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 | Baynard Kendrick | Glenn Low | George Harmon Coxe | The Hard Boiled Style: Revivals: Dent, Sampson, Pronzini

A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page

Hard Boiled Pioneers

Isaac Babel

"Benya Krik, the Gangster" (1923-1924)

Carroll John Daly

"The False Burton Combs" (1922)

Terry Mack stories

• Three Gun Terry (1923)

Race Williams stories

• Knights of the Open Palm (1923)
• Not My Corpse / Unremembered Murder (1947)

The Snarl of the Beast (1927)

Vee Brown Stories

• The Crime Machine (1932)

Satan Hall stories

• Mr. Sinister (1944)

Black Mask Writers

Lester Dent

Oscar Sail Stories (1936)

• Sail
• Angelfish

Paul Cain

Seven Slayers

• Black (1932)
• Parlor Trick (1932)
• Red 71 (1932)
• Murder in Blue (1933)
• One, Two, Three (1933)
• Pigeon Blood (1933)

"Trouble-Chaser" (1934)

Horace McCoy

Jerry Frost and Hell's Stepsons stories

• Frost Rides Alone (1930)

Raoul Whitfield

Jo Gar's Casebook

• Death in the Pasig (1930)
• Signals of Storm (1930)
• Enough Rope (1930)
• Silence House (1931)
• The Black Sampan (1931)
• The Magician Murder (1932)
• Climbing Death (1932)

Tim Slade stories

• Inside Job (1932)

Forrest Rosaire

Jack McGuire stories

• The Devil Suit (1932)

Reuben Jennings Shay

"Taking His Time" (1931)

Charles G. Booth

Blair stories

• Sister Act (1933)

Willis Todhunter Ballard

Hollywood Troubleshooter (1933-1942)

George Harmon Coxe

Flash Casey, Detective

• Casey - Detective (1935)
• Too Many Women (1936)
• Once Around the Clock (1941)

Uncollected Flash Casey Stories

• Murder Picture (1935)
• Reward For Survivors

The Hollow Needle (1948) (Chapters 1 - 7, 23)

Baynard Kendrick

Captain Duncan Maclain stories

• Silent Night (1958)

Other Hard-Boiled Pulp Writers

Robert Leslie Bellem

Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective (collected 1983)

• Dark Star of Death (1938)
• Homicide Highball (1943)
• Hair of the Dog (1947)

Roscoes in the Night (collected 2003)

• Crooner's Caress (1936)
• Dan Turner Deals an Ace (1944)
• Stock Shot (1944)
• Quickie Kill (1950)
• Action! Camera! - Drop Dead! (1950)

Uncollected Dan Turner stories

• Death's Passport (1940)
• The Lake of the Left-Hand Moon (1943)
• Gun From Gotham / Sleep For a Dreamer (1944)

Monk Graham stories

• Gangster Gloves (1931)

Glenn Low

"The Music Box Murders" (1946)

Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel's tales of Odessa gangdom collected in translation as "Benya Krik, the Gangster", form an interesting contrast with American gangland fiction. Set in the Ukraine in the former Soviet Union, the tales are exactly contemporary with the invention of hard-boiled fiction in the USA by Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett, and form a sort of Soviet parallel. While it is unlikely that either the American or Soviet authors were aware of each others' existence, the stories are oddly similar. Both proceed from an impulse to write serious, even literary, fiction, about the underworld classes of society. Both ooze toughness. Today, critics tend to regard Babel as literature and Hammett as detective fiction, and this obscures their common ground. Babel's tales also remind one of the stories of Argentine low lifes that Borges would go on to write, such as "Streetcorner Man". Borges claimed an influence from the late 1920's gangster films of Josef von Sternberg. Gangster stories were clearly a world wide phenomenon.

Pulp Detective Stories

What are the best achievements of the pulp detective story? First of all, I think pulp stories are best when they are novellas, from 30 to 60 pages in length. This is different from the classical mystery story, which flourished at short story length, 30 pages or less, or full length novels. This could just be an artifact of publishing - pulp magazines paid for far more novellas than the markets for classical mystery fiction. But also it could reflect artistic differences in the genre. The characterizations and atmospheric detail with which pulp stories are so rich help expand their plots to novella length, while the need to sustain a single atmosphere, and the lack of a strong classical plot tended to make the tales hard to sustain to book dimensions.

