PaperBack: “The Kiss-Off”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



The Big Kiss-Off, by Douglas Heyes (Signet, 1956). Cover illustration by Art Sussman.

READ MORE: “The Rap Sheet: The Kill by Douglas Heyes (Rediscovered Reads),” by J. Kingston Pierce (Kirkus Reviews).

A Proper Heyes-ing

Today on the Kirkus Reviews site, I begin a periodic series assessing older, sometimes out-of-print crime novels. This is similar to The Rap Sheet’s long-running “Books You Have to Read “ feature, only in this case I’ll be doing all of the critiquing myself.

My first book for consideration: screenwriter-producer Douglas Heyes’ unjustly forgotten, 1985 historical thriller, The Kill. You will find my write-up here. Please click over to enjoy that piece when you have a chance. And feel free to comment on Heyes, The Kill, or maybe my commentary about the author and his work.

In a curious coincidence, Bill Crider just reviewed Heyes’ debut novel, The Kiss-Off (1951), last week in his blog. During his 73 years, Heyes only penned three books--the second being The 12th of Never (1963)--and none of them was a bestseller or a classic of the genre. The fact that two different critics should be championing two different titles in successive weeks is rather remarkable, I think.

Coast of Bad Dreams

Click above to watch the main title sequence from Barbary Coast as well as clips from the second episode, “Crazy Cats.”

(Editor’s note: This is my humble contribution to the weeklong William Shatner Blogathon, organized by Stacia Jones of She Blogged by Night.)

I’ve mentioned before that my fondness for San Francisco can be traced principally to four influences during my teenage years: (1) Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon; (2) Herbert Asbury’s wonderful book about the city’s criminal past, The Barbary Coast; and (3) a pair of American television series, McMillan & Wife and The Streets of San Francisco. Actually, though, there’s another reason, too, for my association with California’s most colorful burg: the short-lived series Barbary Coast.

That hour-long show, which debuted on ABC-TV in September 1975 and disappeared from the prime-time schedule just a dozen episodes later, in early January 1976, was set in 1870s San Francisco. It starred Star Trek alumnus William Shatner as Jeff Cable, the governor of California’s personal undercover investigator, and Doug McClure (formerly of Checkmate and The Virginian) as Cash Conover, the proprietor of a saloon and casino in the then rough-and-tumble town’s most notorious quarter, the Barbary Coast, which butted up against the Italian district of North Beach. The back-story, if I recall correctly, was that the well-connected Cable had saved gambler Conover’s bacon, after the latter killed (in a New Orleans duel) the son of a powerful nabob, and then “persuaded” Conover to help him clean up the Coast--“the haunt of the low and the vile of every kind,” as B.E. Lloyd opined in his 1876 book, Lights and Shades in San Francisco. Agent Cable was a master of disguise, who lived in a secret deluxe apartment on the casino’s second floor, entered through a hinged fireplace in Conover’s office.

At least initially, Barbary Coast seemed to have much weighing in its favor. Shatner and McClure were both fan favorites. The series’ creator was Douglas Heyes, whose screenwriting credits included episodes of 77 Sunset Strip, Maverick, The Bold Ones, McCloud, and City of Angels. The program was the closest thing to a TV Western since Gunsmoke cantered off into the sunset in the spring of 1975. And the setting held considerable promise for quirky criminal adventures. As I wrote of the real Barbary Coast in my book San Francisco: Yesterday and Today,

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, this unabashedly wicked quarter--centered on Pacific Avenue (or “Terrific Street,” as habitués called it), and chock-a-block with groggeries and brothels--was an affront to everything clean-living San Franciscans wanted for their city.

A survey made in 1870 discovered that the Coast’s underworld population numbered 20,000--3,000 of whom made their living from prostitution. The rest spent their days separating fools from their money in gambling joints, “shanghaiing” drugged sailors and other ne’er-do-wells onto ships bound for Asia or South America, running ribald theaters, operating protection rackets, and managing a remarkable redundancy of drinking establishments. In 1875, the city of San Francisco issued some 2,000 liquor licenses, 304 of which went to places along the Barbary Coast. A single block of Pacific Avenue boasted 10 saloons. With such competition, watering holes had to be creative if they were to attract customers. One chained a live grizzly bear beside its entrance. Others, explained Scribner’s Monthly magazine in 1875, “have organs that invite patrons to dally. ... And some, in addition to a band, keep a female staff capable of waking thirst in a stone.” At one dive, a rank grotesque known as Dirty Tom McAlear would consume any noxious liquid or foul food you gave him, in exchange for the few pennies at the bottom of your pocket. McAlear was finally arrested for “making a beast of himself.”

