Isaac Babel | Pulp Detective Stories | The Pulp Style of Plotting | Carroll John Daly | Paul Cain | Horace McCoy | Forrest Rosaire | Robert Leslie Bellem | Raoul Whitfield | Charles G. Booth | Geoffrey Homes | Baynard Kendrick | Glenn Low | George Harmon Coxe | The Hard Boiled Style: Revivals: Dent, Sampson, Pronzini
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
"Benya Krik, the Gangster" (1923-1924)
"The False Burton Combs" (1922)
Terry Mack stories
Race Williams stories
The Snarl of the Beast (1927)
Vee Brown Stories
Satan Hall stories
Oscar Sail Stories (1936)
Seven Slayers
"Trouble-Chaser" (1934)
Jerry Frost and Hell's Stepsons stories
Jo Gar's Casebook
Tim Slade stories
Jack McGuire stories
"Taking His Time" (1931)
Blair stories
Hollywood Troubleshooter (1933-1942)
Flash Casey, Detective
Uncollected Flash Casey Stories
Carl Broderick Stories
The Hollow Needle (1948) (Chapters 1 - 7, 23)
The Whistling Hangman (1937)
Captain Duncan Maclain stories
Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective (collected 1983)
Roscoes in the Night (collected 2003)
Uncollected Dan Turner stories
Monk Graham stories
"The Music Box Murders" (1946)
Secondly, I think pulp tales are at their best when they are pulpiest. The urge to give pleasure is strongly related to the urge to create beauty. Tales created for the pleasure of readers are the finest works in both genres, hard-boiled and classical. The pulp writers became less themselves, and more formal, more committed to standard formulas for "literature", when they created books. These impersonal, scholarly tomes are not nearly as imaginative as the exuberant pulp fictions they wrote when no one was looking. So the novellas they contributed to the pulps are generally much better than their books.
The essential features of this plot construction approach:
It helps in this approach to have a set of characters who are as diverse as possible, so that they are involved in radically different activities.
A benefit of this technique is the naturalness with which it lends itself to surrealism. Because each new development can come as a complete surprise to the reader, the plot events can be made into a series of surrealistic set pieces, erupting into the book in the most logically unexpected manner possible. Surrealism has a long history in American mystery fiction: think of Futrelle, Queen, Craig Rice. Readers and writers of mystery fiction feel it has a natural place in the genre. Here is a technique that encourages it.
The "pulp style of plotting" seems to go back to Carroll John Daly and his story "Three Gun Terry" (1923). It was also widely used at an early date by Erle Stanley Gardner.
After its early use in the 1920's by Carroll John Daly and Erle Stanley Gardner in Black Mask, the "pulp style of plotting" is widely associated with the "second generation" of Black Mask writers, writers who appeared in the magazine in the early 1930's: Theodore Tinsley, Forrest Rosaire, Paul Cain, Todhunter Ballard, Baynard Kendrick, Merle C. Constiner, and Norbert Davis. Many of these writers wrote for other pulps, as well as Black Mask, and they seemed just as likely to use the "pulp style" in stories written for other pulp magazines as in Black Mask itself. Still, there is a common association of all of these writers with Black Mask.
Many Black Mask writers, such as Dashiell Hammett or Cornell Woolrich, apparently never had any involvement with "pulp style of plotting".
Baynard Kendrick's mystery novel You Die(t) Today (1952) has a discussion (Chapter 6), about mystery solutions that involve two culprits working separately, each doing different things. This discussion seems relevant to the "pulp style of plotting". It is far from a full account, and does not look at this as a sort of approach found in specific writers or in pulp fiction.
Daly's most admired work tends to be his earliest. These tales of 1922 - 1923 are clearly pioneer works in pulp writing. They also tend to have some creative plotting, especially "The False Burton Combs" (1922). This was reprinted in Herbert Ruhm's anthology The Hard-Boiled Detective (1977). It stars a tough adventurer-for-hire, who in many ways is a lot like Daly's private eyes to come. He narrates in a rough vernacular, and has his own "code of values". He also spends the tale facing danger.
"Three Gun Terry" (1923) was reprinted in William F. Nolan's anthology The Black Mask Boys (1985), where it was cited by Nolan as the pioneering work of private eye fiction. Peviously, Bill Pronzini made similar claims about "Three Gun Terry" in his anthology The Arbor House Treasury of Detective and Mystery Stories from the Great Pulps (1983). Pronzini's book reprints "Knights of the Open Palm" (1923), the debut of Daly's series private investigator Race Williams. "Knights of the Open Palm" originally appeared two weeks after "Three Gun Terry". "Three Gun Terry" stars a non-series character, shamus Terry Mack.
"Three Gun Terry" does indeed seem to be the real start of hard-boiled private eye fiction, one in which a tough, wise cracking, slang talking private eye fights off an underworld plot in a hail of bullets. "Terry" is still an enjoyable story. The constant use of slang by Terry seems to anticipate both Robert Leslie Bellem and Forrest Rosaire. Not to mention how the wisecracks suggest Chandler's Philip Marlowe. The use of a loner private detective who narrates the story makes Daly's early Black Mask tales seem like the archetypal private eye tales.
There are antecedents; Octavus Roy Cohen's private investigator Jim Hanvey was already detecting in the Saturday Evening Post a year before, although his low-key, non-hard-boiled, humorous style tended to run more to con men and their sneaky rich victims. Private detectives were fairly common in mystery fiction before Daly - but none of them seem to resemble the tough shamuses found in "Three Gun Terry" and so many later hard-boiled private eye tales. And the infiltrating of a house full of bad guys, which Terry does in Daly's story, was already well established in Christopher Morley's The Haunted Bookshop (1919).
"Three Gun Terry" is also the earliest known to me work to contain the "pulp style of plotting", a kind of plot construction in which varied characters interact in mysterious ways. This style is more fully discussed above, in a previous section of this article. The key features of the "pulp style of plotting" exist in fully formed detail in "Three Gun Terry":
The constant paranoia of Daly's stories clearly appealed to readers, who saw a very tough man coping with constant danger. Even by pulp standards, Daly's world was a tough place, and his detective is constantly proving his toughness. The world view of Daly's stories can also be related to Daly's personal life. Daly was a complete recluse, one who rarely stepped outside of his middle class suburban home, a man who apparently lived in constant fear of anything that was not his controlled environment.
There are some other recurrent themes in Daly. There is the smuggled, and then concealed, gun, suddenly extracted and then drawn by either the hero or the bad guy, to rapidly change the balance of power in a confrontation.
There is the emphasis on social corruption, on the way a mob or other organized source of evil can infiltrate and obtain a strong position in both society and the political order. Daly achieved a definitive version of this in his early classic, "Knights of the Open Palm" (1923), his anti Ku Klux Klan story. Written when the KKK was at the height of its power, when the Indianapolis based KKK was well onto the road to legitimacy in American society and was becoming virtually a third political party, it pulls no punches in its look at a KKK dominated small town infiltrated and brought down by Daly's hero. Daly's tale is one of the landmarks of pulp writing: an important look at a social evil, and one of the very first hard boiled tales as well, with one of the earliest tough guy heroes, a model for much later pulp fiction.
Daly's work emphasizes some of the small pleasures of life. Both his heroes and bad guys love to eat, and restaurants are a common setting in his tales. There is also a love of both music and reading, especially detective stories. One of his heroes, Vee Brown, is a famous composer of popular songs in his other identity. It is rather if Batman's alter ego were Cole Porter.
Speaking of Batman: Daly's tales seem very ancestral to Batman and other crime fighters of the comics. Historians emphasize Daly's ancestral relationship with the hard-boiled writing of the pulps, and I think there is a similar ancestral relation with the comics. Batman and other superheroes are always trying to infiltrate the bad guys' den, and are always having physical fights with the bad guy's henchmen. This stuff comes right out of Daly.
The relation of Daly's hero to women also shows some consistent approaches. Daly's heroines pursue the detective, not the other way around. For all his machismo, he is shy, virginal, and too tough to relate well to dames. Often times these women have "bad" characteristics. There is The Flame, beautiful leader of a band of underworld racketeers. She loves Race Williams, and wants to throw her underworld empire at his feet. His detective Satan Hall is similarly pursued by a society girl, a headstrong young woman who is now running with a gang of mobsters - whether for thrills, or as an undercover infiltrator, or what - Satan has a hard time deciding in "Mr. Sinister" (1944), a detective tale with some strong puzzle plot features. While these beautiful, aggressive women have underworld ties, none is marked as clearly evil, like his bad guys. All are rather ambiguous figures, whose deviations from the straight and narrow are balanced by some warm heartedness and emotional fire, and whose ties with the underworld make them very desirable to the hero.
