Frederick C. Davis | Merle C. Constiner | Frank Gruber | Norbert Davis | Richard Sale | Dale Clark | Robert Reeves | Frederick Nebel | Hugh B. Cave | T.T. Flynn | D. B. McCandless | Julius Long | Theodore Tinsley | Walter Gibson | William E. Barrett | Max Brand

A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page

Hero Pulps

Frederick C. Davis

Moon Man stories

• The Sinister Sphere (1933)
• Mark of the Moon Man (1934)

Bill Brent/Lora Lorne stories

• You Slay Me, Baby (1942)

"Where There's a Will" (1945)

Walter Gibson

Hands in the Dark (1932)

Crime Over Casco (1946)

The Great Gerard stories

• The Florentine Masks (1955)

Lars Anderson

"The Domino Lady Doubles Back" (1936)

Mystery Comedy

Frank Gruber

The Laughing Fox (1940)

The Mighty Blockhead (1941-1942)

The Fourth Letter (1947)

Oliver "The Human Encyclopedia" Quade stories

• Death At The Main (1936)

Sam Cragg stories

• 1000-to-1 for Your Money (1939)

Norbert Davis

The Mouse in the Mountain (1943)

Sally's in the Alley (1943)

The Adventures of Max Latin

• Watch Me Kill You! (1941)
• Don't Give Your Right Name (1941)
• Give the Devil His Due (1942)
• You Can Die Any Day (1942)
• Charity Begins at Homicide (1943)

Mark Hull stories

• Kansas City Flash (1933)

Ben Shaley stories

• The Price of a Dime (1934)

Jim Michaels story

• Public Defender (1936)

Just Plain Jones stories

• Something For the Sweeper (1937)

Dave Bly story

• You'll Die Laughing (1940)

William "Bail Bond" Dodd stories

• Murder in the Red (1940)

Jim Laury story

• Walk Across My Grave (1942)

Merle Constiner

The Compleat Adventures of The Dean (Dean Wardlow Rock and Ben Matthews stories)

• Strangler's Kill (1940)
• You're in My Way (1940)
• They'll Kill Again (1941)
• The Riddle of the Phantom Mummy (1942)
• Mr. Bettleman's Blisters (1942)
• The Riddle of the Shackled Butler (1943)
• The Riddle of the Monster Bat (1943)
• The Arm of Mother Manzoli (1944)
• The Affair of the Four Skeletons (1944)
• The Affair of the Bedridden Pickpocket (1945)

Luther McGavock stories

• The Turkey Buzzard Blues (1943)

Kincaid stories

• Last Page of the Hangman's Diary (1945)

Short-Trigger Man (1964)

The Four from Gila Bend (1968)

Dale Clark

Doc Walter Judson and Brady stories

• The Sting of the Hornet (1940)

Steve Harrigan stories

• You're Killing Me (1943)

Highland Park Price and Beulah Randy stories

• Slay, Fido, Slay (1944)

Munro stories

• Crime Lesson (1948)

"Smoke Sign" (1941)

D. B. McCandless

Sarah Watson stories

• He Got What He Asked For (1937)

Richard Sale

Destination Unknown (1940)

Murder at Midnight

• Cape Spectre (1941)
• Murder at Midnight (1945)

Daffy Dill stories

• Death Flies High (1943)

"Active Duty" (around 1943)

Robert Reeves

Firpo Cole story

• Dance Macabre (1941)

Series Detectives

Frederick Nebel

The Adventures of Cardigan

• Spades Are Spades (1934)
• Hot Spot (1934)
• Kick Back (1934)
• Hell Couldn't Stop Him (1935)

Uncollected Cardigan Stories

• Hell's Pay Check (1931)
• Murder by Mail (1936)

Dick Donahue Stories

• Rough Justice (1930)
• Ghost of a Chance (1935)

T. T. Flynn

Mike Harris and Trixie Meehan Stories

• The Deadly Orchid (1933)
• The Letters and the Law (1936)

Hugh B. Cave

Bottled in Blonde (Peter Kane stories)

• The Screaming Phantom (1935)
• Brand of Kane (1935)
• Ding Dong Belle (1941)
• No Place to Hide (1942)

Long Live the Dead

• Dead Dog (1937)
• Stranger in Town (1941)

Mark Lane stories

• The Lady Who Left Her Coffin (1936)

Richard Simms stories

• Headstone For a Heel (1942)

"The Course of Justice" (1964)

"Naked in Darkness" (1965)

William E. Barrett

Dean Culver/The Blue Barrel stories

• A Man's Last Hours (1936)

Theodore Tinsley

The Scarlet Ace stories

• The Scarlet Ace (1933)

Carrie Cashin stories

• Riddle in Silk (1938)

"A Hand of Pinochle" (1936)

Julius Long

Ben Corbett stories

• Carnie Kill (1945)

General Pulp Writers

Frank King

"Death on the 8:45" (1929)

Joseph Fulling Fishman

Old Calamity stories

• Old Calamity's Stickup (1934)

Max Brand

David Clovelly stories

• Nine Parts Devil (1934)

Secret Agent Number One

• The Strange Villa (1935)

"Wine on the Desert" (1936)

The pulp magazines were full of series detectives, detectives who appeared in story after short story. These detectives were reader favorites, and often had careers that spanned a decade and dozens of tales. Most of their adventures had a light hearted side, with pleasant elements of escapism and excitement. The best of these tales, such as the ones listed above, are still very enjoyable reading. It is hoped that many more of them will be reprinted, in both anthologies and single author collections.

Frederick C. Davis

Frederick C. Davis was a prolific pulp writer. Two of his best known series today deal with young men who have dual identities, and all the trouble they get into over this. One series deals with a police officer who doubles as, the rob from the rich and give to the poor, Moon Man. And the Bill Brent stories deal with a young newspaperman who writes an advice to the lovelorn column under a female pseudonym. The Moon Man tales are well written stories of a noble thief and his struggles to preserve his secret identity. They remind me to a great degree of the comic book heroes of the 1960's and their own struggles with their secret identity. Although the Moon Man has no super powers, nor even lots of high tech gadgets à la Batman, he is costumed, including a cape, no less. The Moon Man also seems much closer in tone to the superheroes of the comic books than are other pulp heroes of the thirties, such as the Shadow or Doc Savage, even though both of these characters are often cited as ancestors of Superman, Batman and the rest. In his everyday identity as a 25 year old police Sergeant, the Moon Man is just an ordinary young man, without much in the way of resources or allies. He has a relatively realistic life, too, with colleagues, a fiancee, and a family. All of these characters play a major role in the series. The Shadow, by contrast, is a millionaire with a vast team of assistants, no regular job or personal contacts outside of his team, and a very vague personal life. He lives at the center of a vast crime fighting apparatus, one dedicated to terrorizing the entire underworld. The Moon Man's personal life seems much closer to Clark Kent's than does The Shadow's. The Moon Man's fiancee Sue McEwen is also a young woman eager to be a detective, and a full fledged amateur female sleuth in the Nancy Drew - Amelia Butterworth tradition. Her character reminds one a lot of Lois Lane, who was also a gutsy young woman always trying to unravel mysteries. She is fascinated by the Moon Man, and already in the first story she is trying to figure out who lies behind his mask. Shades of Lois Lane!

Davis hardly invented the hero with a secret identity; Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel is often cited as the first, with Johnston McCulley's Zorro another important pre-pulp precursor. Orczy emphasized ingenious plots to preserve her hero's secret identity; this feature is also central to Davis. Above all, Davis' work seems modeled on Frank L. Packard's tales of Jimmie Dale, also known as The Gray Seal. (A bit of trivia: the one way glass known as Argus glass used by the Moon Man for his helmet echoes the name of the newspaper in the Jimmie Dale series, The Morning News-Argus.) Davis preserves the anti-authoritarian aspect of his hero's activities, established by these writers, as well. But Davis' work does set the hero among a relatively normal, modern setting, and with well detailed personal life.