But problems were quick to crop up. In the pilot film, directed by Bill Bixby of The Magician fame and shown originally in May 1975, Dennis Cole had starred as Conover, owner of the Golden Gate Casino. But critics deemed Cole too restrained and colorless in that role, so ABC dumped him in favor of the more boyish McClure. Personally, I preferred Cole’s performance as the suspicious and manifestly superstitious Cash, because he emanated a depth and restrained deviousness that McClure could never capture--if he even tried. With the substitution of McClure as Shatner’s partner in crime-solving, ABC also announced plans to retitle the show Cash and Cable; fortunately, that decision never went farther than the announcement. One choice that did go ahead, though, was the unfortunate one to schedule Barbary Coast in the same time slot--8-9 p.m. on Mondays--that had been home to the axed Gunsmoke. The real Barbary Coast had been a despicable, dank, and downright desperate place. Capturing and capitalizing on that reputation in a series slated for the “family hour” was well nigh impossible.

Some of the criminal cases these reluctant “pardners” tackled might have been intriguingly fleshed out, had the show’s writers (a few of whom had apparently been borrowed from the stable that made Mission: Impossible a hit) been allowed to incorporate more mature subject matter into their scripts. As the TV Acres Web site recalls, episodes focused on such subjects as “a crooked banker using counterfeit cash to inflate his account,” “recovering a hijacked shipment of rifles,” “retrieving a valuable pair of jade cats for the Chinese,” and “thwarting the assassination plot of a visiting Irish leader.” Heyes’ pilot offered a glimpse of what might have been, with its story line about vigilantes (who had actually terrorized historical San Francisco) wanting to take law enforcement into their own violent hands. But of course such dark material would have been unacceptable on a weekly basis when children were watching. Heaven knows, they might have been traumatized for the rest of their lives!

Television reviewers compared Barbary Coast with another 19th-century Western spy-crime series, The Wild Wild West, and found the former wanting. Shatner’s Cable wasn’t nearly as appealing as Ross Martin’s suave master of disguise and gadget maker, Artemus Gordon, and he could be downright annoying and campy. And McClure’s Conover--unconvincingly a smash with the female sex--lacked anything approaching the magnetism of Robert Conrad’s secret agent, James West. TV Guide critic Cleveland Amory was particularly unimpressed with the show. In his column of October 25, 1975, he wrote:

Barbary Coast is half adventure, half spoof and all complicated. The plots are so involved that it takes someone with nothing else on his mind to understand them. If there’s anything that makes a spoof go poof, it’s not knowing what’s going on--before they start making fun of it. There’s also another problem. Your heroes, William Shatner and Doug McClure, are evidently directed to be as cute as bugs, and, like all actors so directed since the prime of recorded time, sooner of later they begin to--well, bug you.

From the reviewers’ point of view, Barbary Coast probably outstayed its welcome. Even Shatner--who went on from this failure to do the Star Trek movies and then play a veteran police sergeant in T.J. Hooker (1982-1986)--has been dismissive of the show’s strengths in the 35 years since it was cancelled. However, I think Barbary Coast (which, unfortunately, is still not available in DVD format) had potential, and could have been a crowd pleaser--if only it had landed a later evening time spot and been allowed to actually depict the dangers and devilishness that the genuine Barbary Coast offered to both its habitués and the well-fixed young slummers who thrilled at the opportunity to wander its tawdry thoroughfares.

I can only imagine what director Martin Scorsese, who is in the process of developing the fall 2010 HBO-TV series Boardwalk Empire, set in Prohibition-era Atlantic City, New Jersey, could do with a historical detective drama backdropped by a San Francisco locale that made Atlantic City look like a children’s playground. Would he at least sign the now 79-year-old William Shatner to do a cameo bit?

READ MORE: “A Cruise on the Barbary Coast,” by Albert S. Evans (The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco).

Graves Goes to His Grave

Click above to see the teasers and main title sequence from The Underground Man, originally shown on NBC-TV on May 6, 1974.

And to think, this Sunday had been going so well. Now this:

Actor Peter Graves was found dead Sunday at his home in Pacific Palisades, according to law enforcement sources. Graves, who starred in “Mission: Impossible,” “Airplane!” and Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17”--apparently died of natural causes, the sources said.

Graves was 83, according to a biography on the Web site IMDB.com.

