Ellery Queen - The Blue Movie Murders

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Ellery Queen - The Blue Movie Murders (Penguin, 1975: originally Gollancz, 1973)

cover design: Peter Fluck

Blurb:
McCall didn't get invited to many social gatherings in the state capital. A popular hostess had once told him, 'Mike, if I want prestige, I invite Governor Holland himself. If I want trouble I invite you.'

In a motel bedroom in the small town of Rockview, Ben Sloane, a famous Hollywood producer, is found murdered. He had been on the trail of The Wild Nymph - an underground porno movie that over the years had achieved a certain cult reputation. In Rockview, there were a lot of people who had a certain reputation to lose.

Here is something unusual for Ellery Queen. A new detective - Micah McCall, troubleshooter for the State Governor. Those with something to hide were in for a rude awakening.

I think i'm in love! You know the Raymond Williams snuff movie story, Smile, Please in The 9th Pan Book Of Horror Stories? Well mr corpulent cigar chewer above is exactly how I visualise Edward Hitchcock as he films his protégé, delectable Dolores, disappearing down the anaconda's throat. A Study In Scarlet, the only Queen novel I've read to date, was tidy enough and the blurb for The Blue Movie Murders promises much, surely more than it can possibly deliver? if all goes to plan, will know by this time next week.

[noose]

Spitting Image's Peter Fluck? Cover's a good 'un then!

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Meet Micah "call me Mike" McCall, former private detective and US marine, currently employed as troubleshooter and sometimes canvasser for his friend Sam Holland, the progressive State Governor. Because everyone he talks to tends to wind up in a morgue drawer, McCall's not in great demand on the party circuit, so an invite to one of Dora Pringle's extravagant do's is something of a novelty. But there's a mischievous method to the hostess's apparent madness. She's also invited Cynthia Rhodes, the famous militant feminist author, who tomorrow will lead a picket of the Governor's mansion in protest at Streamlined Swappers, Midnight Cowgirl, Beauties In Bondage, and all those other blue movies screening in local cinemas.To Miss. Rhodes, every male is a male chauvinist pig and she for one will not be treated as a sex object (that must be some pair struggling to burst free of her black silk blouse or else how McCall suffers her insolence is beyond me). Also in attendance, Hollywood producer Ben Sloane, and Cynthia is so mad at him she grants McCall's eardrums a temporarily reprieve while she turns her attention to certain "anti-women" items in Sloane's innocuous back catalogue. Sloane counters her argument by defending his own films, and boldly suggests that even the blue movies she loathes can have artistic merit, a case in point being The Wild Nymph, suppressed these past twenty years following a police raid on one of the few legit theatres it played and an underground hit ever since. Sloane owns one of few remaining prints and hails it a masterpiece of cinema. He's learned that the film was shot a two hour drive away in Rockview and is heading there now to try locate the mysterious producer, Sol Dahlman, and offer him a route back into the industry. Sloane offers Cynthia and McCall a private viewing of ...Nymph - that would have made for an interesting diversion - but doesn't live long enough to deliver on his promise. On his first night in Rockvew he's shot dead in a motel room.

Sam Holland, who is being driven nuts by 'Cynthia's Raiders' chanting and hollering on his lawn, sends McCall to Rockview to investigate the murder, rather optimistically hoping that this will placate the tiny-brained, bra-less harpies - they'll probably interperate it as a fine victory in the Females Fighting Filthy Films campaign. McCall learns from the dead man's secretary, Suzanne Walsh, that, before arriving in Rockview, Sloane had enquired after Dahlman's whereabouts to five of its most influential citizens. The Mayor, Frank Jordan, three prominent police officials and Xavier Mann, the wealthiest person in the county whose Mann Photographic Studios was once reputedly a front for the mass production of skin flicks ...,

30 pages down (of 154) and already it's looking like a find. apparently this one isn't the work of the cousins but super-prolific pulpster, the late Edward D. Hoch.

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McCall's investigation continues, not without constant harassment from Lieutenant Powell who took an instant dislike the city boy and has seen nothing since to make him revise his opinion. McCall finally gets to watch Sloane's copy of the cheesecake flick - put it this way, Betty Page wouldn't have lost any sleep - and recognises the female lead. It's Xavier Mann's trophy wife Elizabeth! If The Wild Nymph is not quite the explosion of erotica he'd been lead to believe then, thankful for small mercies, McCall's been spared Cynthia Rhodes's company for the occasion as she'd doubtless have talked throughout and given away the ending. Instead he shares this ultimate boring sex experience with Suzanne Walsh, secretary to the late Sloane, and "he became aware, as the film progressed, of the heavy breathing on the other side of the table." Flustered, fidgeting and red of face, at least Miss Walsh is getting her money's worth, though she just stops short of uttering a resounding "Phwoar!", thereby cheating herself a place alongside such all-time Vault greats as Lyn "Miss Laser Beam Beauty Pageant" Powell, Ann Ashby, Ktara and Vampirella. As The Wild Nymph ends, Suzanne intimates that she's up for it, but McCall's already decided she's not his type and heads off to test the bedsprings of mystery beauty April Evans instead, not least because she seems to be getting to the bottom of the Sloane murder a damn sight more efficiently than he is. But what's driving her?

Back to the plot and there's an industrial dispute over the hiring of black labour at the Mann plant. Union leader Tanner, a racist bully, is so belligerent that McCall is obliged to bash him up each time they meet, which is often. Tanner is particularly irked that George Watts, a black employee, was hired to perform with a white girl in one of the movies which Xavier Mann and the Mayor can no longer pretend don't exist. Otherwise, McCall is still no closer to finding the mystery director and suspects he didn't make The Wild Nymph under his real name. Now there's a thought that hadn't crossed the readers' minds.

And what of Cynthia's Raiders? Last we heard their leader has abandoned the picket line, and was last seen heading toward Rockview ....

to be continued ...

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Finally got to finish The Blue Movie Murders and, while it's not really my thing (no slime, no mutant lobsters, no sleazy nuns) it isn't at all bad. McCall's approach is unorthodox. His modus operandi seems to be to accuse everybody except his boss on the flimsiest of pretexts, until finally the guilty party cracks, murders a second time before plenty of witnesses. Still, it's a results business and you can't fault Mike's. Come the close of a convoluted investigation, once he's nailed the-least-likely-suspect-with-the-most-stupid-motive as the murderer, he tops it all by revealing the identity of genius behind the classic blue movie The Wild Nymph. Extraordinary photo of Rupert Murdoch on the cover aside, one thing I'll take from The Blue Movie Murders is a super spat between McCall and the rad feminist Cynthia Rhodes which concludes with him advising her that he sympathises with the women's movement far more than her dizzy little female mind can comprehend, and what she really needs is for a chap to give her a proper seeing to. You just know they'll get on famously after that.