The one Bill Brent tale I have been able to read is very different; it is a complexly plotted piece in full pulp style. This excellent story startles a reader familiar only with the Moon Man tales, because 1) it is a genuine mystery story, unlike the more adventure oriented Moon Man tales; and 2) it is much closer to the sort of mysteries being written in the same era by Lawrence Blochman, Nebel, Constiner and other exponents of the tale of "Mystery and Adventure". The scenes in the newspaper office at night even recall similar scenes in Blochman's novel Bengal Fire (1937). It does have the same wholesome atmosphere as Davis' other work - it is definitely not hard-boiled - and it does share Davis' idealistic concerns about helping other people.

"Where There's a Will, There's a Slay" was published in Maxim Jakubowski's anthology, The Mammoth Book of Pulp Action (2001); its source was a 1953 pulp. However, the story clearly takes place near the end of World War II in 1945, and the 1953 appearance is probably a reprint from an earlier source. It is likely that it is the same story as "Where There's a Will" (1945), which appeared in Dime Detective (Volume 47, #3, February 1945). In any case, it is a lively novella with a complex plot. The story is a pure murder mystery, and one without series detectives. The tale is not quite fair play: Davis keeps introducing new plot ideas, that are not logically predictable from earlier clues. Still, it is inventive. The story shares features with other Davis mysteries. 1) Davis gradually builds up a complex and surprising set of relationships among his large cast of suspects. Many of them turn out to have family ties to each other. This is in addition to their business relationships. This makes their interactions complex, and often over-determined: someone will have both business and a family relationship. This recalls the Moon Man tales, where the hero is both on the police force with the other characters, and a member of the same family. Such a plot construction gives Davis' stories a unique, highly personal feel. 2) Also in Davis tradition: the complex, ambiguous relations of the police to each other, and to society. Here we are in a crooked town, one ruled by municipal corruption. One never knows which side of the law any policeman is on, or how they relate to each other. This recalls the hero of the Moon Man tales - in his secret identity he is a policeman, one who works both with and against the other police. These police relationships are added to the complex pattern of business and family relationships in the rest of the story. 3) The story also features the complex but pleasant relations between the hero and heroine seen in the Moon Man tales. Oftentimes, one or more member of the pair is up to secretive, mysterious activities, thus complicating the relationship. 4) The nocturnal atmosphere also recalls the Bill Brent tale, "You Slay Me, Baby" (1942). Davis likes to set his works in business offices of the characters, nearly deserted at night. Sinister people are often prowling around these lonely offices, menacing the hero and his friends, who are working late.

Merle C. Constiner

Merle C. Constiner's extravagant humor and ingenious plots surprises are greatly appreciated. There is something especially cheery and upbeat about Constiner's work. It makes you feel good.

Peter Ruber has published a biographical article on Constiner for the on-line journal Pulp Rack, The Hunt for Merle Constiner, and a bibliography of his stories.:

The Dean

Constiner wrote a series of pulp stories about sleuth Wardlow Rock, known as "The Dean", and Benton "Ben" Matthews, his Watson-like narrator and assistant. These have been collected in one volume, The Compleat Adventures of The Dean (2004), edited by Robert Weinberg. The 19 tales appeared in the pulp Dime Detective (1940 - 1945). The stories take place in a comic version of a hard-boiled world, and both heroes are good at shoot-outs and other typical pulp action scenes. But the Dean is also a Sherlock Holmes-like genius detective, with a vast Holmes-like fund of specialized knowledge. Like Holmes, the Dean is a consulting detective, who lives and works in a rooming house presided over by a respectable landlady: here Mrs. Duffy. Just as Holmes is sometimes consulted by a hostile but admiring policeman, Inspector Lestrade, so does the Dean have a rivalry with an honest policeman, Lieutenant Mallory, who reluctantly consults him on the most baffling and bizarre incidents encountered by the police.

The stories also sometimes echo Rex Stout. Ben Matthews is a slum kid, while the Dean is a genius, a bit like how tough guy Archie Goodwin works for super-sleuth Nero Wolfe. The Dean spends a lot of time on non-commercial, intellectual hobbies, in the same way the Wolfe is devoted to orchids and gourmet food. The Dean sometimes sulks and takes it out on Ben, like Nero and Archie, and both teams do a lot of angling to collect big fees from rich clients. However, the well-developed, actual personalities of the Dean and Ben are very different from Nero and Archie; the Dean is not an armchair detective, like Wolfe, but goes everywhere; the Dean is a mature, dynamic acting if eccentric person, and not a big baby like Wolfe who has to be cajoled; and the raffish milieu is far from Stout's upper-middle class New York. The bacon, eggs and flapjack breakfasts frequently described in the stories also seem a world away from Stout's gourmet meals.

The pilot Dean story "Strangler's Kill" (1940) is especially well done. All the pieces of the plot come together superbly well. Today, with a title like that you would expect a horror story, but in the days of the pulps the titles were far more lurid than the actual tales themselves; one suspects that many of them were created by the magazines' editors, not the authors. It is actually a good natured, G-rated detective story. I would love to see a lot more of his work reprinted. In some other of his tales, the clues are eccentric and interesting, but the solutions tend to be a bit on the far fetched and illogical side. So far, all the Constiner tales available do have elaborate puzzle plot narratives, and point out once again how common this was in the best pulp magazine writers.

"They'll Kill Again" (1941) explicitly discusses in its dialogue some of the story construction approaches of the Dean stories. Near the beginning of the tale, Ben points out that there are four separate, seemingly unrelated subplots all going on. The Dean replies that no, all four are facets of the same over-all crime mystery - but he does not explain how. Much of the rest of the story is an attempt to establish connections between the various plots. The Dean's classic remark (section Chapter 4), when he refuses to listen to Banker Vaughn's suggestion, is a delirious reflection of this situation.

The "merger of different subplots" construction of the Dean tales is partly related to, and partly different from, the "pulp style of plotting". In the "pulp style", which was pioneered by Carroll John Daly, there are so many characters in the story, each pursing independent courses of action, that much of the mystery is trying to untangle which of them performed each new mysterious event in the tale. One gets some of that in Constiner's Dean stories. As the different subplots are sewn together, one often learns that mysterious actions are related to a character one would not initially suspect. This recalls the "pulp style". However, in the classic "pulp style" tales of Daly, Erle Stanley Gardner and their followers, all the actions are part of one large complex interacting network. By contrast, Constiner's Dean tales seem constructed more of discrete subplot pieces, all somehow unified together.

The Subplots

Constiner uses a number of story telling paradigms to create his subplots. These run through several of the Dean tales.

The Dean offers encounters mysterious words or phrases in the course of the investigation. These obscure words turn out to be part of some craft, science or lore. The Dean will eventually consult experts in this field, who explain the surprising meaning of these phrases. This in turn will add another piece to the growing plot mosaic of the story.

The con games of cheap grifters also create mysteries. The subplot will start with the Dean and Ben encountering some small, often bizarre or surreal trace of some con activity. This can be some oddball mechanical device used in its commission. Or the strange behavior of some minor character. Eventually, the Dean or Ben will deduce that this device or behavior is part of some larger con scheme. Constiner usually suggests that these are ancient, long established con games, tricks widely known in the underworld. However, all of these schemes seem little known. At least to me: they always take me by surprise. Formally, these strange bits of business leading to larger con schemes are similar to the use of strange phrases by Constiner. In each, and odd, obscure, and hard to explain story element turns out to be part of some organized body of knowledge, whether a respectable craft, as the odd phrases do, or an underworld con scheme. After the explanation of this mini-mystery, which takes place right in the middle of the tale, instead of waiting for the end, the activity thus revealed becomes in turn part of the overall plot of the story.

There are several types of buildings encountered repeatedly in the Dean tales: 1) Mansions of the rich. These tend to have odd-ball aspects, and to be loaded with pretension. 2) Isolated shacks, often run by bad guys. These shacks tend to turn out to be workshops, in which the bad guys carry on strange crafts and professions. They tend to be full of specialized tools. 3) Run down office buildings. 4) Cheap apartment houses, with strange superintendents or eccentric landladies. This gives Constiner a chance for a double dose of bizarrie: first the Dean encounters the superintendent or landlady, then the actual suspect he has come to interview. 5) Cheap restaurants or bars, often hangouts of the underworld. These have a similar double whammy: first the Dean or Ben meets their eccentric proprietor or bartender, then the suspect who is one of the customers. Ben often enters such bars on his own - Ben is a product of the city's tenderloin, and he is often the sleuth who investigates low-lifes in the tales. 6) Underground architectural structures, such as wells, that are in the back grounds of residential buildings. These are often spooky places, and have a unique architecture and purpose that is discussed in the tale. 7) Outbuildings of mansions of every type: garages with chauffeurs' apartments above, gate-houses, tool shacks, boat houses, stables. 8) Cellars and attics. These can have strange architecture, and be half-finished, compared to the office buildings or mansions that contain them.