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 Pulp Style of Plotting

The essential features of this plot construction approach:

• A large number of independent groups, all playing a role in a mysterious situation.
• Every time the reader thinks the story is moving in one direction, another group moves in out of left field with some surprising development. Often times the significance of this plot development is a mystery to the reader, who only sees the surface manifestation of the group's action.
• This keeps up a steady stream of mysterious events, whose underlying causes are only gradually unraveled by the detective.
• The root causes of the events, even the groups perpetrating them, are often very different from what the reader first suspects. Characters that looked like bad guys turn out to be good guys, or at least not deeply villainous.
• The various groups of characters and their actions interlock in ingenious ways. The plot as a whole is like an elaborate, giant jigsaw puzzle, with many pieces contributing to the whole.

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".

Carroll John Daly

Carroll John Daly is the pioneer writer of hard-boiled detective fiction. He is a little bit earlier in time (less than a year) than his fellow Black Mask writer Dashiell Hammett, who he almost certainly influenced. Daly must be considered the father of the tough private eye story.

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).

"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. "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 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":

• There are several disparate groups of characters in "Three Gun Terry": the girl, her uncle, her fiancé, and the various hoods.
• Each one of which is independently trying to achieve some goal, in this case to find a chemical formula.
• When something happens, the reader is unsure which character group is precipitating the action. (It is all eventually explained clearly.)
• Some of the characters tell ingenious lies.
• What is actually going on with each new plot event can be puzzling, and this puzzling element functions, sort of, as the equivalent of a Golden Age story's puzzle plot.

Themes

Many of Carroll John Daly's stories deal with men who are in constant danger of being killed. These detectives are either under contract by a mob leader, who wants them dead, or they are either infiltrating or muscling into a bad guy's stronghold (Daly's favorite plot), or they are having an encounter with a crooked cop, or they just happen to be interrogating someone who is deadly. When not under threats from strongmen themselves, the hero is in turn intimidating bad guys, usually threatening to kill some henchman. The hero often has allies, either women or young men - people who are much frailer and more vulnerable than the hero, courageous, but not someone of his achieved manhood.

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.

Later Short Stories

By contrast, some of Daly's later writing was very thin, resembling the cliché of hacked out pulp writing with violent encounters and very little else. Like most pulp writers, there has been very little actual effort made to unearth and reprint Daly's best works.

"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.

Daly's Early Race Williams Novels: The Snarl of the Beast

Daly's The Snarl of the Beast (1927) is episodic. It was serialized in Black Mask in four parts, and the book falls naturally into a series of episodes:

• The first encounter with the Beast: Chapters 1 - 3;
• The meeting with Daniel Davidson: Chapters 4 - 10;
• The encounter at Race Williams' home: Chapters 10 - 15;
• The events at the lawyer's office: Chapters 16 - 24;
• The interrogations and the solution of the mystery plot: Chapters 25 - 28;
• The final encounter: Chapters 29 - 35.

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.

Dreams and Visions

The lack of mystery makes The Snarl of the Beast very thin throughout. But the book does have a visionary quality. Everything in it is very precisely imagined. The book is like a fever dream. Much of the action takes place at night. The book depends on a stream of strange things that Race Williams sees. This is similar to the procession of imagery in a dream. The way the villain of the story seems to have animal qualities is dream like. So is the way that actions keep getting postponed, such as the unmasking of the heroine, or Williams' constantly delayed plans to get involved in Chapter 7. The pathetically defenseless and cringing Daniel Davidson embodies the naked, powerless selves that we sometimes experience in dreams. So does the strange architecture of Race Williams' house, and all the strange events that keep taking place in it. Such distorting events in one's home are a common feature of dreams. Race Williams keeps encountering policemen in the dark; one can interpret this in all sorts of ways. All the people trying to kill Race Williams also seem similar to the unmotivated menaces and sense of paranoia found in dreams.