"Not My Corpse" is a good story, with a very tangled publishing history. It was reprinted in Bill Pronzini and Martin Greenberg's The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories (1988), where I read it. It appeared under that title in the 1953 Top Detective Annual, a yearly pulp collection. But internal evidence shows that the events of the story are taking place around 1946, shortly after the end of World War II in 1945. The Annuals were full of reprint material, suggesting that this is a retitled version of a story Daly first published c1947. A good candidate is "Unremembered Murder" (1947), a tale from the March 1947 Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine. The title of "Unremembered Murder" fits the plot of the story. This Race Williams novella is a bit different in tone from some of his earlier works. It is more purely a detective story, with Williams solving a set of serial killings. Williams seems to be adapted a bit to the conventions of the Raymond Chandler private eye tale, then at the peak of its influence and popularity. There is no sign of the "pulp style of plotting" which Daly pioneered; instead, all the crimes turn out to be the work of a single villain, as in the classical detective tale. Daly's story evokes the plots of Hammett's "The Scorched Face" (1924) and Christie's The ABC Murders (1936), without stealing from either. Daly's novella keeps coming up with plot twists, developments that put a new perspective on the story. This unfolding plot is the back bone of the story, its central element. Daly has less emphasis on action here than in some of his earlier tales. Yet when it becomes time for Daly to unleash an action scene, the crowd at Grand Central Station, his mise-en-scène is among the best in pulp history.
The novel appeared in Black Mask between Hammett's The Big Knockover (1927) and Red Harvest (1927). Most of Hammett's Continental Op short stories had appeared by this time. Black Mask had also published a large number of Erle Stanley Gardner short stories, including the often sophisticatedly plotted short stories collected in Dead Man's Letters. So this was not exactly early in hard-boiled history.
The Snarl of the Beast is almost pure action, with very little mystery or detection. Race Williams defines the detective's role as one of trying to stay alive, while hunting down and killing criminals. Race Williams depicts every scene as a direct threat to his life; and details his survival strategies to the reader at great length. The book is in some ways a classic of paranoia: what it would mean to live such a hunted life. Both the story's paranoia, with one isolated hero hunted by all the crooks and police in New York City, and its depiction of mean streets, recall Frank L. Packard's The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1914 - 1915). So does its focus on women intervening in the criminal world, with powerful personalities and mysterious identities and pasts.
Daly's vision of the underworld in The Snarl of the Beast is much different from later hard-boiled writers. Many later hard-boiled pulp authors depict such "public" underworld activities as: running night clubs and casinos; getting involved with urban politics, usually corrupt; police corruption; phony cult groups; the vice trade. These are all activities in which prominent underworld mobsters interface with the general public. These mobsters are famous Broadway figures, and dress in tailored tuxedos, hosting the fashionable night clubs they run. By contrast, the underworld in Daly is restricted to secret activities, mainly performed at night, such as murder, burglary and blackmail, combined with the "big criminal scheme", such as counterfeiting or fraud. This is also the sort of crime that shows up in Frank L. Packard. The denizens of the Daly-Packard underworld are mainly known, petty crooks. They have names like Larry the Bat, and dress in cheap workingman's clothes. They are people who engage full time in burglary, fencing, or murder for hire. They hang out exclusively in cheap underworld dives and flop houses, and shy away from all public haunts. The Daly-Packard tradition also seems to have persisted in some hero pulp writers, who were directly influenced by Packard, such as Walter Gibson and his Shadow stories.
By the time of "Not My Corpse" (1947), Daly had widened his view of the underworld to take in the elegant mobsters of the other hard-boiled writers. But it is still combined with many of the features of his original conception. The mobsters are still running a lot of secretive, lucrative businesses along the lines of burglary and fencing. And much of the underworld is still full of secretive, two bit figures.
Dashiell Hammett's underworld figures start off at the Packard level. For example, the small time crook Itchy in the story "Itchy the Debonair" (1924) is straight out of the Packard tradition. The criminals in such tales as "The Gutting of Couffignal" (1925) and "The Big Knockover" (1927) remain faithful to the Packard paradigm, although their crimes are becoming very large scale. However, such crooks as those that run Poisonville in Red Harvest (1927) are beginning to become public figures, through their involvement with corrupt politics, and the crooked machine politicians of The Glass Key (1930) are even more established. Also, many of Hammett's criminals are far more glamorous and polished that the rough underworld mugs of Packard.
Race Williams explains his theories of detection throughout Daly's The Snarl of the Beast. This is in a very ancient mystery tradition: one can find similar explanations of their views on detection in the stories of Poe and the Casebook writers. Such disquisitions have persisted from Poe onward, to the present day. In Chapter 27, Williams explicitly disassociates himself from being the sort of detective that finds clues and interprets them.
There is also much in Daly's The Snarl of the Beast about Race Williams' personal code of morality. Oppenheim's heroes also had their own individual moral code before this. The discussions of morality here are very elaborate, and are at the start of an immense "private eye with his own code of morals" tradition, one that continues in private eye writers to this day. Raymond Chandler immediately comes to mind here, as do many of his successors. See William L. DeAndrea's Killed in Paradise (1988) and The Werewolf Murders (1992) for a funny satire on this.
Even the very gratuitousness of the plotting, hardly a virtue from a mystery point of view, can contribute to the dream like atmosphere. One theory of dreams is that the brain generates a stream of possibly random, or at least non-rational, imagery, and then other, reasoning parts of the brain try to interpret these images, to link them up into a rational piece of storytelling. There is perhaps something of this same effect in The Snarl of the Beast. Williams is always being surprised by strange events which occur, often dimly illuminated in the dark. He then tries to "interpret" these events, to figure out what they mean. For example, in Chapter 15, he first hears a sound, then decides there is a man in the room behind him. He then tries to decide, through reasoning, what kind of man it is, and concludes that it is most likely a policeman. This is similar to the theory that dreams consist of imagery rationally "interpreted" after the fact. Daly's later puzzle plot tales, such as "Not My Corpse" (1947), also depend on interpretation. New events in the story constantly cause the events of the story to be reinterpreted. Trying to find the right understanding of what is going on, forms the main detective element of the story. The reader and the detective are walked through many different approaches to interpreting what is going on in the plot.
When Race Williams reaches a conclusion in The Snarl of the Beast, it is accompanied by emotion: he hopes it is a policeman, for then he can deal with him, but is afraid it is another assassin, who could kill him. This is also similar to the emotions of dreams: many events in them seems to be accompanied by some feeling, describing the emotional attitude the dreaming brain is taking towards the events. The narration of The Snarl of the Beast is first person, and we are always strongly within Race Williams' consciousness; this is also similar to dreams.
The Snarl of the Beast is lacking in any "objective" reality against which Race Williams can check his perceptions. Race has neither a Watson, nor police partners with whom he can share his ideas. He is completely alone. Williams keeps stressing his personal isolation, and lack of friends, loved ones, family or other emotional ties. The police are depicted in the book as remote and limited; only Race has any understanding of the crime. Nor do the media ever develop any realistic perception of the case. Race lives in a completely solipsistic universe. This also contributes to the dream like quality of the book: the dreaming brain is also an isolated figure wandering through the world of dream events.
The visionary quality of The Snarl of the Beast is not only restricted to the sense of sight. Sounds and hearing play a major role too, as well as the sense of temperature - Race is very sensitive to cold and heat - and occasionally scent as well. Daly's elaborate, vividly described nocturnal visions remind one of William Hope Hodgson. So does the monstrous, animal like nature of his villain. The visionary quality reaches its peak with the episode at the lawyer's office (Chapters 16 - 24). If the earlier episodes seem more dream like, this is a full fledged visionary work with a Hodgson like power. These scenes are the best in the novel.
The dividing lines between the stories is easily discerned in the book version. I do not have editions of the original Black Mask stories to compare, but my guess as to how chapters in the novel line up with the Black Mask stories:
Some of the later sections of The Hidden Hand show Daly at his dullest, grinding out routine tales that are simply all action. But the early parts of the book (Chapters 1 - 10) remind us how colorful Daly could be. The focus on master villains, and crime's ties to business, once again recalls Frank L. Packard, and his Crime Club.
The Black tales show many signs of influence from Dashiell Hammett:
"One, Two, Three" (1933) also uses elaborate symmetry, with two parallel groups, each consisting of a man and a woman. When the sleuth tries to reconstruct the crime, actions committed by one character are often mistakenly ascribed to another one, in the tradition of the "pulp style of plotting". Such mis-attributions are also made the subject of systematic symmetry, with all sorts of permutations ascribing the deed of a man or woman from one group, attributed to the man or woman from the other. Sometimes, each pair's action is mistaken for an action of the other entire pair. In other cases, the action of a man or woman alone is mis-attributed to the man or woman on the other team. In still other cases, actions ascribed to a man, were really committed by a woman.
