reprised the character in New York with Peter Gunn, played by Craig Stevens, every bit as smooth as Janssen but with a lighter touch closer to Powell's, or indeed a small-screen Cary Grant. That's Mancini, on the left with Stevens and Edwards, on the Gunn set in the photo on the right.

Mancini's Peter Gunn theme has become an icon of 1950s cool, and fit perfectly with Gunn's base of operations, a jazz club called Mother's where his girlfriend, played by the lovely Lola Albright (see photo left), sang. With Herschel Bernardi providing a tired cop foil to Gunn's super-hip detective (basically the same role Ed Begley had played with Powell on the radio Mr. Diamond), the show ran for 114 episodes over four years. Edwards tried to cash in on the formula once again with Mr. Lucky, (1959) based on the 1943 Cary Grant film, but John Vivyan wasn't a Craig Stevens, much less a Grant, and it lasted only one season.

Edwards revisited Gunn twice, first in an underrated 1967 film, whose gender confusions prefigured Victor/Victoria, and whose climax, as Max Allan Collins has pointed out, was borrowed from Spillane's Vengeance Is Mine. But only Stevens returned from the original cast, and its 50s style didn't translate to the Sixties setting. In 1989 he wrote and directed a disappointing TV movie starring Peter Strauss as Gunn alongside Jennifer Edwards, his daughter.

Edwards made one other venture into period crime, writing the script which became the Clint Eastwood/Burt Reynolds film City Heat, set in early 1930s Kansas City. He was originally supposed to direct, but he wanted to cast his wife, Julie Andrews, in the role finally played by the much better-suited Madeline Kahn. Reynolds had not enjoyed working with Andrews when Edwards directed them in The Man Who Loved Women, and when he objected Eastwood sided with his co-star. Eventually, Richard Benjamin directed, and Edwards' screenplay was credited to Sam O. Brown, whose initials reflect the title of his 1981 film SOB.

Though Edwards remains thought of as a comedy director, his comedies are often less than satisfying. That's partly because they so often depend on the despair of the main characters, and partly because the casting and characters often lack subtlety but fall short of farce. I do remember being enthralled by Operation Petticoat when I was eight or nine at summer camp. But they lack edginess, as if the characters are being softened, despite their obvious faults; it's one of the reasons James Garner and Jack Lemmon (and Grant, for that matter) worked so well with Edwards, because they are essentially likeable; Lemmon's may be the best Edwards' performance, in Days Of Wine And Roses. But when you look, Garner is far better with Julie Andrews in The Americanization of Emily, which itself far outshone What Did You Do In The War Daddy; and he's better in Robert Benton's Twilight than in Sunset, which itself isn't as good as Hearts Of The West. He is the best thing in Victor/Victoria, where I find Julie Andrews' arch in the extreme, less funny than Grant in I Was A Male War Bride but with no real sexual edge to her cross-dressing.

But when Edwards worked in TV crime, his characters' flaws were minimal, and subsumed by their outward cool. They could move through a flawed world as, if not heroes, men to whom small problems were not problems. These characters stopped interesting Edwards when he got to the big screen; the 1967 Gunn is far more vulnerable than his 50s prototype. But you might argue he didn't quite know what to do with his flawed characters and their despair; like the Edwards who hurt himself trying to slice his own wrists, they're caught somewhere between angst and joy, somewhere he often can't define. Gunn's relationship with Edie reflects that: he's often cool to the point of detached with her, often barely smiling in the face of her affection. It's a peculiar sort of 1950's attitude, a bit of understatement somewhere between Hugh Hefner's Playboy and Mike Hammer with Velda.

This article will also appear at Shots (www.shotsmag.co.uk)