HE DONE HER WRONG

Mae West, as you can assume from the title, is the latest celebrity-client for 1940s narrator/shamus Toby Peters--and Mae (a pale facsimile who delivers below-par one-liners) wants Toby to locate a missing manuscript of hers, apparently stolen by a mad would-be extortionist. Toby soon identifies the thief as frustrated-actor Jeffrey Ressner--a fugitive from the loony bin. But when he starts looking for Ressner, he finds corpses instead: the husband of Ressner's ex-wife; actor Richard Talbott (another of Ressner's obsessions, apparently). And, after a long sequence with Toby himself trapped inside the loony bin, Ressner is finally captured--just before assaulting another of his obsessions: Cecil B. De Mille. As virtually anyone who's ever read a mystery will guess, however, madman Ressner isn't the killer--and Toby comes up with the slightly twisty solution. But the pacing is even slower than usual this time, the movie people add little luster, and the only amusing moments (some zesty insults) come with one of the many digressions here: the remarriage of Toby's ex-wife Anne.