Two recognition scenes are major turning points in the plot; they too contribute to the pattern.
"One, Two, Three" also resembles many Erle Stanley Gardner novels to come, in that its characters move from city to city throughout the investigation. Such travel becomes part of the plot patterns in the story. As in Gardner, the base of operations is Los Angeles, with side trips to a smaller town in the region.
"Parlor Trick" (1932) is a brief little story, and as its title implies, it is mainly a stunt. The trick plotting is clever. It contains a murder mystery, which is soon given a twist around, so that a second solution has a similar structure, but role-reversed protagonists. Then Cain provides a coda, in which a resolution of the plot is also given a role-reversal. The story is a virtuoso exercise in plotting.
The plot of "Pigeon Blood" shows symmetry, of sorts. The second half of the tale replays the first half, only with new meanings and perspectives. The two men in the tale (other than sleuth Druse) seem to reverse roles. It is an ingeniously constructed piece. Each man has a meeting with Druse. Each has a relationship with the heroine. These echo and reverse between the two men, in the two parts of the tale. As in "One, Two, Three", actions attributed to one man, were really committed by the other.
The reversal also serves as the surprize solution of a puzzle plot mystery.
"Pigeon Blood" shows some of the Golden Age interest in architecture. However, this is applied not to the mystery / reversal elements, but rather to the thriller finale.
Grand Central Murders (1942) does not seem to be a very personal work for Cain. It has a complex flashback structure, perhaps influenced by Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941).
By contrast, Twelve Crowded Hours (1939, directed by Lew Landers) shows something of the feel of Cain's prose fiction. It takes place in a fairly hard-boiled world, in which reporters, police, and racketeers keep encountering each other, throughout the course of a single night. So do a framed suspect and his innocent sister. The film is intricately plotted. It involves a complex web of relationships among the characters. The film is not a whodunit. Instead, it has to be classed as a gangster film, although the lead characters are a non-crooked reporter and the decent sister of an accused criminal. The reporter here recalls the novelist hero of The Black Cat, although he is much tougher and more working class. The crooked characters are all involved in New York City's numbers racket, and recall the racketeers in Cain's prose fiction. The film's complex plot consists of a series of schemes and counter-schemes. First one character will develop some scheme, then another character will interfere with the scheme in an ingenious way, producing a different effect. Such a plotting approach recalls some of the crook stories of Erle Stanley Gardner.
McCoy's protagonists tend to be rough, macho agents of the Texas State Government. McCoy's characters are often summoned to the State house in Austin Texas, where they meet a tough, fatherly commander of their force. He has a big office filled with imposing furniture, and he lauds the hero for his work. His characters pretend indifference to all this, but the scene is so common in McCoy's fiction, it was clearly a very gratifying fantasy to him. Jim Corbett's boxer in Gentleman Jim is given a priest as his sympathetic father figure. Similar macho fantasies form the substance of "The Mopper-Up" (1931), in which Texas Ranger Tom Bender takes over and tames a wild West Texas oil town. He earns the total respect of all the people in the town, both good and bad. McCoy's work shows an almost limitless need for public recognition.
Behind Forrest Rosaire stands Carroll John Daly. The detective narrator of "The Devil Suit" describes everything in very lively slang. Rosaire's use of slang in the descriptions mixes humor with vivid detail. You can see a similar use of a slangy, detective narrator in Carroll John Daly's early tale, "Three Gun Terry" (1923).
Rosaire's story looks backward to Dashiell Hammett, who had largely stopped publishing pulp stories when this came out. The plot elements dealing with thieves who are struggling at cross purposes over loot recalls such Hammett works as "The Whosis Kid" (1925) and The Maltese Falcon (1929). So do the complexly negotiated fights and struggles which conclude the story. There are also evidences here of a certain cultural tradition at Black Mask: just as Hammett's "Fly Paper" (1929) explicitly draws on a story by Dumas, so does Rosaire's build on one of Maupassant's. I have wondered (and this is pure speculation) if editor Joseph P. Shaw had fed such cultural references to 19th Century French authors, to his authors as ingredients for stories.
Rosaire's story looks forward to Raymond Chandler, who had not yet begun to publish, his first tale coming out a year later in the same pulp magazine (Black Mask). The L.A. setting of the tale immediately reminds one of Chandler. So do specific locations: the beach near Santa Monica, the house in Topanga Canyon in the hills overlooking the beach. Characters in the tale also seem to anticipate Chandler's world, including a violent, giant ex-con, and an upper middle class doctor who wanders into the plot, offering the hero some support, rather like Annie in Chandler's work. One thing different from Chandler: the strong social support network the hero has. He has both personal friends, and cooperative contacts with other agents. He is a federal agent, not an antisocial loner like Marlowe working for himself. The atmosphere of good cheer and macho adventure is also a little different from Chandler's angst. Still, the tale could be a role model for Chandler's fiction.
This ultra-tough hard-boiled yarn startles by including an impossible crime plot. Its solution is easy to guess. But it shows the devotion of writers of all types, pulp as well as slick, to the formal standards of complex plotting during the Golden Age. The story also has elements of science and technology.
Daly's constant use of slang was a also feature of Bellem's Dan Turner tales. Of course, Bellem pushed his slang to a point of bizarre (and campily entertaining) self parody, with mountains of grotesque slang expressions clearly invented by the author. You can die laughing reading some of Bellem's absurder prose. He is over the top in a way that another Daly-influenced writer, Forrest Rosaire, never is. Still, there is a family resemblance between the three authors. One can see Bellem-like metaphors occasionally in Daly's The Snarl of the Beast (1927). For example, at the end of Chapter X, Race Williams says a street "is as empty as a congressman's mind". One can also find Bellem style metaphors at the end of Chapter 24, and at the end of the second paragraph of Chapter 34. One suspects that Daly was the author used by Bellem as a model.
I suspect that Bellem knew how funny his broader effects were, and was deliberately including them for the entertainment of his readers. No one could write prose this outrageous, without having his tongue firmly in his cheek.
By any standards, "Gun From Gotham" (a.k.a. "Sleep For a Dreamer") succeeds on all levels, and not just as campy narration. One hopes that there is more work of this quality buried in Bellem's immense oeuvre. The tale conceals a clever, mysterious scheme, that serves as the basis for a puzzle plot. It also has some complex clues to the scheme, that enable a deductive solution in the Ellery Queen tradition.
"Death's Passport" (1940) is full of storytelling and plot. It also has a dying message clue and a deductive finale, both just like Ellery Queen. "Dan Turner Deals an Ace" (1944) also has a fair play, deductive finale.
Bellem shows the influence of EQ in a number of other ways. "The Lake of the Left Hand Moon" (1943) reminds one a little bit of Queen's "The Lamp of God" (1935) in its puzzle plot, just as Bellem's "Dead Man's Head" (1935) recalls Queen's The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932). There is a bit of a hint of Queen's The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) in Bellem's impossible crime tale "Crooner's Caress" (1936), although Bellem's plot is quite different. The general tone of the Bellem stories, with Dan Turner encountering a host of crazies in Hollywood, recalls the EQ tales, in which Ellery is always encountering Alice in Wonderland situations in New York. Ellery went to Hollywood himself, in four novels. The amusement park setting of "Homicide Highball" reminds one of EQ's "The House of Darkness" (1935). There is also something about the general "flow" of the people through a Bellem tale that seems EQ like.
"Action! Camera! - Drop Dead!" (1950) contains the "strange hiding place for an object" that is the subject of several EQ puzzle plots. So does "Diamonds of Death" (1950), although the solution makes this part of a more complex chain of reasoning.
Many of Bellem's most puzzle plot oriented tales were written in either 1935-1936, or in 1943-1944, the latter two years containing some of Bellem's finest works, such as "Homicide Highball" (1943), "Gun From Gotham" (a.k.a. "Sleep For a Dreamer") (1944) and "Dan Turner Deals an Ace" (1944).
The treatment of the gun in "Hair of the Dog" (1947) is nicely managed. It shows Bellem's interest in deductive finales, offering both a fairly ingenious puzzle plot, and a clear logical indication of the murderer.
"Action! Camera! - Drop Dead!" shows Bellem's ability to have a surface series of events, which contain some hidden events concealed inside. This "story within the story" effect is part of Bellem's mystery plotting technique. It helps Bellem develop the complex plots of some of his best work.