The Dean's own landlady, Mrs. Duffy, sometimes entertains the Dean's clients while he is out of the office. She always winds up developing some off trail approach to said hosting. She also solves subplots in the mystery, which the Dean puts to her in abstract form.

Constiner likes strange-themed parties. These seem to be a 1940's specialty. People seemed to like official hospitality in this era, and create all sorts of planned get togethers. Similar parties sometimes turn up in comic books, which often focused on such get togethers for their plots.

There are a lot of off-trail locales in which the bad guys have secretly buried bodies. Strange poisons play a role in the tales, with unusual symptoms. Wills and complex chains of inheritance also are common. All three are the common coin of much mystery fiction. But they also recall the work of R. Austin Freeman, as do the tales' emphasis on skilled craftsmanship and ancient lore. A plot twist early in "The Riddle of the Monster Bat" (1943) recalls ideas in Freeman's "The Naturalist at Law".

The Dean and Ben are always tracking down characters, who have been mentioned, but not yet seen on stage by the detectives or the reader. Sometimes this is a simple matter of looking them up in the phone book; other times it is a huge search that becomes a major element of mystery plotting, with an ingenious surprise when the character's locale is finally revealed. The characters often wind up living in some strange, colorful home, which is described in detail. There are dozens of such locales in the story, all eccentric, all vividly set forth. The characters come from a huge range of backgrounds, from the very rich to the very poor, with every sort of working class background thrown in. Many characters do not have much money, and the tales show how poor everyone was at the end of the Depression. The rich characters have far less "class" than they often do in 1940's non-pulp mysteries, lacking the sophistication and pretension of those of the Van Dine school, the HIBK writers, or British country house whodunits. The rich characters often have mean streaks, and an addiction to night clubs, drink and dissolution. In addition to the respectable characters, rich, working class or poor, there are also an endless parade of con men, mob hit men and crooks. These tend not to be the mysterious murderer behind the puzzle plot. Instead, they add color and complexity to the plotting, as well as the action scenes that were de rigeur in the pulps.

The Dean and Ben live in a run down rooming house on the edge of the slums; they share three rooms, which double as their office, and never seem to have any money or consumer goods, and do not own a car. They seem like a portrait of the desperate financial state of middle America in the late Depression, themselves. While they always make a big bucks fee at the end of the story, their financial lot never improves in the next tale. One suspects that the big-money finish is designed to give the working class readers of the pulps a fantasy thrill. The Dean could be a portrait of an intellectually trained man with no job opportunities in the Depression, reduced to struggling to get by on his wits, and the tales make clear that Ben was at the end of his rope before he was "rescued" by the Dean and made his assistant.

Non-series Stories

"Last Page of the Hangman's Diary" (1945) is the only tale about a sleuth named Kincaid, and Constiner's only piece for Ten Detective Aces. The story appeared as the Dean tales were coming to an end, and the tale strongly resembles the Dean outings. We have a mansion with some interesting and unusual architectural features that play a role in the plot: both a Golden Age specialty, and a recurrent feature of the Dean stories. There is also the rural cabin deep in an isolated recreational area, a number of eccentric suspects who range from rich to poor, clues in the form of arcane words and phrases, a complex back history for the characters involving wills and inheritance, an inside look at a racket (here stealing and fencing rare books), and a pure puzzle plot approach topped off with very occasional action scenes, including a final shoot-out: all features known (and loved) in the Dean series. "Last Page of the Hangman's Diary" is not as long as the Dean stories (most of which are fifty page novellas), and Kincaid is a solitary sleuth without a Watson or as many hobbies as the Dean (although his fondness for photos of caves perhaps ties in with all the underground structures in Constiner). His personality comes across: bemused, ironic, sensitive to the slightest nuance, not easily deceived. He has a restaurant-based office, like Norbert Davis' Max Latin, and a little bit of Davis' humor clings to the detective's characterization.

"Last Page of the Hangman's Diary" shows an interesting construction, joining together its subplot mysteries. Once a subplot mystery's solution is explained, it in turn leads to a second mystery. These second mysteries, as a group, all revolve around one central mystery - their explanations all form pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, involving one central riddle. This "two level deep" construction shows considerable formal beauty, and requires plotting skill. To give a concrete example, what and who are causing the hangman noises, and why? Once we learn the answer to this, the answer serves as clue in a new central puzzle. And what is the truth about the enigmatic "Dog's-Tooth Bond" the old man wanted investigated? When the truth about this is revealed, it too serves as a clue in another mystery: the same mystery for which the hangman noises solution became a clue. Not only is this two levels deep structure ingenious in itself. It serves to unify all the apparently completely unrelated subplots into a central mystery. Some other mystery subplots in the story (but not all of them) also take part in this grand design.

The name of the detective Kincaid, recalls Hake Talbot's sleuth Rogen Kincaid, who appeared in Hangman's Handyman (1942), a novel with a similar title to Constiner's story. Despite this, I cannot see much similarity between the two authors.

"Black of the Moon" (1946) is the only appearance of detective Lew Crockett. One wonders if this started out life as a Luther McGavock tale, and if Constiner changed the lead to sell it to a different pulp, Mammoth Detective. The names of the two sleuths are similar, and both travel to small Southern towns. Lew Crockett runs some small con games himself, but they are always to advance his detective work, never to make money. The overall detective plot does not cohere, with logical flaws in the plot. But some of the subplots are nice, and the story is pleasant reading. I especially liked the strange woman Crockett meets, and the subplot about the tool shed. The title refers to an odd back woods superstition, part of Constiner's ongoing interest in old lore - all of which he always debunks.

Constiner and T. S. Stribling

Merle Constiner's pulp mystery tales seem oddly similar in many ways to those of T.S. Stribling, although it is hard to see how they could have been too familiar with each other's work. (Neither one's detective work appeared much in book form, being largely confined to magazines.) Constiner's detective Dean Wardlow Rock resembles Dr. Poggioli, in being an erudite, eccentric scholar hired to work among the police and criminals. Both are bright, both can be flaky, and both are figures of humor, both admired and mocked by their authors. Ben Matthews, the Dean's Watson and narrator, is a down to Earth kind of guy, and sometimes seems very similar in tone to the narrator of Poggioli's later, post 1945 stories. As we said before, Constiner's first story about the Dean, "Strangler's Kill", is one of his best.

A second similarity is the nature of the characters both authors' detectives encounter. These characters are very eccentric, and many of them are engaged in mysterious enterprises, activities that are distinctly off beat and off center. In both authors, the exact nature of these enterprises is often initially not made clear. Figuring out exactly what the characters are up to is one of the principal tasks of the detective, in fact. The detective is aided in this search by clues these enterprises leave behind, clues that are often distinctly bizarre, to the point of surrealism.

A third similarity of the two authors is their focus on the humorous eccentricities of Southern Life. The Dean stories take place in an unnamed town, but one which is hot and muggy, and which has commercial ties with New Orleans in some of the tales. It could well be a fairly Southern city, perhaps in Kentucky or Tennessee. Constiner's other series detective, Luther McGavock, often visited small Southern towns, the same as Poggioli. McGavock appeared in Black Mask, just as the Dean stories ran in Dime Detective.