There seems no doubt that Graves, who was actually born Peter Aurness (the younger brother of Gunsmoke star James Arness) in 1926 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, will be most widely remembered for his role as Jim Phelps, the no-nonsense head of a contingent of secret U.S. government agents, on the long-running CBS-TV action-espionage series Mission: Impossible. But I remember him as well for playing Lew Archer, author Ross Macdonald’s compassionate Los Angeles private detective, in the 1974 NBC-TV flick The Underground Man, based on Macdonald’s 1971 novel of that same name. This was the second time Archer had been portrayed by a Hollywood actor (Paul Newman played Macdonald’s man--renamed Lew Harper--in the 1966 film Harper), but the first time he’d appeared in an original TV production.

As Tom Nolan recalled in Ross Macdonald: A Biography (1999), Macdonald--whose real name was Kenneth Millar--watched some of the filming of that TV movie, which was also supposed to be the pilot for a prospective Archer series.

Millar approved of Graves (“a serious and very pleasant man”) as his detective; in fact, he told L.A. Times columnist Cecil Smith, he’d had a sort of premonition about the actor: “In thirty years of writing about Lew Archer, I never thought much about how he looked. Except that he was Californian, tanned, athletic. Then one night a few years ago, I saw Peter on Mission: Impossible and thought, ‘That’s Lew Archer; that’s the way he looks.’ It was really quiet eerie when I was told Peter was playing Lew, because I had nothing at all to do with the casting. Even stranger was the casting of Dame Judith [Anderson] as Mrs. Snow. All the way through the writing of the book, the image I had in mind for Mrs. Snow was Judith Anderson, who is a neighbor of ours in Santa Barbara [California]. It gives you the feeling of having had it all happen before.” Another thing Millar noted with surprise was how much he identified with his fictional character: whenever one of the actors in a scene addressed “Archer,” Millar looked up.

Unlike his creator, other critics groused that the white-haired Graves had been miscast as Lewis A. Archer. Or they blamed this pilot’s failure to become a series on writer Douglas Heyes’ teleplay. Declaring the teleflick “lackluster and tedious,” Nolan notes that “The novel’s plot had been truncated and Archer’s persona fiddled with. This TV Archer lived in the past, watching reruns of forties movies, stocking his booze in a safe lined with a W.C. Fields poster, playing bland pseudo-jazz on his car’s eight-track. His ‘office’ was a café-bar run by a former cop; barkeep and Archer played a running trivia game with old songs, plays, and films. But the P.I. was with-it enough to swap slang with a seedy hippie: ‘Lay something new on me.’” Macdonald himself conceded sometime later that his novel, The Underground Man, “did present a structural problem, and, even in cut-down form, there was too much material for the script-writer to handle.”

With all due respect, I must disagree with those naysayers. Having screened The Underground Man only recently, I think it is true to the spirit, if not always the details of Macdonald’s book. Yes, Graves’ Archer has a home among L.A.’s Venice canals, rather than an apartment out in West Los Angeles; and yes, it was probably a mistake to move the investigator’s place of business from an office on Sunset Boulevard to a bar. On the other hand, Graves did definitely look the part, and he had the combination of energy, empathy, and determination needed to fill the big gumshoes into which Macdonald had long fit his protagonist. This Paul Wendkos-directed teleflick benefited, too, from its impressive roster of guest stars: not only Dame Judith, but also Jack Klugman (two years before he appeared in Quincy, M.E.), Jim Hutton (more than a year before he began his star turn in the series Ellery Queen), Jo Ann Pflug, Vera Miles, and the then-captivating Kay Lenz as a woman in trouble (the sort of part in which she always excelled). Composer Marvin Hamlisch, who by then had put together scores for motion pictures such as The Way We Were and The Sting, gave The Underground Man a poignant, eminently hum-able score, and its main title sequence--embedded atop this post--looked for its typographical and image design to Bantam Books’ familiar 1970s line of Archer paperbacks (such as The Moving Target).

It’s a shame that NBC passed on the chance to turn The Underground Man into a series. Whatever Graves might have accomplished with that show would almost certainly have been superior to the performance of Brian Keith in Archer, a midseason replacement program for the same network (introduced in January 1975), in which Keith played Lew Archer with more tough-guy demeanor but far less magnetism. (“To all Lew Archer fans,” wrote the Times’ Cecil Smith, “I must regretfully report this ain’t him.”) During a period when the competition among TV sleuths (such as Jim Rockford and Harry Orwell) was considerable, Archer was too-basic private-eye fare. The series lasted a dismal six episodes.*

For readers who’ve never seen The Underground Man, but would like to do so, there are reasonably priced but unofficial DVD copies available on the Web, including from Modcinema.

* * *

Graves, whose acting career began in earnest in the 1950s, won his first starring role in a TV series in the western Fury (1955–1960). He was later featured in the World War II-era crime drama, Court Martial (1966), playing Major Frank Whittaker of the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) office. In 1968, Graves starred in Call to Danger, a CBS-TV adventure series pilot about “a secret government agency whose mission is to solve cases that stump other law enforcement offices.” The show looked to have a good shot at winning a slot in the coming season’s schedule--until CBS decided it would prefer to see Graves replace actor Steven Hill (later to star in Law & Order) as the team leader on Mission: Impossible.