Bellem's "Preview of Murder" (1949) focuses on a new detective, Hollywood stuntman turned private eye Nick Ransom. The narration of this story is more subdued than the Turner stories, although it eventually includes some unique Bellem stylings and aphorisms. The story continues Bellem's interest in architecture. The opening of the tale describes in detail a cheap hotel with a special apartment in it. Later on, the story will explore a mansion in the Hollywood Hills. There is also a good description of the night sky, a long time Bellem trademark. Bellem's stories also betray a continuing interest in still photography, especially its technical aspects. Many also take place on movie sets, and involve the technology of film making.
"Homicide Spike" (1948) is way too gruesome as a whole, but it contains Dan Turner's delightful encounter with a woman psychiatrist in the second half of Chapter 2. Psychiatry was really getting big in the USA in 1948, and was usually treated with religious reverence. Bellem's story is not a satire, but it shows plenty of his good natured gusto. I especially liked the dreams. Bellem often contained dream sequences. They were part of his characters' strong expressions of personality.
Los Angeles pulp writers, such as Bellem, Raymond Chandler ("Trouble is My Business", 1939), and John K. Butler ("The Saint in Silver", 1941), have featured chauffeurs prominently in their tales. Perhaps chauffeurs were a more conspicuous part of the L.A. world than other cities. Before any of these writers, Carroll John Daly included a chauffeur as a character in his Florida based The Hidden Hand (1928) - see Chapter 10, and Race Williams' only friend in Daly's The Snarl of the Beast (1927) seems to be his chauffeur Benny. Perhaps this just suggests again how influential Daly was on later hard-boiled writers. Often times these chauffeurs are figures of menace. They are also often very macho, and exemplars of male sexuality. Dan Turner goes undercover in a chauffeur's uniform at the start of "Hair of the Dog" (1947). The chauffeur who highjacks Dan Turner in Chapter 2 of "Drunk, Disorderly and Dead" (1940) gets the funniest line in the story. Both of these tales are fairly minor as mysteries. "Diamonds of Death" also contains a good looking chauffeur. This tale is reprinted in the anthology The Arbor House Treasury of Detective and Mystery Stories from the Great Pulps (1983), edited by Bill Pronzini.
Wooley's introduction to Roscoes in the Night has a lot of useful biographical information on Bellem.
Surrounding this whodunit is a portrait of tough city life. Whitfield's work is more civic than Hammett's, more oriented to the hardball politics and sometimes corrupt public life of typical cities. Whitfield's work seems much less violent than some of his hard-boiled contemporaries. It also seems to be among the most realistic. Hammett had a personal vision of worlds where social authority had broken down. Whitfield had nothing this personal or this artistic, but he did have a sober, steady exploration of the real life, rough world of public life, one that is not present to such a degree in Hammett's more personal art. Whitfield is also interested in business organizations, such as newspapers or Hollywood studios, in a way not typical of Hammett or his contemporaries. He liked to draw pictures of tough, authoritative bosses in such organizations, often apparently condemning them, but with a sneaking fondness underneath. Even his detectives seem like shrewd businessmen. So, to a degree, seem Nebel's later characters, especially Cardigan and the Cosmos Detective Agency.
"About Kid Deth" shows the "pulp style of plotting". That is: it has many separate villains, each running around mysteriously committing crimes, and it is impossible to tell who is doing what, till it is all unravelled at the end of the tale. As an extension of this approach, Whitfield also keeps us guessing about the motives of the heroine in her big scene.
"Inside Job" is a formal murder mystery. Its mystery plot bears a strong resemblance to the first killing in S.S. Van Dine's The Greene Murder Case (1928). This is another example, of how Whitfield combines hard-boiled and Golden Age mystery approaches in his work. In some ways, the inside look at the newspaper is also the hard-boiled equivalent of the portraits of the intelligentsia and media that run through Van Dine school writers.
Whitfield also includes some hard-boiled action in "Inside Job". A scene on a bridge shows Whitfield's fondness for waterside settings.
Still, I feel great reservations about such World War I air ace turned pulp fiction writers of air adventure as Whitfield and Horace McCoy. While they present a macho image, basically what they had in common was despair.
The villain in "Sal" is eager to get money so that he can go and live in Europe, just like his creator was about to do. One tends to think of American expatriates as writers of literary fiction, such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. But pulp writers of the era, like Whitfield and Max Brand, also went abroad.
It is also notable for its introduction of a sweet little old lady into a hard-boiled tale, treated realistically and without obvious comedy or camp, although Booth clearly relishes the incongruity. Despite his hard-boiled mannerisms, Booth shows signs of wholesomeness and even sentimentality breaking through in parts of his tale. There is also a good deal of pleasant male bonding going on between Booth's agency operative Blair, and his police friend Pete Hurley.
Booth is good at descriptive writing about locations; he likes night scenes, and is good at picking up on scents, how things smell. Booth is also alive to the significance of hand gestures. Andrew Sarris has pointed out how important these are in the films of Booth's contemporary Josef von Sternberg. Booth's tale does have some of the same physicality as a Sternberg movie, with vivid descriptions of the physical locations of the action, and his chorus girl heroine dressed in feathers, no less. Sternberg's films explicitly influenced the early crime stories of Borges, and it is possible that they were well known to American writers of underworld stories, too. On the other hand, maybe they both just shared the same gangland zeitgeist.
As in other Booth mysteries, there are strong, tough female characters. The burlesque dancer recalls the chorus girl of "Sister Act". Color imagery plays a role in the story. Night scenes return again. The deserted theater anticipates the deserted ship in Booth's Mr. Angel Comes Aboard.
"Stag Party" takes place in a raffish urban theater district, filled with colorful showbiz and underworld characters. There is perhaps some sign of influence from Broadway chronicler Damon Runyon, whose Guys and Dolls (1932) had just appeared in book form the previous year, and made a huge splash. The character of Maggie O'Day seems especially Runyon-like.
The hero of all three novellas is called "Handsome" McFee, no official first name, at least in the book. He works with policeman Pete Hurley. He seems to be the same character as Blair, the no-first-name private eye who works with Hurley in "Sister Act". Both "Sister Act" and "Stag Party" appeared in Black Mask, in the February 1933 and November 1933 issues respectively. The second of the novellas, "Cigarette Lady" (1933), appeared in another pulp magazine, Clues, in October 1933. One wonders if Booth changed the names of his characters for book publication. I don't have access to the original magazine appearances to check this. The third story in the collection is "Queen High". I don't know where it was first published; perhaps it appeared under another title. It directly continues the action of "Cigarette Lady"; perhaps both stories were just published together in Clues as one long novella.
A scene from "Stag Party" (end of Chapter 10) that evokes its era is the hero's preparation for the final showdown, at an underworld run nightclub. The hero carefully dresses in evening clothes for this. It might be an armed showdown, but at least he will be properly dressed for it! In the thirties, everyone wanted to be well dressed. It was considered a universal ideal. Even though most people were too poor to have good clothes, they idolized movie stars who wore them. Unlike today, when people are always looking for excuses to dress down, in previous eras people wanted to dress up. Most of Booth's readers probably didn't own tuxedos, but the idea of wearing one to a night club seemed profoundly right to them. Similarly, in Hugh B. Cave's Black Mask tale "Dead Dog" (1937), the hero feels strange when he barges into a nightclub on business just wearing his "street clothes": presumably a suit when everyone else there is in evening clothes.
In the first chapter his reporter heroine makes an explicit stand for female equality and gender free behavior; it is one of the most principled stands for feminism anywhere in the pre 1950 mystery novel, and recalls the gutsy female characters in "Sister Act". The prominence of romance in this book recalls "Sister Act" as well, as do the sympathetic portraits of older people.
By contrast, the novel also includes a great deal of wish fulfillment fantasy. Robin Bishop gets to be involved in exciting sleuthing, and the novelist’s mystery books become huge best sellers, as well as prestigious critical favorites, lauded for their superb writing.
The book is at its best when it concentrates on the literary world. These sections show a vivid literary style. Homes has a flair for clever phraseology. By contrast, the sections dealing with the suspects are dull. Only the non-narrative passages dealing with literary history really come alive.
The technique of the novel is an eclectic mix. Like Homes’ later film Out of the Past (1947), there is a long look backward at the earlier lives of the characters, and their complex interactions with each other, romantic, financial and criminous. The novelist’s new identity as a mystery writer recalls Jeff Bailey’s new identity when hiding out from gangsters in Out of the Past. Both men retreat to the California mountains, at one point.