The Late Constiner Mystery-Westerns

Constiner did not write only for the pulps. Early in his career his short story "Big Singing" (Household Magazine, January 1932) was nominated for an O. Henry Award. After the pulps died in the early 1950's, Constiner published some stories in slick magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post, then began publishing paperback Western novels under his own name. Correspondents tell me that some of the books published by "Tom West" were also by Constiner, although I have been unable to verify this from independent sources. The Constiner Westerns include: Last Stand at Anvil Pass (1957), The Fourth Gunman (1958) published as a "double" with Slick on the Draw (1958) by Tom West, The Cactus Kid (1959) by Tom West, Short-Trigger Man (1964), Guns at Q Cross (1965) published as a "double" with The Toughest Gun in the Territory (1965) by Tom West, The Action at Redstone Creek (1965), Wolf on Horseback (1965) published as a "double" with Bushwack Brand (1965) by Tom West, Outrage at Bearskin Forks (1966), Rain of Fire (1966) published as a "double" with Bitter Brand (1966) by Tom West, Top Gun from the Dakotas (1966) published as a "double" with Rattesnake Range (1966) by Tom West, Two Pistols South of Deadwood (1967), The Four from Gila Bend (1968), Killers' Corral (1968), The Man Who Shot "The Kid" (1969), Death Waits at Dakins Station (1970), Steel-Jacket (1972). He also wrote novels, mainly about the American Revolutionary War, for young people, including Meet Me at the Merry Fifer (1966), The Rebel Courier and the Redcoats (1968) and Sumatra Alley (1971). Many of these books are quite short, from 100 to 130 pages, and are perhaps more long novellas than novels, strictly speaking. They are refreshingly unpadded by modern day standards. Some of these novels are fascinating combinations of the Mystery and Western fiction. However, not all of Constiner's Westerns are deeply mystery oriented. The Cactus Kid (1959) by "Tom West" has a murder mystery, but it is a minor element in a unmemorable Western dealing with violent confrontations (although the encounter with the nesters at the start of Chapter 8 is good).This book, like the other "Tom West" tales, may or may not be by Constiner. Death Waits at Dakins Station (1970) is much better written, but it has little mystery, strictly speaking.

Short-Trigger Man. Constiner's Short-Trigger Man (1964) is a Western novel, but it has many elements in common with mystery fiction. The tale opens with the hero innocently mixed up in a murder case; he spends most of the story trying to track down the killers and discover the sinister facts behind the killing. Much of the first half or more (Chapters 1 - 8) strongly resembles a detective novel, with the hero interviewing suspects and tracking down information; the second half has more pure elements of Western adventure. The hero, a retired gunslinger or "short-trigger man", can be seen as the Western equivalent of a modern day private eye, although the analogy is far from exact. Both spend much time investigating crimes among scenes of danger. His initial involvement in the crime stems from a failed mission that blows up in his face, just like the way many private eyes become enmeshed in their cases. The story differs from most mystery fiction in that the villains are identified early on, and the story has no whodunit aspects.

Unlike modern writers who mix mystery and Western fiction, such as Bill Pronzini and Edward D. Hoch, Constiner does not emphasize the fact that he is combining genres. He follows many conventions of detective fiction, but never explicitly calls attention to this. One suspects that his publishers or his readers or both simply wanted a Western, and Constiner was incorporating mystery elements as part of his own writing approach.

Constiner is good at vivid details of daily life. He has elaborate descriptions of food in the old West, and buildings, as well a nature and the clothes people wear. This gives the tale a vivid, "you are there" quality. The tale is much less surreal than some of Constiner's 1940's pulp stories. It shows good storytelling. Constiner often emphasizes mysteries of character. We first meet someone, and both his hero and the reader wonder what they are really like. Gradually, we find out in the novel.

The fine cover painting (perhaps by Jack Gaughan - the inside illustration is signed with his "JG" logo) of the original paperback publication of Short-Trigger Man shows two cowboys riding the same horse; the cover blurb states: "Share my horse, share my fate!" The only trouble with this is that no such scene occurs anywhere in the novel. This is a classic mix-up.

I suspect that Short-Trigger Man has many autobiographical elements. Not in a literal sense, but it conveying the feel of the author's life: what Andrew Sarris calls a "stream of emotional autobiography". Constiner's hero Watts Denning has many skills, some of which he uses professionally, some personally. He is a former gunman, now a professional barman. He is also an expert horseman, rider, cattleman, bookkeeper, student of human nature, and sleuth. All of these skills are poetic expressions of Constiner's own artistic gifts. Constiner had spent his life writing: it was a life devoted to art. Constiner's fiction had appeared in cheap outlets devoted to entertainment - pulp magazines and paperback original Westerns. This is similar to Watts' work as a barman in cheap but agreeable dives. Watts has no permanent home - he wanders from bar to bar to get work. Similarly, Constiner had found no permanent platform in publishing. Neither man minded this - both just accepted this as part of the nature of things, and enjoyed the variety of experiences, instead. The profession of barman is similar to Constiner's own: both serve up pleasant concoctions to the public. By the way, Short-Trigger Man does not emphasize alcohol; Watts often serves up a wide variety of non-alcoholic drinks to his Western patrons, as well as himself. He is as much a restaurateur, serving up beverages to accompany food, as what we today think of a barman. Watts' skills as a sleuth represent Constiner's ability to construct mystery plots; Watts' gunman abilities stand for Constiner's ability to write about violence, always a necessity in the world of pulp.

The working class environment of Short-Trigger Man also reflects Constiner's own life. My correspondents tell me that Constiner was a kindly man who spent his last years writing in a room in the back of the small house in Monroe, Ohio where his wife ran a nursery school. The room was decorated with the covers of Constiner's Western paperbacks. This is somewhat similar to the existence of Watts Denning, and most of his friends. Watts will wind up with a cot in a back room of whatever bar he is working, and enough food to eat. The other good characters in Short-Trigger Man lead similar lives. One holes up in the back of a burned out building. The sheriff and his wife have rooms above the courthouse; a friend owns and lives in a cheap bar on the wrong side of the rail road tracks, which he never crosses: he is uncomfortable on the fancy side of town. All of this is presented as typical existence in a small frontier town in the old West. But it also reflects the life of Constiner. Constiner should be compared to Mondrian, the great abstract painter who also devoted his life to his art. Mondrian never had more than a one room dwelling which served him as both a studio and as a bedroom. This is part of the price for what these men did. All in all, Short-Trigger Man is a poetic testament, telling us about Constiner's life and art.

The Four from Gila Bend. The Four from Gila Bend (1968) does have a puzzle plot. Its construction is the reverse of Short-Trigger Man. The first half of this book emphasizes Western adventure, the second half concentrates more on the mystery puzzle plot. The puzzle plot has pleasant appeal, although it is not clear that it is "fair play": that Constiner gives the reader all the clues needed to deduce the solution.

Its location is the opposite of Short-Trigger Man. That book took place in the far North of the United States, near the Canadian border in Montana, while The Four from Gila Bend takes place in Arizona, in the far South near the Mexican border. Both novels are in arid, barren, near desert locations, as is The Cactus Kid (1959). Constiner has a flair for describing such locations. They often have a poetic quality. They seem to give consolation to Constiner's heroes, and mirror their emotional states. Constiner discovers plenty of variety in these desert locales: they are rich and complex environments. The slow journeys his heroes take through these landscapes are often high points of the novels.

The Four from Gila Bend shows signs of its era, in its discussion of subjects that might have been taboo in an earlier time. One of the women in the book is in a common-law marriage, and the subject gets an airing that seems to reflect the hippie generation of the period. The book has quite a few sympathetic woman characters, most of whom are strong willed and gutsy, as well as being extremely down to earth and unrefined. This perhaps echoes the women's lib movement of the time. There is an anti-authoritarian attitude running through many of the characters and the book, with one of the sheriffs in the tale the subject of much satire. This too reflects the hippie era, and its skepticism about the fuzz. The hero of the book is a sheriff, so the book is hardly anti-police.

Women in the book tend to own property, and run land, while men tend to be in charge of businesses or professions. Villains in Constiner Westerns tend to be rich men with large business empires. They tend to be up to complex criminal schemes that result in murder. His good guys tend to be fast-drawing Western heroes. Often times, a female relative of the first victim plays a major role in the plot.

