John K. Butler | Hacker's Holiday | The Saint in Silver | The Killer Was a Gentleman | The Hearse From Red Owl | Butler and Hard-Boiled Fiction | Butler and Mary Roberts Rinehart | Tricky Enright | Sandy Taylor
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
"Hacker's Holiday" comes the closest among the Steve Midnight tales to the "pulp style of plotting" (see the article on The Pulp Style of Plotting for a full discussion). It has many independent bad guys, each with different motives, and all of them constantly up to some nefarious scheme. This is one half of the "pulp style". However, the reader is not mainly left mystified till the end of the tale, about which villain is doing what, with a succession of criminal actions flying fast and furious, the other half of the traditional "pulp style". The story cannot be considered a full implementation of the style. Many of the Butler stories have more than one person involved in crime. This would not fly in a British Golden Age story, for instance, with their insistence on a single bad guy. However, most of these Steve Midnight stories are still remote from the multiple villain set-up of the "pulp style". In many Butler tales, there is one chief villain, and the other criminal characters tend to be acting under his leadership, or to be less deeply involved than himself. The villainy tends to form a pyramid, with one chief bad guy, then the lesser bad guys falling under his scope, and engaged in less sinister schemes.
"Hacker's Holiday" gives a full road map to the problems of women and abusive spouses. It reads as if it were written by a feminist of the 1990's, not a pulp writer of the 1940's. And it does this without exploitative scenes or lurid writing. Butler had a lot of sympathy with "ordinary" people and their problems.
The sheer honesty of Butler's hero Steve Midnight is refreshing, too. He comes across as a 100% good guy, not at all cynical or vicious. Butler's portrait of a corrupt high life out of which the mystery emerges is also well done. There is a note of class consciousness in the story, and a Depression mood: it pits a honest but poor working man against a bunch of wealthy but crooked upper class types. Butler also excels at describing the sharp clothes and macho, moneyed looks of the upper class men. They may be crooks, but they are snappy dressers. Butler also likes the high powered cars of the era.
Steve Midnight has adventures while solving a mystery; in many ways this sort of mystery-adventure is a quintessential pulp mystery tale in the Dime Detective tradition, DD being the magazine in which the Midnight stories first appeared. Despite this, the story does not really involve the "pulp style of plotting", in which large groups of people are working at cross purposes, thus baffling the reader. Instead, Steve unravels the plot one step at a time. The story concentrates absorbingly on his detective work, not on the activities of the crooks, as it would in a "pulp style of plotting" story. In fact, the crooks largely lay low in the tale after the initial crime, just as in a Golden Age non-pulp style mystery. On the other hand, the story hardly has a fair play puzzle plot in which all clues are displayed in advance. Instead, the tale unwinds as an old fashioned unraveling of mysterious events.
In real life Butler also made friends with men he admired. Frank MacShane's The Life of Raymond Chandler describes Butler's attempt to become friends with Chandler, an author twenty years Butler's senior; the anti-social Chandler kept Butler somewhat at a distance, as he did to most people. This was during the period that both men were pulp mystery writers. John Wooley's fascinating introduction to At the Stroke of Midnight describes Butler's later friendships with two men, who like him, were Republic Studios scriptwriters.
There are numerous scenes of detective work enabled by taxicabs in Butler's stories. Nearly every Steve Midnight tale has him tracking down the location of some suspect or victim by using the facilities of the cab company. Butler rarely repeats an effect. These are neat innovations in the history of pure detection.
Butler used a number of fairly powerful standard techniques in the construction of his puzzle plots.
The bad guys in the Midnight stories are often wandering around at night, using many steps and different kinds of transportation to get around, in an effort to shake off pursuers. They also often disguise themselves in different personas.
At the Stroke of Midnight reprints the tales photographically from the pages of Dime Detective, illustrations, ads and all. In general, I like the cover paintings of the old mystery pulps, but not the interior illustrations. These Midnight tales run true to form: the cover by Malvin Singer is a lot better the opening black and white pictures to each tale. Interior artist John Fleming Gould has no sense of glamour at all, and his entire world looks ugly. So does his illustration of Steve, who he makes look like some brutish thug you'd meet in a dark alley.
However, there are some important differences between Butler and hard-boiled writers. There are plenty of crooked characters, but they tend to be more racketeers and big time swindlers, than the mobsters that flow through so much hard-boiled fiction. The swindles tend to be money oriented rackets, which deceive ordinary people and separate them from their money, and the swindlers maintain an aura of public respectability, unlike the mobsters of other writers. Butler shows little interest in vice, which is the mob's chief business in real-life: unlike many hard-boiled authors, there is very little in his stories about gambling or smuggling booze or drugs or vice.