Homes uses a modified version of the “pulp style of plotting”. This plotting technique, especially associated with Black Mask writers, involves many different characters all acting independently of each other, commiting a series of intricately interlocking actions. The reader is hard pressed to understand who is doing what; untangling the series of events is a chief mystery of the plot. Homes combines this “pulp style of plotting” with a 1930’s Golden Age tone, and a search for a principal killer.
The Man Who Didn’t Exist refers to Erle Stanley Gardner, one of the principal exponents of the “pulp style”, as well as Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie.
No Hands on the Clock shows Homes' verbal skill. Here that skill is applied to clever comic dialogue, reminiscent of 1930's screwball comedy movies. It also applies to descriptions of nature and the city of Reno. This makes the book succeed as a piece of storytelling.
The typical joke is Homes showing an unexpected side of some character. A detective will suddenly indulge in kid's games, or a robber will get side tracked with something nutty. This is funny. But it also greatly adds to characterization. Those stick figures of a million novels, detectives and crooks, suddenly get the personalities of real people. Related to this are the thoughts that pop into Campbell's mind. They tend to be odd analogies to situations in front of him. They too tend to be comic, funny, unexpected, and additions to characterizing the scene in nice ways.
The pure descriptive passages in Homes somewhat resemble Dashiell Hammett. They often describe taut criminous situations. However, Homes was a struggling mainstream novelist when he started writing mysteries. He has no pulp background.
| Story | Year | Distance | Vision | Message | Background | Pet | ID | EQ | Note |
| Blood on Lake Louisa | 1934 | Shooting | - | Snake's sister | Bartlett | Dogs | - | X | - |
| The Eleven of Diamonds | 1936 | Stabbing | Seeing in Dark | Eleven of Diamonds | Fowler, Juan | - | - | - | X |
| The Last Express | 1937 | - | Night Club | The Last Express | Chapter 6,7 | Mice | X | X | - |
| The Whistling Hangman | 1937 | Fall | - | Bible | Killer, Holden | - | X | - | X |
| Blind Man's Bluff | 1943 | Fall | - | - | Finale | - | X | X | - |
| Death Knell | 1945 | Shooting | - | - | - | Dog | X | - | X |
| You Die(t) Today | 1952 | Hanging | - | Photograph | Tubby, Joan | - | - | - | - |
If you are new to Baynard Kendrick, a good place to start reading him is The Whistling Hangman. His next most interesting book is his debut novel Blood on Lake Louisa.
Had I But Known. Blood on Lake Louisa is full of the literary techniques of the Had I But Known (HIBK) school. But it has almost no female characters, and is set among a world of outdoor sportsmen, moonshiners, policemen and other macho types. This is very unusual. Still, it is full of passages that recall Mary Roberts Rinehart novels:
Other mystery traditions are invoked too. The complex map of the countryside and the alibi-and-timing aspects recall Freeman Wills Crofts.
Architecture. The floor plan of the house bears some resemblance to the layout of the bridge club in The Eleven of Diamonds. Both have verandas or porches, that reach around right angle bends. And lines of sight play a role in both mysteries, based on the floor diagrams.
SPOILERS Blood on Lake Louisa has scenes in underground areas, something that will recur in The Last Express and The Whistling Hangman.
Mystery Subplots. The shooting in Blood on Lake Louisa resembles the stabbing in The Eleven of Diamonds, in that neither is an impossible crime - yet both could easily have been made so, had the author chosen.
Later Kendrick novels will have the killer identified by knowledge of information or access to objects. Blood on Lake Louisa is moving in this direction - but is not quite there yet. The killer does have unusual knowledge of something - but it is broad factual information, not some unique aspect of the crime known only to the killer. This knowledge does serve as a tentative indication of the killer, who would have been likely to research such facts. But it is not a true "killer's knowledge plot". And it is not a rigorous clue to the killer, that would guarantee guilt, or exclude all other people.
The Detective. Miles Standish Rice works as a private investigator in The Eleven of Diamonds. But compared to many private eyes in fiction, Rice has an unusually close relationship with the police. He is actually hired by his client, on the recommendation of the police. Rice is a personal friend of police homicide Captain Vincent LeRoy, and the two men essentially investigate the crime together, as a team. Rice and LeRoy in fact resemble the amateur sleuth / police partnerships of the Van Dine school, such as amateur genius Ellery Queen's working with the New York City homicide squad to solve cases. Rice and the police constantly share information.
Racism. The Eleven of Diamonds suffers from racism, especially in its second half. There is a lot of painfully dated language. But worse is the finale, which depicts a member of a minority group as "dumb": a full-blown racist stereotype.
Relationship to Impossible Crimes. SPOILERS ahead. The Eleven of Diamonds has an unusual structure. It starts off by looking like an utterly conventional, routine murder, a simple stabbing. There doesn't seem to be anything unusual about the crime, or hard to explain, except of course, whodunit. But gradually, Rice comes up with an unusual explanation of how the crime was committed, as a physical act.
Kendrick could easily have written this killing in The Eleven of Diamonds as an impossible crime. He could have made the wing of the building where the murder took place locked and guarded. Then he could have used the exact same murder mechanism to solve a locked room, impossible crime tale.
Had Kendrick done so, he would have wound up with an impossible crime novel, with some broad similarities to his later impossible crime novel, The Whistling Hangman. The two have completely different solutions. But both involve the killing of an apparently isolated figure, by a killer who is somehow acting at a distance.
Kendrick might also have been wiser to write The Eleven of Diamonds as a locked room tale, in terms of the book's long term reputation. There is a steady readership for impossible crimes, and a small but loyal audience for this kind of fiction. The Eleven of Diamonds would probably be better remembered and read today, if it fell into this sub-genre.
The crime and its physical solution are found in chapters in the book's first half. The opening chapter introduces some characters, and sets up a mysterious background for them. Then the murder and its initial investigation are in Chapters 2, 3, 5, 6 - much of which are quite dull and seemingly routine. An interesting clue relating to the puzzles of Chapter 1 appears in Chapter 9. The solutions start coming in Chapters 11, 12, 16, including all about the murder, and also about an interesting puzzle about Fowler from Chapter 1. The mysteries of chapter 1 finally get a full explanation in Chapter 23.
Meanwhile, there is a vividly described second murder in Chapter 15, which is the book's best-written set piece. It introduces aspects of impossible crime. Unfortunately, the same puzzle and solution had already appeared in Ellery Queen's "The Adventure of the House of Darkness" (1935) of the year before. It is a vision-related plot idea: a kind of mystery concept that will return with the night club murder in The Last Express.
Mystery Subplots. There is much mystery in Fowler's background, and also that of Juan. Such background mysteries run through Kendrick.
The "Eleven of Diamonds" subplot is fairly elaborately developed, going through several stages. It might be considered as a form of message, and it even takes on aspects of a Dying Message.
Characters. The Last Express deserves credit for introducing Maclain. But most of the numerous ideas it presents about Maclain seem to be repeated in later novels - so readers will not actually miss much about Maclain if they fail to read this debut.
The portrait of Charles Hartshorn, upper crust young man-about-town, is a satiric gem (start of Chapter 6).
The youthful hit man, a known villain seen throughout the novel, is constantly indicated to be gay, although the label is never quite explicit. He is even wearing a "pinkish suit" at one point! This homophobia is a major flaw of the novel. This characterization perhaps influenced that of the sinister but handsome twins in The So Blue Marble (1940) by Dorothy B. Hughes.
Mystery Plot. The best mystery elements take up a fairly small section of the novel. They are its best part. They include the first murder and its investigation (end of Chapter 3 through Chapter 7), and solutions (Chapters 29, 30, 33).
The reconstruction of the first crime is solid detective work.
The best of several Golden Age puzzle features is the identity of the head villain, revealed at the end by the detective. It's both logical and surprising:
Weaker Golden Age aspects include a far-fetched Dying Message (stated end of Chapter 3, solved end of Chapter 30). Dying Messages were associated with Ellery Queen, and were also common in other American writers. Kendrick's Dying Message involves the location of valuable property, rather than a clue to the killer.
Somewhere in the mid-level of quality: a nightclub murder which depends on a rather recherché gimmick for its surprise mechanism (end of Chapter 29). It anticipates the main crime in The Whistling Hangman, in being witnessed, but not understood. In The Last Express the witnessing is visual, in The Whistling Hangman it is aural. Both crimes also have a technological aspect, linking Kendrick to the tradition of Scientific Detection.
The Last Express manages a good plot twist (Chapter 6, 7). This gambit recalls "The Master of the Conjurers' Guild" (1930) by Joseph Szebenyei, The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932) by Ellery Queen, The Unicorn Murders (1935) by "Carter Dickson" (John Dickson Carr). It might be linked to the mysteries of background in other Kendrick books.