Frank Gruber

Frank Gruber's detectives tend to be small time businessmen, whose work is humorously presented. Oliver Quade is an encyclopedia salesman, where Sam Cragg is a skip tracer. Both men horn their way into public events, where they proceed to ply their trades, using little more than brass effrontery and gumption. The villains in Gruber's stories tend to be swindlers, often making big bucks, but having a bit of a low life, small potatoes feel still clinging to them. On the sidelines in Gruber's stories are a series of millionaires, who live in big mansions in the suburbs of New York City. These men usually turn out to be nice guys, and nearly regular fellows. They seem to be wish fulfillment fantasies on the part of the author, how he would live if he had really big bucks. They tend to be interested in hobbies or collectibles, an interest that often kicks the story off.

Gruber's work has much in common with Norbert Davis' in tone. Both mix comedy with detection. Both often put their hero in physical jeopardy. Davis' Bail Bondsman Dodd is also a two bit small businessman, whose work brings him in contact with the public. Both writers have a penchant for Amazonian women, whose skills with violence and beating up men are depicted as both comic and scary. It is hard to tell which of the authors influenced the other. The Gruber stories reprinted today are a bit earlier than Davis', but this could just be an artifact of publishing. Gruber's tone is more wholesome and less "sick" than Davis'.

Another writer who Gruber seems to have influenced is Craig Rice, especially in her stories about traveling photographers Bingo Riggs and Handsome Kusak. Handsome has a photographic memory, similar to Gruber's Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia. Rice's characters are small time street businessmen, just like Gruber's. Sam Cragg teamed up with Johnny Fletcher, the two selling books door to door in a series of 1940's Gruber mystery novels. Craig Rice's characters are a duo, just like Gruber's. If Handsome has a perfect memory, his publishers do not: his name is spelled Kuzak in The Sunday Pigeon Murders (1942), and Kusak in The Thursday Turkey Murders (1943), at least in the paperback editions.

Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg

Gruber wrote fourteen novels about the detective team of Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg.

The French Key. The first is The French Key (1940). It shows some charm in its storytelling, and in its low life detectives. Like other Gruber characters, they are on the borderline between regular businessmen, and small time hustlers or con-men. Some of Johnny Fletcher's con-man-like schemes recall similar clever gambits in Erle Stanley Gardner's fiction: I liked the encounter with the used car salesman (start of Chapter 16) and his pleasing trick to get all the suspects together for the denouement (middle of Chapter 18). The latter shows a genuine sense of style, and would make a good movie scene. But the solution of its mystery plot is poor, lacking both ingenuity, and any clues that would let anyone deduce the murderer.

The Laughing Fox. The Laughing Fox (1940) is the second Fletcher-Cragg novel, with a much better puzzle plot. It is a genuine mystery story, with an opening murder, detective work, and a number of mystery subplots. The Laughing Fox has a solution that surprised me. It has a Background of commercially raising foxes for fur, and exhibiting the animals at fairs. This recalls the poultry background of "Death at the Main". The Background is detailed and interesting, but it never winds up having much to do with the actual mystery plot.

The Laughing Fox looks at the lives of people in the Depression, and how talent does not seem to lead to success. This is interesting, mainstream fiction material.

Both The French Key and The Laughing Fox have characters who live in cheap hotels; these will also show up in Gruber's non-series novel, The Fourth Letter. These characters eat most of their meals in restaurants, and lead an almost transient life-style. Gruber goes into much satiric detail about this way of living. Many of the characters are traveling salesmen, and make their living on the road.

The puzzle plots and plot surprises in The Laughing Fox and The Mighty Blockhead deal with making connections between past and present. In both, it is hard to connect up past and present characters. And secrets and events in the past also have surprising links to current plot events. This sort of mystery plotting is interesting and creative. However, it has no links to the tradition of impossible crimes, ingenious alibis, hidden objects, mysterious murder methods and other "clever uses of a physical situation" puzzle plots, so often found in intuitionist puzzle plot mystery authors. It is a different kind of plotting.

The Mighty Blockhead. The Mighty Blockhead (1941-1942) is the seventh Johnny Fletcher-Sam Cragg novel. It offers a Background of an inside look at the fledgling comic book industry. American comic books had started in the early 1930's as a minor curiosity. The first Superman story (1938) changed comic books into a national craze, and huge commercial industry. Much of this industry was run by crooks who exploited the creative writers and artists. Gruber is well aware of this. In fact, his jaundiced, scathing and satirical treatment of the industry is the most knowing until such modern exposes as Gerard Jones' Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (2005). Artists continued to be naive in their dealings with crooked publishers for decades after The Mighty Blockhead appeared in 1942. In fact, in hindsight they would have been better off if they had read Gruber's novel, and taken its lessons to heart. Although The Mighty Blockhead eventually appeared in paperback, it seems to have been a relatively little known novel. It is not mentioned much by comic book historians, or for that matter, mystery experts.

The Van Dine school novelists of the Golden Age offered inside looks at New York City's intelligentsia, including Jerry North, the glamorous publisher-turned-amateur-sleuth in the novels of Frances and Richard Lockridge. Gruber also focuses on the publishing industry, in such mysteries as The Mighty Blockhead and the non-series The Fourth Letter. But Gruber's books target the lower depths of the publishing industry, not the prestigious, upscale literati featured by the Lockridges. Gruber had worked as an editor of a trade journal, and seems to have known the dark side of the publishing industry well. His books form an observant record of a creative but financially exploitative era of American cultural history.

The Mighty Blockhead shows good storytelling. Gruber keeps thickening the plot, adding new characters, situations and publishing industry detail to the story, in chapter after chapter. He pulls off a pair of decent mystery plot surprises along the way (see Chapter 8, and the start of Chapter 18). Unfortunately, there is nothing clever about the solution at the end of the novel. It is arbitrary, short, and does not offer a good explanation of why the corpse keeps getting moved around in the opening chapters.

The Mighty Blockhead resembles other Gruber novels, in that it offers retrospective looks back at the lives of its characters, and takes a side trip to the Midwest (here, Iowa).

Non-Series Works

Death on Post #7. Gruber's novella "Death on Post #7" (1941) is set on an Army base. The story gives a vivid inside look at daily life in the Army of that time, just before the entrance of America into World War II. It also has many mystery plot incidents, closely interwoven with and based on Army life. These have a different feel from those in a typical mystery story, and show an originality of approach. Both of these features make for good storytelling. However, the solution of the mystery is minimal and implausible, and this seriously hurts the story's quality. Gruber clearly sympathizes with the urban rough necks who are now in the Army, and who furnish his sleuths. Many of Gruber's characters are such two bit people. Their rowdy humor, lower class life styles and energetic vitality are Gruber traditions.

The Army setting of this story is a full Background, in the Freeman Wills Crofts sense. The story concentrates on the day to day life of the base, and how it operates; it does not delve into big issues of war and peace, unlike much fiction about the Army. As in the Crofts school, there is an interest in technology used on the base, much of which was fairly high tech in its time. And as in Crofts, the detective is a professional policeman, now serving in Army Intelligence after he entered the service. As in Crofts, we see the physical analysis of crime scene clues by the detective. The story also gives a feel for both the landscape of the base and many of its buildings, in the Golden Age mystery tradition of interest in architecture. The tale's interest in radio is also found in Richard Sale and Hugh B. Cave, among pulp writers of the era. Radio was also a major craze in comic books of the time, such as Radio Squad.

The Fourth Letter. The Fourth Letter (1947) is a non-series mystery novel, and a highly readable one. It has a Background, depicting the operation of the circulation department of a journal sold to farmers, and goes into rich and interesting detail on this subject. Gruber himself had worked on trade journals in his younger days. The look at the attempt to sell subscriptions recalls the attempts to sell books in other Gruber works, although The Fourth Letter transpires on a much more business-like and professional level. Everyone in this book is a small-time entrepreneur, trying to sell something. Today computerization has utterly transformed circulation and subscription work; it is a fascinating business carried out on a truly huge scale that would have astonished the denizens of this novel. It is also interesting to see the specialized machines used for mailing in this era; these have also been transformed by modern technology.

The Fourth Letter takes place in a small town in Iowa, and continues Gruber's interest in Midwestern farm life. The cattle show here recalls the fox show in The Laughing Fox. The feel of the book as a whole recalls The Laughing Fox. Both works dive deep into the past histories of their characters, looking both at incidents in their remote past and youth, and the course of their entire lives. Once again, we see youthful hopes blighted, and lives led awry. The mystery story unfolds logically, and as in The Laughing Fox, there is a successful attempt to fasten the crime on an unlikely suspect. However, there are too few clues here, that would allow the reader to logically deduce the killer. Still, this is a good book.

