Marvin H. Albert (1924–1996)

As hurricane Irma approached Florida, even though I was a good distance inland, it was a bit unsettling.

Tony Rome with Frank Sinatra turned up on the broadcast TV channel Movies!, and I recorded it and watched it Saturday afternoon Sept. 10 as the storm neared Florida.

It had been a while since I'd seen it, having first learned of it in Jon Tuska's The Detective in Hollywood when I was a kid. It came in the wake of Paul Newman's Harper as part of a mini-detective cycle in the late '60s. I caught it finally on cable years after that.

I'd forgotten much of it as I re-watched the film, which was about all I could really focus on that pre-Irma afternoon with all the hurricane prep I could manage already accomplished.

Maybe the Miami setting played a small role. It was kind of relaxing watching Sinatra drive Jill St. John around in a convertible on happier and sunny Florida days.

The storm passed through in the wee hours of Sept. 11-12 , bringing us a lot of wind, but we survived and were lucky. We lost power 36 hours or so and had water and canned ravioli, so we fared OK.

I plucked the novel the movie was based on from my shelves. Somewhere along the way I picked up a tie-in edition of the 1960 book but had never read it.

I was pleasantly surprised. The novel's really deftly plotted and fairly character rich. I suspect Albert was a Raymond Chandler fan, but resemblances are really a tip of the fedora, I believe.

Anthony Rome, the hard-boiled narrator protagonist, is an ex-Miami cop with a gambling problem. He lives on a houseboat called the Straight Pass from the craps game that won it for him, and Travis McGee's Busted Flush is possibly a tip of the fedora to that even though McGee didn't wear one.

Anthony aka Tony's slightly less cool than Sinatra is in the movie. He gets rattled a little more, but the movie's fairly faithful to the novel's plot.

Rome is called on by an ex-partner to drive a missing heiress home from a seedy hotel where she's wound up at the end of a drinking binge. When he arrives at her dad's house, he's promptly hired by her businessman father, Rudy Kosterman, to find out what's troubling his daughter, his only heir from a first marriage.

By the time Tony makes it back to the Straight Pass, thugs are waiting, in search of a daisy-shaped diamond pin the daughter, Diana Pines, should have been wearing.

Tony's situation gets worse from there. That ex-partner's murdered soon after Tony asks about the missing pin, and he's off to figure out what's up as his efforts lead to word of a swindler named Nimmo and his henchman named Catleg.

From ruined-mansions to secret gambling dens and redneck shanty towns, Tony dodges bullets, outmaneuvers cops, including pal Lt. Santini, and encounters drug dealers. He finally figures out what's up with the pin and the Kosterman family as the tale winds down. It really all ties together in a tight package.

I need to look up the other Rome books including Lady in Cement, which was also adapted into a film about a year after Tony Rome. Albert moved on from Rome after three titles to craft a longer series about a hero named Pete Sawyer.… (más)

Scarlet Women is set in New York City during the Grant administration just as Tammany Hall is beginning to crumble. Corruption is pervasive and our hero, Harp, an ex-street urchin, has been hired by a wealthy but unscrupulous law firm, to locate the wife of a prominent merchant. She has disappeared. Several of the missing woman’s clothes have been found on the body of a prostitute killed in a warehouse, ostensibly during the course of a robbery. His investigations soon begin to lead to other bodies and a confrontation with the local precinct captain, who has predictably brutal ways of interrogating suspects and who has his own motives for wanting the murder of the prostitute solved as quickly as possible.

It’s a good mystery that captures the gulf between rich and poor and what it must have been like to live in New York City after the Civil War. It has numerous little details such as little explanations about
the two kinds of horse-drawn trolleys, and about the laborious methods for clearing snow off the trolley tracks. Teams of ten horses pulled plows that pushed the snow off the tracks. The piles were then shoveled
by cheap immigrant labor into other wagons to be dumped into the river.… (más)