Mystery Plot. Baynard Kendrick's The Whistling Hangman (1937) is a largely straightforward whodunit, with a mysterious murder solved by a detective. This pure whodunit structure makes it different from some of Kendrick's other works, which can combine mystery with thriller elements. The detective here is Kendrick's famous blind private investigator, Captain Duncan Maclain.
The murder method in The Whistling Hangman is itself a mystery. It is an example of the howdunit: a crime committed by a mysterious method, one that has to be figured out by the sleuth. Making it more complex than most howdunits: the crime is actually partly witnessed, by two different people. What they see and hear is itself baffling, and does not explain the killing.
Like several other howdunits, the murder in The Whistling Hangman is a borderline impossible crime. It does not seem to have any plausible explanation.
Like other Golden Age novels, Kendrick includes several subsidiary mysteries along the way. The focus is kept steadily on the unraveling of these mysteries. The book never stops dead in its tracks, for soap opera passages or other filler. Each chapter usually brings new revelations about the tale's mysterious events. We do learn a lot about the suspects' personal lives - but this is all carefully interwoven with attempts to uncover those characters' mysterious pasts.
I was able to figure out whodunit. But this is because I noticed some (but not all) of the numerous fair play clues to the killer Kendrick sprinkled through the book. Some of these clues center on the killer having knowledge and access needed to commit the crime: a Kendrick tradition.
There are interesting puzzles about the hidden backgrounds of some of the characters. These recall the puzzle about Fowler's background in The Eleven of Diamonds.
Towards the end, there is a puzzle about where an object involved in the crime might be hidden. Such Concealed Object puzzles were associated in the 1930's with Ellery Queen and Stuart Palmer.
The Bible is one of the last things looked at by the murder victim. It has some aspects of both an information source and a dying message: so it perhaps falls into the message subplots in Kendrick.
Had I But Known. As in Kendrick's later The Odor of Violets, there are some Had I But Known (HIBK) elements:
The Hotel. The Whistling Hangman resembles in its settings Helen Reilly's The Line-Up (1934). Both are principally set at lavish New York City residential hotels, occupied by wealthy families. Both novels also have a secondary setting, which is similar in both books. That setting is a surprise, sprung in later chapters. I have no idea if these common settings are just a coincidence, or a sign of influence. The Whistling Hangman differs in that it concentrates on the hotel and its staff as a whole, while The Line-Up mainly looks at one family's domicile within the hotel.
The luxury hotel in The Whistling Hangman and its elite staff anticipate Hugh Pentecost's Pierre Chambrun series.
We learn a fair amount about the architecture of the hotel: an example of the Golden Age interest in architecture.
There are some technological ideas in The Whistling Hangman. Oddly, these involve not so much the murder or mystery plot, as some suspense passages in the finale. In these last chapters, Kendrick explores some of the technological features of a 1937 hotel. These take us to the hotel's sub-basements, far below ground. The Last Express explored Maclain's training facility, in the sub-basements of his own building.
The entry on Kendrick in The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976) edited by Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler, says that Kendrick worked as "general manager of a New York City hotel chain (1930-1931)".
Kendrick's book suffers from his grim tone, which even the author describes as one of "horror". This is not the standard Gothic trappings, but a full look at modern problems. The book includes borderline incest, date rape, a dog trained to kill, the death of dozens of men on a sabotaged submarine, Nazi torturers, and a decapitated woman. Yikes! This would be pretty strong stuff in the 1990's, and in 1940 it must have been startling. (Admittedly, most of this stuff happens "offstage", and is not directly portrayed, in deference to 1940's taboos. Still, all of these things form principal elements of the plot.)
The novel's grim view of sex and romantic relationships is also prominent. In most cases in the book, sex and romance lead immediately to death. At least one person in many "romantic" relationships turns out to be a spy, interested in the other person only for espionage purposes. Men are always getting shot or stabbed in the back, with all of this method's disturbing symbolic overtones. This is a strange book. While its form has roots in the pulp tradition, its content is distinctly different.
Pulp Heroes. Some of Kendrick's characters are out of the superhero pulp PI tradition, such as Maclain and his team, which includes a largely unstereotyped black chauffeur. This team can remind one of Doc Savage and his men, for example. Maclain's private eye partner is in fact named Spud Savage. He is brainy, as well as being tough and daring, in an era that valued intellect in its detectives.
Had I But Known - Women. On the other hand, the initial viewpoint character Norma, is a palpitatingly emotional woman right out of the Had-I-But-Known school, not so much of Rinehart as of such Rinehart imitators as Mignon G. Eberhart and Mabel Seeley. Norma is always seething with emotion about her family and romantic relationships, when she is not walking into dark and lonely rooms concealing the murderer and various corpses. I have never seen the combination of Pulp PIs and Had-I-But-Known-ism, before. It is not as much fun as it sounds, partly because Kendrick's tone is so grim that it precludes all sense of tongue-in-cheek fun, but somehow it all manages to work. What the Had-I-But-Known element does do, is allow Kendrick to talk seriously about relationships, particularly their negative and problem sides, such as divorce and date rape. This serious, realistic portrayal of relations has always been one of the strong sides of the Had-I-But-Known school, both here and elsewhere.
The Pulp Style of Plotting. Kendrick is described in the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection as an outstanding creator of plots in the 1930's style. This statement can be defended, but it is misleading. My impression (before I had read Kendrick's novel) was this meant that Kendrick was Ellery Queen #2, spinning out Golden Age detective puzzle plots. This is not true at all, at least in this book. Anyone coming to Kendrick's book looking for an outstanding formal detective story in the Christie-Carr-Queen tradition will be disappointed.
Many of the book's spy characters are acting independently of each other - none of the US government agents seems to inform Maclain of anything, for example, even though he is working for G2 - and we have the familiar pulp plot construction approach of a large number of independent groups all playing a role in a mysterious situation. This "pulp style of plotting" dominates the book's plot construction.
Kendrick's short fiction appeared in Black Mask, and Kendrick's plotting style has its roots in the pulp mystery fiction of its day. The plotting techniques reminded me of Kendrick's Black Mask colleagues, from Carroll John Daly onward.
Kendrick's book is at the middle level of "pulp style of plotting". It is not bad, but it is not as good as Merle Constiner at his best, for example. It is more at the level of Todhunter Ballard. Kendrick's writing style is smoother than Todhunter Ballard's, although a lot grimmer and more downbeat.
Mystery Plot. There is a whodunit aspect to the book, with a series of murders, and the final unmasking of the chief Nazi spy behind the murders at the end. However, there are some major changes to the ground plan of the typical whodunit. Motive becomes a non-operative factor in the mystery puzzle, because the villains' motives are simply that they are Nazis, a fact known right from the start.
SPOILERS More crucially, unknown to the reader a large number of characters in the book are leading double lives as spies. No less than three characters turn out to be US Government agents, while another three character are Nazi spies. This is perhaps related to the puzzles about characters' backgrounds in other Kendrick.
Blind Man's Bluff suffers from dullness. It has an atmospheric opening leading up to the crime (Chapter 1), with more facts coming out in the immediate investigation (Chapter 2, Sections 1-2). But not a whole lot else happens of interest, till the solution at the end (Chapter 8, Sections 2-4). There are two more murders - but they both simply re-use the same mysterious approach of the first crime, and thus don't add much to the plot. Had Kendrick written this tale as a longish short story, including the material in the opening, the solution from the end, and some brief bridging material in between, it would have been a much better reading experience.
The murder in Blind Man's Bluff is partially witnessed, as in The Whistling Hangman. A witness has some facts she observed, but doesn't understand, just as in the earlier novel. And as before, these serve as a clue to how the impossible crime was committed. Unlike the earlier book, in Blind Man's Bluff these observed facts are not brought out and shared with the reader right away. They only emerge under Maclain's questioning, later in the novel (end of Chapter 5, Section 4).
Despite the many tributes in Blind Man's Bluff to the skill of the New York Homicide police, it seems to me that they do a less than skillful job in searching the crime scene and questioning witnesses. Had they brought more facts out, the impossible crime could have been solved sooner.
Had I But Known. The opening chapter has links to the Had I But Known tradition:
Racism. Blind Man's Bluff has a brief but highly offensive endorsement of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II (Chapter 1, Section 2). It repeats the discredited lies that they were security risks. Kendrick lived and worked for decades after this book. But he still allowed it to be reprinted unchanged in the 1970's, long after the truth about this situation became widely known.