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 Hidden Hand

Daly's The Hidden Hand (1928) is at least as much a story sequence as a novel. It appeared as five short stories in Black Mask. Each tale is of novella length, around 50 pages. This is what Black Mask clearly considered as the ideal length for a short story. Each tale has a separate villain.

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:

• "The Hidden Hand": Chapters 1 - 8;
• "Wanted For Murder": Chapters 9 - 16;
• "Rough Stuff": Chapters 17 - 25;
• "The Last Chance": Chapters 26 - 34;
• "The Last Shot": Chapters 35 - 44.

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.

Paul Cain

Black

The Black tales show many signs of influence from Dashiell Hammett:

• The complex roundelay of the characters and their relationships in a story like "Black" (1932) recall such intricate Hammett tales as "Fly Paper"(1929).
• There is the same effect of coming at the mystery plot at such off-angles that the reader is constantly kept off balance.
• The influence is especially strong in the matter of prose style. There is the spare, dispassionate tone, which narrates events in a flat, unemotional manner. The detective is consciously emotionally distanced from everyone around him, just as in Hammett.
• Cain's detective Black gets involved in gang disputes in "Black", and plays both sides against each other, just like the Continental Op in Red Harvest. He is similarly manipulative of everyone around him, often for benign ends, in "Trouble-Chaser". He is arrogantly sure he knows what's best for everybody in that tale.
• Also, like Sam Spade in Hammett's 1932 stories, in "Trouble-Chaser" he is depicted as liking to read, and is quietly proud of his ability to absorb high brow culture, a skill treated in both writers as a sign of mastery.

Symmetry in the Plot

"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.

Druse

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.

Fast One

Screenplays

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.

Horace McCoy

Carroll John Daly shows considerable contempt for social climbing. Both his bad guys and his subsidiary minor characters indulge in this, and Daly holds them up to ridicule, using this feature for comic relief in his tales. The rigidly middle class in his personal life Daly, is a contrast here to such social climbing pulp writer contemporaries of his as Dashiell Hammett and Horace McCoy, both of whom were eager to go up the social ladder. McCoy would go on to be the Hollywood scriptwriter of Gentleman Jim (1942), the Raoul Walsh directed tale of an athlete whose goal it was to crash society, a very charming movie that is virtually autobiographical (McCoy's younger years were spent as an athlete-sports writer who aspired to the upper reaches of Dallas Society). Gentleman Jim is the definitive sympathetic film about social climbing. The scenes where Jim Corbett essays acting on the stage also reflect similar acting experiences in McCoy's own youth.

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.

Forrest Rosaire

The Devil Suit

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.

Nitroglycerin News

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.

Robert Leslie Bellem

Influence from Carroll John Daly

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.

Plot: Links to the Golden Age

"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. "Action! Camera! - Drop Dead!" (1950) contains the "strange hiding place for an object" that is the subject of several EQ puzzle plots. 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.

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.

Architecture and Landscape

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.

Themes

"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.

Other Heroes

Films and Biography

Wooley's introduction to Roscoes in the Night has a lot of useful biographical information on Bellem.

Raoul Whitfield

Raoul Whitfield's best pulp stories, like those of his friend Dashiell Hammett, center around fair play, puzzle plot mysteries. Some of these have ingenious solutions, e.g., "Death in the Pasig" (1930). Whitfield's work shows a consciousness of the whodunit tradition that was flourishing in the detective story outside of the pulps during his era. His novel The Virgin Kills (1932) involves a hybrid of the pulp story and the Golden Age mystery novel.

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.

Jo Gar

About Kid Deth

"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.

Mistral

Sal the Dude

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.

Charles G. Booth

Charles G. Booth was born in Manchester, England, but he moved to L.A. by way of Canada in 1922, and became a Hollywood scriptwriter, as well as a fairly prolific pulp author. Booth was a friend of Lawrence G. Blochman. Booth's story for the spy film The House on 92nd Street (1945) helped to inaugurate a tradition of documentary realism in the post war film, and shows some mild interest in scientific detection. It also won an Oscar for him. He had a success with adventure novels set in the world of modern war and intrigue; the best known is The General Died At Dawn, which was made into a Gary Cooper movie (1936).