Five years later, in 1973, Graves--fearing that Mission’s mission would soon be cancelled, and wanting another project to fall back on in that event--signed on to star in a second CBS pilot titled Call to Danger. According to one synopsis of the film, he portrayed “a federal agent who enlists ‘ordinary’ people to solve crimes. Headquartered in Washington, D.C. (where most of this film was shot), Graves selects his erstwhile agents by means of a computer.” In a piece for the Portland Oregonian (embedded at right--click to enlarge the images), radio and television columnist Francis Murphy wrote that Call to Danger “should be a strong contender for a regular CBS-TV series next fall.” Yet, although Mission: Impossible went off the air in March 1973, Call to Danger wasn’t called in to replace it. Graves was suddenly without a series commitment. He was therefore free to star in The Underground Man.

Not until 1988, with the revival of Mission: Impossible, did Peter Graves headline another TV series. And that show only lasted until early 1990.

* Just four months after the final episode of Archer was broadcast in March 1975, Paul Newman returned to the big screen in his second adaptation of a Ross Macdonald novel, The Drowning Pool, again starring as the renamed Lew Harper. Pool wasn’t as good as Harper, but it was still better than NBC’s Archer, much to the relief of faithful Macdonald readers like me.

READ MORE: “R.I.P., Peter Graves,” by Marty McKee (Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot); “Peter Graves, ‘Mission Impossible’ Star, Dies at 83,” by Michael Pollak (The New York Times); “Peter Graves, R.I.P.,” by Randy Johnson (Not the Baseball Pitcher); “Peter Graves Dies at 83; Star of TV’s Mission Impossible,” by My-Thuan Tran (Los Angeles Times); “Peter Graves (1926-2010)” (Television Obscurities); “Classic Television Showbiz’s Night at the Drive-in: Killers from Space, starring Peter Graves (1954),” by Kliph Nesteroff (Classic Television Showbiz); “Peter Graves’ Unanswered Call to Danger” (The HMSS Weblog).

Birthday Candles and Bikinis

As you may have noticed from all the hoopla hereabouts, today is The Rap Sheet’s first birthday. And we’ll resume our previously scheduled nominations of overlooked/underappreciated crime novels presently. But there are things going on elsewhere in the crime-fiction realm, too, that deserve attention.

• Speaking of birthdays, there will be Sherlock Holmes fans all over the world celebrating what would have been Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s 148th birthday today (had he not died in the summer of 1930). But another birthday may be more easily forgotten. May 22 was also the birthday of Douglas Heyes (born in 1919), a screenwriter who worked on many films and TV shows of note. In addition to penning the screenplays for Beau Geste (1966) and Ice Station Zebra (1968), Heyes--who seemed to be a favorite of legendary producer Roy Huggins--wrote episodes of Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, Checkmate, Alias Smith and Jones, Night Gallery, McCloud, The Bold Ones, City of Angels, and others. He also wrote a fine but largely forgotten 1969 teleflick called The Lonely Profession, which starred Harry Guardino as a San Francisco private eye embroiled in a case involving too much money and too few scruples. In addition, Heyes adapted Taylor Caldwell’s novel Captains and the Kings as a 1976 NBC miniseries, created the too-short-lived William Shatner-Doug McClure historical adventure Barbary Coast, and served as executive producer of the 1971 “post-Western” series Bearcats! Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: Heyes was a novelist. I own one of his books, a pretty exciting 1930s P.I. tale called The Kill (1985), but he apparently also wrote two previous novels, The Kiss-Off and The 12th of Never. Heyes died of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles in February 1993.

• “BookBitch” blogger Stacy Alesi interviews author Alafair Burke on the subjects of her famous father, crossover crime characters, her Manhattan commute, and her forthcoming novel Dead Connection. Their exchange can be enjoyed here.

• Meanwhile, John Kenyon of Things I’d Rather Be Doing asks Michael Connelly about his remarkably short new novel, The Overlook.

• Have you ever wondered what author Ian Rankin’s work space looks like? Well, wonder no more.

• Christian Science Monitor writer Daniel B. Wood takes readers on “a gumshoe’s tour” of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, complete with “passage-quoting noir junkies.” Ride along with him here.

• And Bookgasm’s Bruce Grossman readies us for summer with notes on a trio of older paperback novels that remind us of what is really important this coming sunnier season: bikinis and Berettas. You’ll find his comments here.