Society. Blind Man's Bluff is set among failed financial institutions in the Depression, and how they are treated afterwards by the US Government. This is interesting. It has echoes of the 2000's, and the similar collapse of Wall Street firms today. One sees that in the Depression, such failed firms came under the control of the Government. They were not merely bailed out like many firms today.
The visit to a jewelry store (Chapter 4. Section 1) has some comic sparkle.
SPOILERS in the rest of the discussion of Blind Man's Bluff.
Identifying the Killer. The killer is identified, in part, due to being the sole person who has information about the other characters' movements and appearances in the building. Such access to information is a standard kind of Kendrick clue to a killer - and normally, a pretty good one. However, we never actually learn before the solution that the killer had access to the information. Instead, the book simply has the killer in a position in the story, that it becomes plausible in the solution that he or she had such access. This is OK - but not as good as the more rigorous use of such clues in other Kendrick, which fully spell out long before the solution who had access.
The identity of the killer uses a Least Likely Suspect approach, commonly associated with Ellery Queen. So do some previous Kendrick novels. Both this Least Likely Person aspect, and the access to information clue to the crime, seem modeled on similar elements in Kendrick's The Last Express (1937).
The other main clue to the killer involves access as well: in this case, access to financial opportunity to commit financial wrong doing. This is a well done clue.
A Suspect's Background. A subplot deals with the hidden background of a suspect. This is solved in the last section of the book (Chapter 8, Section 4). This subplot seems modeled on one from Kendrick's Blood on Lake Louisa.
Subplots. Also, while The Whistling Hangman sticks closely to detective work unraveling the mystery, much of Death Knell is consumed with soap opera about the book's uninteresting characters. This soap opera is largely seen from male points of view: the husband, the secretary; and Death Knell largely lacks the Had I But Known aspects of some other Kendrick novels.
There is just less mystery in Death Knell than in Kendrick's 1930's novels. His 1930's books were full of mystery subplots.
Death Knell has a mysterious invitation - but little is done with this, and it does not lead to an ingenious solution. It does recall the phony notes passed to both the victim and the mobster in The Eleven of Diamonds, which caused them to go places.
Identifying the Killer. Death Knell does come up with a logical choice of a killer. Sleuth Maclain gives a surprisingly brief and cogent pair of reasons why one person is the most likely murderer - in a single sentence on the last page of the book. These reasons are more "common sense" like than those in many mystery novels. They don't prove that this person is the killer, in the logically rigorous style of an Ellery Queen novel. But they are certainly a strong indication.
SPOILERS The clues are related in basic approach to the knowledge-based and access-based clues that were so good in The Last Express:
The Literary Life. The mainstream novelist who is the chief character, is viewed ambiguously as an author. Sometimes he is seen as talented. But he also comes across as a bit of a commercial hack. His books seem to be racy novels, at a time when the trashy historical Forever Amber (1944) was a real-life best-seller (and one of the most talked-about and spoofed books of its era). An interesting passage near the start has his work denounced for ignoring social realties, especially racial conflicts in the USA and the struggles between capital and labor. This seems like a left-wing critique.
The novelist bats out 2,000 words of fiction every afternoon. This is a terrific pace. He could compose an 80, 000 word novel in just 40 working days - less than two months. Later, the beginning writer of You Die(t) Today will have a goal of 500 words per day.
There is a witty homage to Ellery Queen at the end. One suspects that by this time, Kendrick knew Queen personally, through their mutual involvement with the newly formed Mystery Writers of America, if nothing else.
The book's plot is highly complex - but a mess:
However, unlike other Kendrick books, the howdunit:
Other Mystery Plot. Subplots about characters' backgrounds play a large role in You Die(t) Today. They are more elaborate - but in my judgment less plausible or sound - than the simple-but-good background subplots in some other Kendrick novels.
The photograph is an example of the information-bearing objects that run through Kendrick. There are some related hard-to-interpret markings, made by a deceased character, that give it something of a Dying Message aspect, although it is hardly a pure or traditional Dying Message.
Characters. Ted Yates is a likable character. He gets a lot of attention in the opening (Chapters 1, 5). But then he unfortunately disappears from much of the book.
Setting. The health farm is an interesting place (Chapters 10, 12, 15). It takes paying guests, and in some ways resembles the hotel in The Whistling Hangman, also a notable Kendrick setting.
You Die(t) Today also has an actual hotel, a rundown but still respectable Broadway spot. It too is pleasantly described.
The Catholic mission for the poor is a third hotel-like structure in the book (Chapter 12).
The story contains a complex landscape, intermeshing with an unusual piece of architecture: both a Golden Age tradition. Low would go on to publish Western novels, and the feel of the rural landscape here is of a Western ranch - although the story actually takes place at a farm some distance from Baltimore. The landscape somewhat anticipates one in a Western comic book a few years later: see "The War for Water" (Western Comics #9, May-June 1949). Low uses technology throughout the tale: most startlingly, in an account of how the map of the farm landscape was produced. The landscape, and the story as a whole, is hauntingly atmospheric, something like the feel of a dark fairy tale.
Coxe used three series detectives in his tales. Two were newspaper photographers who fought crime. Flashgun Casey appeared in the pulp Black Mask, whereas the similar Kent Murdock showed up in novels. It is often hard to tell the two detectives apart! Flashgun Casey is a technologically oriented person. Much is made of his camera equipment. Clues often come to him photographically. Another Coxe detective, Dr. Paul Standish, practiced medical detection in the early 1940's, somewhat in the spirit of R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke. This means that Coxe has elements of Scientific Detection in his ancestry. However, he only occasionally emphasized these scientific aspects as much as most full fledged members of this school did. His Kent Murdock novel The Hollow Needle (1948) is among his most technological fiction.
Coxe's plots tend to have a crime in the present that Flashgun is investigating. The suspects tend to have a long complex history of interaction, often around crooked schemes. Casey often finds hidden murders in the past, that help motivate the present killings, and provide plot surprises.
The Casey stories seem to gravitate towards the bad guys' apartments in later stages of the plot. These locations are fraught with menace, and often show the bad guys threatening the hero there.
Murder Picture. "Murder Picture" (1935) was reprinted in Otto Penzler's anthology The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (2007). The first half has an odd structure. It seems like a newspaper adventure. But gradually one realizes that Coxe has sneaked in a murder mystery, in the background of the tale. The mystery is told in an oblique style, only gradually coming to light. One reason the murder is so obscure, at first: the bad guys have covered it up, a frequent occurrence in Coxe. Also unusual: no sooner are all the details of the mystery fully in place, halfway through the story, than does sleuth Flash Casey immediately solve it. He identifies the killer through some fairly clued detection - but this clue is likely hard for the reader to spot, being buried in the strange construction of the tale. The first half also shows the Golden Age interest in architecture.
The second half of "Murder Picture" becomes a pure thriller, without mystery elements, although Casey does do a nice piece of detection about an elevator. Mainly, in this second half Casey tries to rescue a young newspaper man. This half has some of Coxe's male bonding, exploring relationships between Casey and newspaper legman Potter, a cab driver, and Casey's editor Blaine. The whole story is entertaining, but it does not have as complex a plot as some of Coxe's best work.
Murder Mixup. "Murder Mixup" (1936) is reprinted in the anthology, The Hard-Boiled Omnibus (1946), edited by Joseph T. Shaw. The long tale falls into four parts. Each one is set at a favorite Coxe location: an apartment building, together with the lobby and streets outside. Each building is different in the three sections. In addition, a different crime takes place in each of the first three apartment buildings, while the solution emerges in the fourth and last. This gives a modular construction: a tale built around a series of events, each cast in similar modes.
In between the apartment house sequences, there are more comic interludes, that focus on the relationships between the good guys.
Through most of its length, "Murder Mixup" seems like a nearly pure thriller. But at the end, Coxe pulls off some simple but effective mystery plot surprises. MILD SPOILERS: there is an interesting symmetry, in the revelation of whodunit.
And there is also an interesting subplot, about the plate-carrying cases. Here is a plot dealing with Casey's profession of photographer - but NOT one dealing with what a "mystery photo" reveals, as in some other Coxe works.
Casey's partnership with Logan is plainly important to him. Newspaperman Flashgun Casey and policeman Logan remind one a little of that earlier Black Mask pair, Frederick Nebel's drunken reporter Kennedy and policeman Steve MacBride, although Casey is a lot more responsible and sober than Nebel's dipsomaniac. Coxe's storytelling reminds one a little of Nebel's, as well. The newspaper setting allows the hero to be a working man, sensible and realistic. He does not have the gunman image of the private eye which descends from Daly, with wisecracks, constant violence and dames throwing themselves at him. Raoul Whitfield's "Inside Job" (1932) also has a newspaperman hero.
