Word: sleuths
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...epoch of Agatha Christie and Ronald Knox, of G.K. Chesterton and S.S. Van Dine. The mystery craze gripped every age, sex and temperament; it spread so wide that it was parodized by P.G. Wodehouse. Back then it seemed possible to believe, as Playwright Anthony Shaffer later joshed in Sleuth, that mysteries were "the normal recreation of noble minds...
Steps Going Down (Countryman Press; 307 pages; $14.95) omits Author Joseph Hansen's recurring sleuth, Insurance Investigator Dave Brandstetter, but unfolds in his usual seedy gay Southern California milieu. The central character, Darryl Cutler, is a rogue undone by his few fleeting moments of trust and devotion. A former male prostitute, he becomes infatuated with a blond boy as pretty and venal as he used to be. Cutler knows that he is being used. Even so, his sexual itch drives him to theft, fraud and murder. Each crime makes him more subject to blackmail. The tale moves toward its climax...
Even the most novice sleuth could identify this plot as the work of an experienced pen—and, sure enough, Willig has been sharpening her quill since she was nine. At that tender age, she wrote her first novel, The Night the Clock Struck Death, a noirishly-titled mystery which was summarily rejected by Simon and Schuster upon submission...
...Lightning Raider. Oland looked no more Chinese than, say, Bob Keeshan, yet he was cast "yellow" dozens of times, including in four films with Wong, and culminating in 16 Charlie Chan movies. When Oland died, in 1938, Missouri-born Sidney Toler was tabbed to replace him; he played the sleuth in 22 films, until his death in 1947. Wong had played Fu Manchu's daughter in 1931, but the following year, when MGM made The Mask of Fu Manchu, that role went to caucasian Myrna Loy, Katharine Hepburn, Walter Huston, Jerry Lewis, Alec Guinness, Shirley MacLaine all applied Oriental makeup...
...early scene, smugglers are shown flying aliens into the country; when the Feds close in on them, they jettison their human payload. (An identical scene appears two years later in Secret Service of the Air, the first in Ronald Reagan's Brass Bancroft series.) Wong turns globe-trotting sleuth to learn the identity of the smugglers' Mr. Big (who turns out to be a Mrs.) and is nearly gang-raped on slave ship of illegal immigrants. When four guys fight in a dispute over her honor, she stands by, paralyzed. Scriptwriters, who didn't have trouble dreaming up cool things...