The Midnight tales, unlike much hard-boiled fiction, do not actually take place within the underworld. For example, in many pulp stories, we are at a night club in a tense scene. The owner and several of the guests are all big time mobsters and hit men. They are all engaged in tense negotiation over mob business, and violence is always threatening to erupt. Scenes like this just do not occur in the Midnight tales. One might be at a night club, but the singer there is likely to be a tough but honest broad with no mob connections, and she might be taking to an equally innocuous bartender. If a racketeer shows up in Steve's cab, he is likely to be alone or with a partner, interacting with the hero or honest characters. This is a tough world on the fringe of rackets and swindles, not the mob itself.
Butler liked the deserted quality of buildings and streets by night, the sense that only a few people were around. He rarely took us to places that were full of people at night, such as theaters or nightclubs. In fact, the main night club sequence in the Midnight tales (in "The Hearse From Red Owl") takes place during the day. The club is just as deserted and eerie then as most of Butler's other settings are at night.
Butler's tales are constructed in chapters. Each chapter has its own title, as pulp conventions demanded. The titles in Butler tales are usually pretty interesting and apposite. In general, I prefer titles to merely numbered chapters in both novels and stories. They add a lot of interest and vividness to the tale. Each chapter in a Steve Midnight story tends to be at a different location. When the location changes, Butler starts a new chapter. This presumably made it easy on him as writer: he never had to make any tough decision as to where the break went. It also helps clue in the reader: it is like a change of scene in a play, a basic structural feature that recurs repeatedly, and helps give a story some much needed structure.
Butler's closest analogue is to the stories of Mary Roberts Rinehart. "The Saint in Silver" especially reminded me of her "The Buckled Bag" (1914). The unraveling of a gripping mystery plot; the suspense events at night; a vaguely medical background; and elaborate locations loaded with sexual symbolism all seem in the Rinehart tradition. Even Midnight's relation with Captain Hollister, a gruff but honest policeman who serves as a friendly father figure to Steve, seems similar to the relationships between Rinehart's spinsters and the police. The policemen, tough professionals, seem skeptical at first of Rinehart's spinsters' amateur detective skills, but ultimately they become both impressed and even friendly. This is just the sort of relationship Steve develops with Captain Hollister. One of the woman suspects in the tale has a troubled marriage; this also reminds one of Rinehart. So does the tale's storytelling technique, in which event after detailed event is rigorously and vigorously described. Rinehart had perfected this step by step, "And then I did..." approach in her writings; Butler's style shows distinct similarities. Even the trolley rides in the story remind one of Rinehart's The Window At The White Cat (1909). The skepticism about religious cults in the story recalls Hammett's The Dain Curse (1928) and Chandler's Farewell My Lovely (1940), but it also recalls Rinehart's distaste for religious fanaticism in The After House (1914).
Steve Midnight is an amateur detective, just like most Rinehart protagonists. He is always stumbling across crimes, and then snooping around on his own to solve them. Often his motives are to prevent being accused of the crime himself.
Golden Age mysteries often created a closed circle of suspects: everyone present at a remote country mansion, for instance. By contrast, Butler's tales tend to happen in Los Angeles, and initially, anyone in that city can be regarded as a potential suspect. Butler's detectives have to isolate and track down people who might be involved in a case, out of the millions who live in LA. A good deal of the detective work in Butler involves finding ways to hunt down such suspects, often times with only the slenderest clues to go on. This detective work tends to be logical, and firmly based in the following up of genuine clues. The outstanding detective comic book Big Town (1951-1958) would also often concentrate on such pure detection finding of suspects.
The first half of "Why Shoot a Corpse?" concentrates on such tracking of suspects. Cabs taken by the characters play a major role in this section. They anticipate the cab-oriented Steve Midnight tales.
The mainstream novelist John Steinbeck would create Cannery Row (1945), which like "Death on the Hook" is also a look at a California community dominated by fishermen and canneries. Its atmosphere is a bit closer to that of Butler's story, than are the Speed Saunders stories. "Death on the Hook" will also anticipate elements of the finale of the film Terror in a Texas Town (1958), directed by Joseph H. Lewis.
Sandy Taylor, like Steve Midnight to come, operates in a tough, working class milieu. Its feisty heroine reflects the feminism that runs through Butler. The story quietly shows some of the negative features of alcohol and alcoholism - Butler is definitely not a pulp writer who admired booze.
"Death on the Hook" has a well constructed mystery plot. It shows such common, and admirable Butler features as a central situation that is different from what it appears; an intersection between a crime in the past (here a robbery) and the current events of the story; and sound detective work by the hero, reasoning a way towards the solution. Sandy Taylor unfolds his ideas step by step throughout the story, as he gets them.