"Reward For Survivors" was reprinted in Peter Haining's anthology The Mammoth Book of Movie Detectives & Screen Crimes (1998). "Reward For Survivors" is notable for the intricate network it builds up among the good guys in the story. The warm feelings among these men seems to be very important to Casey, and to Coxe. This network includes the photographers and editors of two papers, the police, and various working guys Casey knows. This network is almost the mirror image of the group of villains in this, and other Coxe tales, who are also typically composed of a group of networked bad guys.
Flashgun Casey is a leader within his world. He is always being paired with some young news person who idolizes him: a woman cub reporter in "Too Many Women", and a young male photographer in "Reward For Survivors". Casey is a bit older than many pulp heroes, with gray temples suggesting his maturity. Kent Murdock will also be an older man, and a leader of younger newspaper employees, in such novels as Murder on Their Minds (1957).
In pulp stories, we are used to private eyes being good guys. But in the Flashgun Casey and Kent Murdock stories, private eyes seem frequently to be bad guys, sinister figures hired by other villains in the tale, but often branching out on their own. Casey himself is a newspaper man, not a p.i., and he works well with the police. There do not seem to be any sympathetic private detectives in this equation.
"Murder Mixup" shows Coxe's admiration for good guys who are well-dressed. Both the Secret Service agents, and police Lt. Logan, are tough guys who also maintain sharp middle class standards of dress. This is a combination that runs through Coxe's fiction.
New characters, both good and bad, keep getting introduced throughout the story. Often we get brief verbal descriptions of them from a third party. Then, later on in the tale, they show up in the flesh. Coxe then gives a deeper portrait of them. The technique is a bit like the way characters in "Too Many Women" first appeared in a photograph, then showed up in person for a detailed characterization later.
"A Routine Night's Work" is a mystery, but not a fair play puzzle plot one. It recalls in approach Coxe's pulp short stories from the 1930's, so much so that one wonders if it might be a tale from that era which Coxe reworked. It contains many of Coxe's motifs: a murder in the past, affecting a second murder in the present; a criminal scheme that is gradually uncovered; a move from a rough working area where the body is discovered, to a criminal's glitzy apartment for the finale.
One problem with the Great Artist treatment Chandler often gets today is that these questions do not get asked. Chandler is considered as a Literary writer, and everything he ever wrote is considered to be a personal artistic expression for him, pure and simple. If The Big Sleep (1939) is incredibly sordid compared with most other American novels, whether literary or mysterious, it must simply be because Chandler wanted it that way.
The Glass Triangle. A later Murdock novel, The Glass Triangle (1940), is much better written. Some of the vignettes dealing with a company of film people are well done, especially in Chapters 1 and 7. An absorbing middle section in the book (Chapters 5 - 13) deals with an attempt by the villains to cover up the crime, and Murdock's effort to counter the same. This section shows Coxe's skill with plot construction and story telling. The man to man relationships that build up between Murdock and the policeman investigating the case, and the suspect Ben Pollard, show Coxe's interest in male bonding. Unfortunately, the story eventually completely unravels into one of those tales in which numerous different suspects all engage in some sinister activity, making the final explanation an endless group of coincidences. Such finales violate Occam's Razor.
The Hollow Needle. The Hollow Needle (1948) has a good opening section (Chapters 1 - 7), which sets up the basic situation of the novel. This section shows inventive storytelling. Kent Murdock develops a friendship with ambiguous tough guy Nick Taylor, in the Coxe tradition of male bonding. The book takes place in that Golden Age staple, the isolated mansion in the country, with the wealthy family and their servants as suspects. It has a more hard-boiled feel than most such tales, however, with various bodyguards and enforcers constantly present. This mixing of hard-boiled and Golden Age approaches is typical of Coxe. The description of Nick Taylor as a "thug in a Brooks suit" epitomizes this mix of the genteel and the hard-boiled. Murdock himself is a combination of a two-fisted newspaperman and a social sophisticate: he is always very well dressed.
The use of science and technology throughout is also typical of Coxe, and forms a fusion with the tale of scientific detection, bringing a third school of mystery fiction into the mix. The hollow needle of the title is a piece of broken glass from a technological device, just like the "glass triangle" of the earlier book.
As in The Glass Triangle, the plot involves criminal schemes to cover up crimes, and Murdock's efforts to uncover them.
The architecture of the house and grounds is elaborately described; different rooms and corridors tend to be associated with different people. The opening has a dream-like feel. We only get glimpses of the various denizens of the house. This makes them seem like characters in a dream.
Murder on Their Minds. Murder on Their Minds (1957) is a Kent Murdock novel from the middle of Coxe's career. It is smoothly written, and much less hard-boiled than Coxe's earlier fiction, although its overall story construction resembles the "pulp style of plotting", with disparate characters interacting to commit the events of the tale. It is at its best in Chapters 1-9, which detail the activities of a plethora of newspaper men, photographers, police and private eyes, all of whom are investigating a number of stories and mysteries. They make a pleasantly interlocking grid of activity. There are some good portrayals here of the male bonding between Murdock and the other characters. It also offers an inside look at the professional approaches of all these characters, including the lives of newspaper photographers.
Coxe includes precise descriptions of the offices and work areas of his heroes. Although simple, these recall the Golden Age tradition of interest in architecture.
The story becomes less interesting in later chapters, when the focus shifts to the suspects in the mystery, and away from the lives of newspaper employees and detectives.
The story shows Coxe's skepticism about guns, and the people who use them. Coxe's heroes instead tend to use technological equipment, such as cameras.
One Minute Past Eight. One Minute Past Eight (1957) is one of the many non-series novels that Coxe wrote throughout his career. Many of these take place in exotic locales; this one is set in Venezuela. The approach recalls Richard Sale tales set in the Caribbean, such as Destination Unknown (1940). The story also involves communication through cables, which recall Helen McCloy's The Goblin Market (1943), another Caribbean mystery. The Hollow Needle states that Joseph Conrad is a favorite writer of Coxe's series detective Kent Murdock. Coxe's own novels set in exotic places follow the Conrad tradition. Conrad, like Coxe, is also a writer who mixes many schools of fiction, using a fusion of eclectic approaches in his writing.
One Minute Past Eight has a well written first half (Chapters 1-9), which offers a nice combination of adventure and mystery. This section also includes some pleasantly mysterious characters, whose background is gradually elucidated. Unfortunately the book runs out of steam here. And the solution to the actual murder mystery, in Chapters 20 and 22, is perfunctory.
The novel mixes hard-boiled and middle class characters, in Coxe's pleasant style. There is an overtone of respectability about everything concerning Coxe's hero, a nice young businessman from Boston, who has something of the same smoothness and decency as Kent Murdock. But the hero also gets innocently mixed up with a whole series of shady or tough characters in his adventures, just as Murdock does in his.
There have been a number of attempts at recreating the hard-boiled style of Black Mask magazine in recent years. The two most successful are Robert Sampson's "Rain in Pinton County" (1986) and Bill Pronzini's "Stacked Deck" (1987). Pronzini's tale duly recreates such devices as not knowing whether the initially villainous-seeming protagonist of the tale is actually something more, a gambit also found in Raymond Chandler's first tale, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot". Both of these tales were clearly written as labors of love, in homage to an era that the authors admire greatly.
What is perhaps paradoxical is that these modern authors are not the first to consciously attempt a pastiche of the Black Mask style. So did many of the writers who appeared for the first time in Mask during 1933-1936, after the first heyday of the magazine had passed. For example, Lester Dent's two stories about Oscar Sail, which appeared in Mask in 1936, are just as much careful, loving imitations of the Black Mask style as are Pronzini or Sampson's stories 50 years later. So, to a degree, are the tales of W.T. Ballard, or the early Mask fiction of Norbert Davis, before he found his own humorous, more screwball style, a style which was probably influenced by the detective farces of Phoebe Atwood Taylor. What makes it even more paradoxical is that some of these works are now considered definitive expressions of the hard-boiled style, for instance, Dent's two Sail stories, which have been much reprinted. I admire Dent's two tales highly - they are superb - but I also think that they are more conscious objets d'art, than straightforward attempts to write fiction in a style natural to Dent. This hardly makes them artistically poorer, but it is good to recognize that despite clichés about a monolithic entity called "pulp fiction", that pulp magazines took part in diverse literary movements, just like any other branch of literature. Captain Joseph Shaw leaving the editorship of Mask in 1937 apparently put an end to attempts to promote a well-defined, hard-boiled Black Mask style. Submissions to the magazine after his editorship often took place in a tough underworld milieu, recalling earlier stories, but otherwise do not seem to ape Black Mask's literary conventions in great detail.