The Fourth Letter also gives a detailed and unsympathetic look at small town life. Aside from the heroine, all of the locals are highly unappealing people; the hero and the other sympathetic characters in the story, such as the hotel proprietor, are all recent arrivals to the town from the big city. There is a long tradition in both mystery and mainstream fiction in this era of skepticism about small town life. As in "Death on Post #7", these likable characters are urban sharpies, now transplanted into an all-encompassing world far from their original haunts. They do not fit in very well, but are the only signs of life in that world.

Gruber's book shows how poorly paid but efficient working women were the mainstay of many businesses in the era. The heroine, despite all her knowledge of the business, is never offered any promotion or advancement here, while all sorts of incompetent males are leaders. Gruber never offers any explicit social commentary on this. But the extreme nature of the contrast between the male and female employees makes this conspicuous. Such a gap was set in stone in the era's social customs.

By the way, I cannot see what the title The Fourth Letter has to do with the plot or events of the novel.

Short Stories

"1000-to-1 for Your Money" is a murder mystery, but a parallel subplot about the identity of a swindler gets more attention. This identity mystery plot anticipates other "identity mysteries" in Gruber novels like The Laughing Fox and The Mighty Blockhead. Those books involve attempts to line up and connect characters and incidents between the past and present. There is no such past-present dichotomy in "1000-to-1 for Your Money". But the story does ask us to compare what we know about the characters, with the mysterious world of the swindler. And the solution involves a similar effort of alignment.

"1000-to-1 for Your Money" is a revised version of the story "The Sad Serbian", originally appearing in the March 1939 Black Mask. The ethnic slurs in the original have thankfully been cleaned up and removed, probably through the intervention of editor Ellery Queen, who printed "1000-to-1 for Your Money" in his magazine. It can be found in Ellery Queen's Anthology: 1965 Mid-Year Edition. The much inferior original version "The Sad Serbian" is in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (2007).

The idea of asking large number of people to "subscribe" to a swindle, in "1000-to-1 for Your Money", finds an echo of sorts in The Fourth Letter, which deals with subscription struggles of minor periodicals.

Gruber re-used the name of the detective Sam Cragg in "1000-to-1 for Your Money", for a series character in the Johnny Fletcher mysteries. However, the name seems attached to two drastically different characters: the personalities of the Sam Cragg in "1000-to-1 for Your Money" and the Sam Cragg in the Fletcher novels seem completely different.

Gruber also wrote fantasy fiction: the well done story "The Gold Cup" (1940) appeared in Weird Tales.

Norbert Davis

Norbert Davis' reputation is floating in a strange limbo. On the one hand, his pulp work as a whole is almost completely unavailable. On the other hand, he has been praised to the skies by critics of pulp magazines. Getting at a more balanced point of view is more difficult. Davis began as a writer for Black Mask magazine; his early work was imitative of the hard-boiled Black Mask style. The best of these early pieces reprinted today is "Kansas City Flash" (1933). Davis wanted to write a more humorous and ingeniously plotted kind of fiction, however. Like the Hollywood detective hero of "Kansas City Flash", he wanted "to be hard-boiled and good-humored at the same time", to quote the first page of that story. He eventually came into his own in the magazine Dime Detective, for which he wrote two series in the early 1940's. All five of the Max Latin tales there were collected and reprinted in one volume in 1988; while Davis' other sleuth, William "Bail Bond" Dodd, appeared in eight stories, two of which have been reprinted in anthologies. Davis then wrote three novels about the detective team of Doan and Carstairs, available today in reprints from Rue Morgue Press, and much non-mystery short fiction for the slick magazines.

Davis' Number 1 fan during the 1940's: the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who loved Davis' books. (Thanks to reader Martin Thau, who pointed this out to me!) Wittgenstein was especially enthused about Davis' first novel, the zany The Mouse in the Mountain (1943), which Wittgenstein knew under its British title of Rendezvous With Fear. Apparently, Wittgenstein recommended this book to many of his friends, and even tried unsuccessfully to contact the author. Reader John Tingley gives more information: "About the Wittgenstein reference - it can be found on pp. 528-29 of Ray Monk's biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage, 1991). The 4.6.1948 letter to Norman Malcolm is printed in full on p. 109 of Malcolm's Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Wittgenstein was a special fan of "Street & Smith" detective magazines, and had Malcolm send them to him at Cambridge."

Themes and Imagery

Both Davis' plot and dialogue are full of paradoxes, which attempt to be both witty and clever. These paradoxes are in the tradition of such writers as Shaw and Wilde. Davis' stories are full of intricate, line by line point counterpoint dialogue between his characters. Each line of dialogue attempts to give a surrealistic, paradoxical twist to what was just said by the other person.

The relationship between Davis' private detectives and the police are especially complicated. The private eyes take especial delight in tweaking the noses of the police, often coming up with complex situations designed to annoy the police, but to which the cops have no choice but to consent, because the situation leads to the arrest of the bad guy. Another Davis plot twist: the police often try to pin the private eye's allegedly crooked schemes on them, only to discover their hidden positive side. However, Davis tends to be sympathetic to his police characters, as well. The heroic Mexican police in The Mouse in the Mountain seem designed to shatter stereotypes about Latin Americans, and his American cops, like all his characters, tend to be wily and persistent.

Davis was good at describing journeys into waste places: shacks in marshes near warehouses; snowstorms out West, weedy yards in isolated city manufacturing districts. Traveling in these environments usually results in comic physical indignities for his hero. The remote Mexican highlands of The Mouse in the Mountain, are one of the largest scale, and most successful, of such desolate regions in Davis. There is also the flash flood in the Mohave Desert at the finale of Sally's in the Alley.

Davis' color imagery is most often linked to people's clothing. Men are in blue, a color Davis seemed to have found particularly appropriate for men: see Max Latin's blue topcoat and hat, the blue uniformed elevator operator in "You Can Die Any Day", the G-Man's suit at the start of Sally's in the Alley, and the Count's navy blue tuxedo in "Give the Devil His Due". There are also the blue flashlights carried by the soldiers in that story. A man is named "Blue" in Sally's in the Alley. There is also a lot of blue carpeting in locations Davis finds sophisticated. By contrast, there is the black gown worn by the glamorous woman in "Don't Give Your Right Name", Gertrude Glenn's green dress in "You Can Die Any Day", the red uniform worn by the waitress at the drive-in in Sally's in the Alley, and the woman's red high heeled shoe in "Watch Me Kill You!". Walls in swanky locations in Davis tend to be colored as well: there is the red enameled art gallery in "Watch Me Kill You!", and the black leather paneled elevator in "Give the Devil His Due".

Davis Imagery in some Short Stories

Some comedy about a hotel mistaking the hero for a crooked, blackmailing private eye, anticipates those later, full-blown Davis stories in which honest PI's systematically masquerade as crooks.

The good-hearted but sarcastic chef seems like an early sketch for the chef in the Max Latin tales. He works in a Mexican restaurant, giving a hint that Davis will write the Mexico-set The Mouse in the Mountain.

The comically surreal scenes on Hollywood sets anticipate Sally's in the Alley.

A chauffeur is in a snappy plum-colored uniform, extending Davis' range of color imagery.

Murder in Two Parts. Davis' novella "Murder in Two Parts" (1937) was reprinted in the anthology American Pulp (1997) edited by Ed Gorman, Bill Pronzini & Martin H. Greenberg. The first half has some funny dialogue about a drunk the hero has to look after; this is the earliest Davis story I've read to show his trademark humor and clever dialogue. The relationship between his detective hero Brent and the drunk anticipates a little that between Doan and the dog Carstairs; in each the rather sneaky detective has to look after a non rational being who is physically large, self confident, and powerful.

Davis liked small, wooden, ramshackle, nearly cubical structures for the settings of his crimes, such as the bum's waterfront shack in "Murder in the Red". This story has a bathing cube, something I've never heard of elsewhere. The Golden Age interest in unusual architecture extended to Black Mask, where this story appeared.