Gold Bullets

Sister Act

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.

Murder Strikes Thrice

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 Runyan, 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.

Mr. Angel Comes Aboard

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.

Baynard Kendrick

Kendrick's The Odor of Violets (1940) is a combination spy thriller cum mystery, featuring Kendrick's blind private eye, Captain Duncan Maclain, now working for US intelligence in the early days of World War II.

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.

Characters: Pulp Heroes, Had I But Known women, and Secret Spies

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.

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. 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.

The Pulp Style of Plotting

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.

Glenn Low

Glenn Low published stories in the last era of the pulps, post-1945. "The Music Box Murders" (1946) is a late example of the "pulp style of plotting", in which numerous suspects commit an interlocking series of mysterious actions, which are eventually sorted out and clarified by the tale's end. The tale is notable for being loaded with mysterious situations, always pleasing to mystery readers, although the story often lacks fair play clues to their solution. The hero seems close to the tough G-men of the pre-war era, and the crooks he fights and their kidnapping schemes also seem representative of the 1930's. All in all, this story shows continuity with mystery traditions of an earlier era.

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.

George Harmon Coxe

Coxe's Antecedents

One of Coxe's first crime stories is "Invited Witness" (1933). This little tale recalls Carroll John Daly. Its central character is an officer who has been criticized in the press for shooting too many crooks, just like Daly's trigger happy heroes. The protagonist shares his paranoid ideas about self protection during shoot outs, another Daly specialty. The story is little more than an episode; it sets forth its Daly like philosophy and closes down.

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.

Structure in the Flashgun Casey Stories

Coxe's Black Mask novella "Too Many Women" (1936) shows his personal variation on "the pulp style of plotting". There are a lot of separate groups of more or less crooked people running around in this tale. And sometimes, just as in the "pulp style", the reader is mystified about which group has done some act. But Coxe shows some differences as well. Often times, the big mystery is not who has done some act, but rather just what the identity of the characters are. Coxe introduces many of them earlier as simple faces in a photograph Flashgun Casey takes. We wait for each one to show up in the plot, and later still, for each one to be identified by name and profession. This gives a different feel to the tale. The reader is watching a design being built, watching each person fall into place in that design. Coxe's design here is delightful, and so is its unrolling in the story. There is a Mozartian progression to the tale, with each piece adding to the growing pattern of the story.

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" (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 occurance 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.

Characterization and Relationships

Despite its title, "Too Many Women" is one of the least sexist stories to appear in Black Mask. It gradually accelerating cast of women characters wind up giving as good as they get. Their roles are equal to the men in the tale, something that was uncommon in "the he man magazine". The characterization of both the men and the women is not quite hard-boiled. The policeman Logan is refreshingly sensible and cooperative, and most of the people in the story are resilient and realistic without being nasty.

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.

Kent Murdock

Murder with Pictures. Some of the other Coxe fiction I've read is pretty indifferent, even unpleasant. The first Kent Murdock novel, the uninspired Murder with Pictures (1935), is one of the raciest of all Golden Age novels. The censors must really have been asleep on this one. Like his fellow Black Mask alumni Baynard Kendrick and Raymond Chandler, he seems determined to be as explicit as possible. This is a side of the world that is not really covered by the term "hard-boiled". Black Mask had been much more straight laced than this, at least in regards to male female relationships - the violence level allowed in pulps was another matter. All of this sleaze is in the first hardback books these authors wrote; their pulp stories seem much cleaner, as do their later hardback novels. Was this a reaction to the censorship of the pulps - an expression of freedom when they found hardback book publication? Was the raciness a strategy to get these little known authors published in book form? After all, these three writers were nearly complete unknowns when they made the transition from pulps to books. Was the raciness encouraged for artistic regions, by editors, perhaps? Were all three of these men part of an artistic movement that advocated frankness and naturalism?

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.

Non-Series Books

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.

The Hard Boiled Style: Revivals

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.