TELEVISION PILOTS: Ed McBain is working on the pilot show for a possible new television series about the 87th Precinct. An earlier series ran for thirty weeks on NBC-TV back in 1961.
And another new TV pilot, Murder Ink, involves a woman bookstore owner whose husband is a policeman. The pilot, directed by John Avildsen (who made Rocky), was filmed at New York’s Mysterious Bookshop in February.
POLICE PHOTOS: A new trade paperback by photographer Leonard Freed, Police Work (Touchstone, $9.95), brings together 124 stark black-and-white photos of New York police officers going about their daily business. Captions are minimal, and the photos speak eloquently of the dangers and rewards of police work.
COMING ATTRACTIONS: An unusual and perceptive European view of the mystery is contained in The Whodunit: An Informal History of the Detective Story, by Italian writers Stefano Benvenuti and Gianni Rizzoni. The heavily illustrated trade paperback will be published by Macmillan in November, complete with a Who’s Who section of leading authors and characters. A final chapter on contemporary writers from an American viewpoint has been added to the original text.
One of the unjustly neglected writers of the 1940s, Matthew Head (pseudonym of art critic John Canaday), will be available again in paperback when Harper & Row reprints The Cabinda Affair and Murder at the Flea Club in June.
Coming from Ticknor & Fields this fall will be two unusual collections — the first gathering of P. G. Wodehouse’s crime tales, Wodehouse on Crime, edited by Don Bensen with an Introduction by Isaac Asimov, and Critical Observations, a collection of criminous and literary essays by Julian Symons.
It’s a big year for fans of Robert B. Parker’s Boston private eye, Spenser. In February there was Early Autumn, and coming in July (also from Delacorte) is the new Spenser novel, A Savage Place.
Bloody Visions
by Chris Steinbrunner
© 1981 by Chris Steinbrunner
The colossal failure of the stage play Frankenstein, which recently opened and closed at New York’s Palace Theater in a single evening, has become a Broadway legend: with a price tag well over two million dollars, it was the costliest disaster in American theater history. It was also an ambitious undertaking, a titantic drama of murder and vengeance so visually stunning it deserved a better fate. As EQMN was present during much of its pre-opening difficulties and talked with many of its creative participants, we will try to stage this spectacular-but-doomed production for you in the theater of the mind.
The show is eye-filling from the very first scene: a gigantic glacier cliff looms over the stage, almost lost in swirling snow, while struggling near its edge lumbers first Frankenstein’s monster and then his creator, Victor. We see them for a moment, then they disappear. (Few in the audience realized that the figures trudging across the ice are actually life-size puppets — the only way the effect could be achieved.) Mist and smoke obscure the stage, and we are suddenly in a Swiss village churchyard as a ghastly moon looks down on two grave-robbers about their grisly work. (The swiftness of the scene-changes is possible because the cavernous Palace Theater has a gigantic revolving stage.)
The next scene is Victor’s baronial home, massive doors and French windows sloping upward to vaulted ceilings in dizzying false perspective. The young scientist is anxious about his approaching marriage and the secret experiments he is conducting in the cellars beneath the castle tower. The subterranean laboratory with its giant vials filled with colored fluids, crackling electrodes, and sparkling, smoking reactors is mind-boggling: here, amid slashes of lightning bolting down from the tower’s open battlements, he brings his creation to life and it escapes.
We find the creature next stumbling toward a blind hermit’s cottage deep in a forest. The hermit (John Carradine) befriends him, teaches him to read from the Bible, but in the next scene is killed by the villainous grave-diggers as the creature flees again and the cottage burns to the ground onstage! And that’s just the first act.
After intermission we follow the now maddened creature on a single-minded course of vengeance against his creator — embittered because Victor cannot bring himself to construct a mate to relieve the monster’s loneliness. In yet another forest setting he kills Victor’s young brother, a crime for which the governess Justine is accused and hung. He kills Victor’s best friend and aide, Henry, and on the night of Victor’s wedding murders his bride, Elizabeth. The bedchamber setting, Gothic and looming, where the creature bursts through a vast hanging tapestry, is a knockout. Finally we descend to the cellar once more, as Victor and his creation are destroyed when the laboratory explodes and the castle walls come crashing down. Much of the production’s $2-million budget went to elaborate, gargantuan stage wizardry — harking back actually to the melodrama theater before the invention of the movies, where chariot races and burning mills were often scenic treats — but on a sweep and scale never seen on Broadway before.
The play’s young author, Victor Gialanella, told EQMN that he hoped this first effort (produced originally at a St. Louis regional theater, but without any spectacle) would last perhaps as long as the recent Broadway revival of Dracula. Alas, Dracula seemed to thrive on undercurrents of erotic camp, while Gialanella’s Frankenstein was a straight, sober tale of murderous revenge. “I go much closer to the Mary Shelley story than any movie version; none of the movies have ever done the book properly,” he declares with pride — yet surely the pyrotechnical laboratory scenes were more inspired by Universal Pictures than Shelley, and the play ignores the book’s climactic death on the ice-floes as well.
The play was in trouble from the start. Because of the massive sets it could not undergo out-of-town tryouts; at one point the New York Fire Department closed it down because of the hazardous electrical effects; the actor playing Victor was replaced (by David Dukes, the killer Sinatra stalked in The First Deadly Sin). Finally, the major critics savaged it as just another melodrama enlivened by high-voltage staging.
The producers decided there were not enough advance sales to risk keeping the play open. But it was fun (with almost as many murders as Sweeney Todd) and might have caught on. Sad that such an electrifying theatrical disaster — one that will be remembered for years to come — was an attempt to revive the bloody visions of melodramatic stage spectacle.
Interview: Jack Ritchie (1)
This is the first part of an interview that will be concluded in the next issue.
EQMN: You share your birthday, February 26th, with Victor Hugo, Buffalo Bill Cody, Jackie Gleason, Johnny Cash, Godfrey Cambridge, and George Randolph Chester. What do you think of that?
RITCHIE: I do vaguely remember staring at a calendar as a child and seeing Buffalo Bill’s picture in my place. Victor Hugo? As a teenager, I happened to be reading his 1793 when suddenly the world before me began jumping up and down and acting crazy. I thought I was having a stroke of some kind, but it turned out that I was merely suffering eye spasms and needed glasses badly.
Jackie Gleason, Johnny Cash, and Godfrey Cambridge, I, of course, recognize. But who in the world is George Randolph Chester? Has he ever been to Sheboygan?