The story's finale on a sea side cliff in the fog recalls other suspense finales in Black Mask tales exploiting sea side phenomena, such as the hurricane ending of Lester Dent's "Angelfish" (1936).

The tale also continues Davis' color coding: a female murder victim is wearing green pajamas, whereas a man is wearing a blue suit. A bad guy's green ring is the tip-off to his identity to Brent; clearly in Davis' world, this is the "wrong" color for a man to be wearing: it should be in blue!

You'll Die Laughing. Unlike many of Davis' stories, "You'll Die Laughing" (1940) does not star a professional detective, but rather an amateur, a young man who gets caught up in a murder at his apartment house. The story is reprinted in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps.

The tale has some genuine clues to the real murderer. Otherwise, the inventive and strange twists of the plot, are too outre for any reader to predict, and it can hardly be called a "puzzle plot" story.

The painful crawling of the mystery man in the opening, recalls the hero Just Plain Jones of "Something For the Sweeper" (1937), and his difficulty walking on bad feet.

The architecture of the hero's dumpy building plays a role in the story, in the Golden Age manner.

Black is a persistent color in the story, on everything from clothes to the "chrome-and-black-marble" lobby of a fancy apartment house. The two apartment houses, one poverty stricken and the other fancy, anticipate the frequent movement in the Max Latin tales between an earlier waste place mileu, and a swanky setting for the finale.

Plot Construction

"Murder in the Red" (1940), a Dodd tale reprinted the anthology Tough Guys and Dangerous Dames (1993), is an elaborate shaggy dog story. While trying to track down one character, Dodd finds a lead to another character who knew the first. So Dodd starts tracking this character, who in turn suggests a lead to a third character, who Dodd tracks in turn. And so on, with nearly infinite recursion. The whole story is a delightful labyrinth. At the end, Davis reconstructs in turn the activities of various characters in the story: first he shows a linear picture of what the mobsters were up to, then he reveals what the older men did, then he traces the activities of the heroine, then he reveals the killer and the killer's activities, and at last he traces the route of one of the murder victims. The whole thing has some affinities to the "pulp style of plotting", in which different groups of characters are constantly operating at cross purposes to the reader's mystification, but Davis' almost musical style of plotting is his own here. The Mouse in the Mountain also shows a similar technique, wherein one character will introduce another character as a friend or acquaintance, followed by the new character introducing other characters, and so on throughout the novel. There is a branching pattern, or tree like structure among the characters in the story. "Murder in the Red" shows much less of Davis' paradoxical dialogue than his later works in the 1940's; this kind of dialogue appears in Davis' other work as early as 1937, so Davis was simply operating in a different mode here.

The Max Latin stories tend to be much more straightforward puzzle plot mysteries than are many of Davis works'. They are less cats-cradled in their plots than the two Bail Bond Dodd tales that are available today. The stories open with comedy in Guiterrez' restaurant. Then a client or clients sees Max Latin there in the booth that serves as his office. Latin goes out, usually at night, on a crooked sounding errand for his client, usually to some fairly sinister location. There he unexpectedly discovers a murdered body. Often the killer tries to kill Latin at this point too. Inspector Walters of Homicide shows up, and Latin gives him a sort of run-around, combined with Walters often refusing to believe Latin's true but unfortunately implausible account of events. Finally, Latin goes to some second location, often swankier than others in the tale, and solves the crime. Not every story adheres completely to this approach, but it is a fairly good blueprint for an "average" Max Latin tale.

Characters

Davis' tales often end with explanations centering around complex business maneuvers involving high finance, and the rich in general. His more powerful male characters like to propagate elaborate illusions about themselves, involving role playing and trickery. Some of the high powered men on both sides of the World War II conflict in Sally's in the Alley, also fall into this category, and promote similar illusions, while their schemes are also explained in the finale. In contrast, lower class men in Davis' world can be prey to obsessions which they act out compulsively. Davis had a special fondness for violent women; they show up with great regularity in his tales. So does a combination of humor and violence, which can be very disturbing, and which makes his work much less entertaining than one would like. He also likes mild mannered little men, who can be concealing major secrets.

Davis' characters include small businessmen with bizarre ideas on how to run their business. These include the eccentric chef Guiterrez in the Max Latin stories, his waiter Dick, and the bus driver Bartolome and the painter Amanda Tracy in Mouse. Extensions of this businessman with unusual obsessions include his private detectives. Both Max Latin and Doan take an off kilter approach to their work. Both pose as crooked detectives. Both loudly proclaim their corruption, and deliberate involvement with crooked sounding schemes. These schemes tend to be quite imaginative, just as the strange approaches of Davis' businessmen are fresh and new. Behind this mask, however, Davis' detectives are actually trying both to solve crimes, and manipulate bad guys into jail or giving up their ill gotten gains. Davis also seems to like characters who are involved with the arts: painters, musicians, lecturers, museum workers.

Other standard characters in Davis' work include young males and boys with outrageously aggressive personalities, such as the rotten, bratty kid Mortimer in Mouse, and the autograph hunter Steamer in "Don't Give Your Right Name". Rich, powerful, beautiful, young women also make an appearance in Davis work, including movie stars and heiresses. Under a veneer of politeness and graciousness they are completely spoiled and self indulged, and determined to do exactly as they please. These women tend to have an entourage of obnoxiously upper crust male followers, who have both a parasitical relation to the women, and a haughty "get out of my way you worthless proles" attitude to everyone else. These men are often prepared to engage in fist fights, cause incidents, and otherwise gum up the plot. They have a certain shrewdness, and no scruples, but otherwise are none too bright, unlike the much cleverer private eye and police characters.

The Doan and Carstairs tales

The Mouse in the Mountain. The Mouse in the Mountain (1943), is the first of Davis' three Doan and Carstairs novels, dealing with private eye Doan, and his canine "partner", a Great Dane called Carstairs. The Mouse in the Mountain contains three crime subplots, none of which have anything to do with each other. The last and weakest of the three is the only actual mystery plot in the book; it is a perfunctory murder mystery with a routine solution. This causes some drag at the end of the novel. By contrast, the novel's middle sections soar, with their vivid description of the remote Mexican mountain town and the events it triggers. Since the mystery plot does not appear till after the mid point of the book, most of the first half is basically a story about some very eccentric characters, some of whom might be detectives and criminals, but which is not basically a mystery story. Davis impresses with his ability to extend his strange paradoxical storytelling to novel length, without any noticeable strain or effort. The book just speeds along, with gracefulness and freshness.

Sally's in the Alley. Sally's in the Alley (1943), the second Doan and Carstairs novel, is much grimmer than The Mouse in the Mountain, and suffers for it. The book falls into two halves, the first largely taking place in a remote town on the California-Nevada border, the second in Los Angeles and then in some vividly described desert scenes. The first half suffers from mean behavior on the part of Doan, making this section often unlikable. The novel does get much better in the second half. Events in the second half sometimes surrealistically echo actions in the first half of the novel, an approach also found in such surrealist writers as Ellery Queen and Craig Rice. Also, events in the second half develop the plot, building on and extending plot ideas from the first half. The novel eventually builds up a coherent mystery plot. The finale also has some interesting political commentary. Davis' take on the events of World War II are as off trail as his other ideas, although they are completely patriotic.

The book is genuinely strange throughout, with weird characters and events. This strangeness is not always pleasant, especially in the first half, which often has a bitter quality, but the novel is truly far out. Characters in Davis are so deceitful, and/or running so many complex schemes, that almost no one in this book is leading a conventional life. Nearly everyone, from the detective hero on out, is involved in some strange existence, often involving a new persona or strange crooked scheme. This systematically divorces this book from conventional reality. Most of the characters are leading complex lives that are entirely imagined by the author; these lives are entirely made up for the book, and have no counterparts in the conventional world. Oddly, none of these lives are at all science fictional; here and elsewhere, Davis' imagination has little to do with the fantastic. All of the strange schemes relate instead to mystery story tradition. They are part of the complex plotting involving criminal activity that has long been central to the detective story. Davis has carried these ideas out to extreme length, with every character, including the detective, involved in some baroquely complex and ingenious activity. But all of the schemes relate to the detective story, and its heritage of ingenious plot. Like many traditional detective story authors, Norbert Davis is a deeply plot-oriented writer.

Many of the characters in Sally's in the Alley systematically subvert conventional ideas on how society should be run. This includes strange ideas on how police and detective work should be carried out. Davis experimented with such concepts in his short tale, "Walk Across My Grave" (1942) (not a Doan and Carstairs story). These sections have some satire. But mainly, they are exercises in pure imagination, showing how a conventional institution can be twisted into bizarre new directions.

Restaurants, bars and hotels are frequent locales in Sally's in the Alley. These tend to be as outré and bizarre as possible. They include some of the earliest depictions in American fiction of the modern-day country-western bar and the drive-in restaurant. The workers in these establishments tend not to be crooks or deceitful. They can be comically strange. Also surreal in location: the trip to the Hollywood back lot in Chapter 12.

Oh, Murderer Mine. The final Doan and Carstairs novel, Oh, Murderer Mine (1946), shows a sad decline from the first two, and is not recommended.

Richard Sale

Daffy Dill pulp short stories

The best of Sale's pulp fiction that has been reprinted today deals with Joe "Daffy" Dill, a newspaper reporter. Dill is an exuberant, wise cracking sleuth, and the Dill stories are full of a snappy line of patter that evokes an era in American life. Both bright and funny, and verbally complex, it has an almost Elizabethan feel, reminding one of courtier's dialogues in 1590's plays. It is full of both word play and elaborate, circuitous descriptions of things. In Elizabethan times, this rhetorical device was popular; it is now known as euphemism. The energetic characters in the Dill stories tend to be well to do eccentrics, engaged in various sub rosa schemes. This brings them into contact with various crooks and underworld types.

Radio and Caribbean stories

Murder at Midnight. Murder at Midnight contains two novellas, which did not appear in specialized mystery pulps. They presumably originated in either general purpose pulp magazines, such as Argosy, or in the slicks. The heroes of both stories are involved in radio, at that time the most high tech communications medium in the world. Although the radio background of the tales is only tangentially involved with the mystery plots, it still makes for interesting reading. Sale was a ham radio operator in real life, and during World War II became involved in radio-based civilian defense work. Neither tale is at all hard-boiled. Instead, both have a young man who gets plunged into a frightening situation. The first half of each novella is filled with mystery. Gradually the puzzling events get explained. By around the midpoints of the stories, a clearly identified villain has emerged, and the last sections of the tales turns into a pure adventure and suspense thriller. I enjoyed the opening mystery sections of both works more than their finales. Neither novella is a classic, but both make pleasant reading.

"Murder at Midnight" (1945) is a more conventional mystery, with a setting amid the New York City upper crust.

"Cape Spectre" (1941) is set on an isolated wild island on the Florida coast. Its Caribbean setting, and elements of spy fiction in a World War II context, resemble Lawrence G. Blochman's Blow-Down (1939) and Helen McCloy's The Goblin Market (1943). The radio messages of "Cape Spectre" and the telegrams of The Goblin Market introduce readers to now obscure media of specialized communication. There is also much about radio in Blochman's Blow-Down. Many of these novels also have heroes who are traveling under false pretenses, who look like ordinary workers, but who have an agenda to investigate an already murderous situation.

Active Duty. "Active Duty" (around 1943) is a little short-story thriller, without elements of mystery, taking place in the United States, and with a radio background. It resembles the thriller-finales of such Sale radio tales as "Cape Spectre" (1941). This gripping story was later used by Sale as the plot of the motion picture Suddenly (1955), which Sale scripted.

Home is the Hangman. Sale also wrote Home is the Hangman, which consists of two long novellas, "Home is the Hangman" (1940) and "Beam to Brazil" (1943), set in Haiti and Puerto Rico, respectively. Both radio thrillers are written in a style similar to "Cape Spectre" (1941). Unfortunately, both are markedly inferior to "Cape Spectre", and are definitely not recommended. There are signs that "Home is the Hangman" was updated for book publication, making it consistent with recent historical events. Both of these novellas originally appeared in slick magazines, "Home is the Hangman" in the Saturday Evening Post.

Destination Unknown. Destination Unknown (1940) is a pleasant thriller with a shipboard and South American setting. It reminds one of the thriller portions of Sale's Caribbean novellas of the period. Like them, its hero is a technical expert, its villains are Nazi spies, and communication equipment plays a role in the tale. While there is a murder in this tale, there is no murder mystery. Also, the villains and the good guys are clear in the tale right from the start. So the book is hardly a murder mystery in any sense of the term. However, the book does have elements of mystery. For one thing, the goals of the Nazi scheme here are mysterious, and not revealed till towards the end of the story. This serves as a mystery throughout the tale, the way a murder mystery does in a conventional book, and the lead characters do some detection to try to uncover it. Also, the reader constantly wonders what the next step in the Nazis' actions will be, and the next step the good guys will take to counteract it. Both kinds of action, when they show up, tend to be surprising and fairly ingenious. This too has aspects that are mystery-like: the actions are both logical and surprising, like the solution of a mystery. And like a mystery, the story is heavily plot oriented.

Hollywood Novels

Passing Strange. I liked the evening at Ciro's, a real life Hollywood night spot of the era, in Chapters 7-8 of Passing Strange (1942). The hero is in his tuxedo here, too, and the movie patois spoken by the Hollywood types reminds one that Sale is the author of the snappy patter in the Daffy Dill tales.

Unfortunately this minor novel is only partly set in Hollywood, and is mainly filled with unpleasant medical imagery. It is perhaps Sale's least enjoyable book. The emphasis on medical techniques recalls the radio technology in other Sale stories, suggesting that Sale, along with George Harmon Coxe, is the most technology oriented of the pulp mystery writers. The doctor narrator here is as skilled as the radio expert protagonists.

Benefit Performance. Sale's novel Benefit Performance (1946) has a Hollywood background, although its portrait of the movie industry is much less technology oriented that his radio tales. This story eventually bogs down, but it does have a logically constructed mystery plot. The story is best in Chapters 1-7, which sets up the plot, and then the solution in Chapter 24 and 25. The characters spend much time hanging out in night clubs: this is both a favorite hard-boiled locale, and a Sale tradition too. His men characters enjoy getting dressed up in tuxedos, and going dancing.

Dale Clark

Clark's detective heroes like technology:

• Highland Park Price in "Slay, Fido, Slay" (1944) has a whole closet full of high tech gizmos, all of which he has purchased to save money - he is notoriously and comically cheap. The solution to the tale involves scientific facts about photography. High Price also knows a great deal about inheritance law, and many plot developments in "Slay, Fido, Slay" depend on this.
• Doc Judson, the criminologist detective of "The Sting of the Hornet" (1940), is explicitly created as a scientific sleuth, although the technological elements are mainly limited to ballistics.
• The forest ranger of "Smoke Sign" (1941) lives in a ranger station full of high technology.
• Another Clark detective, FBI agent Steve Harrigan in "You're Killing Me" (1943), is expert on science. The tale is set at a chemical plant.
• "Crime Lesson" (1948), a brief story Clark wrote for EQMM, mixes in both scientific expertise and humor in among its detection. Its information about the history of detection makes for fascinating reading.

Clark also enjoys creating elaborate Southern California landscapes. Dale Clark was born in the Midwest, but lived in Southern California during his writing years. Among his many early jobs was that of private detective, according to his autobiographical note in A. L. Furman's anthology, The Mystery Companion (1943).

While Norbert Davis liked outrageous characters who flaunt their anti-social attitudes, Clark's bad guys tend to be self righteous types, like high priced lawyers or smooth talking authors, whose mask their crookedness in a stream of noble sounding verbiage. It makes for a gentler tone, and a vein of satire.

The Sting of the Hornet. "The Sting of the Hornet" (1940) appeared in a pulp magazine, but it seems like a full scale Golden Age mystery in miniature, with a country house full of suspects in a quasi-locked room mystery. Mainly, the tale is notable for its intricate plot, with endless complications in the Golden Age tradition. These include some ambiguous romantic and financial relationships among the characters, although this element is not as extensive as in "You're Killing Me". The finale is a let-down: Clark has little ingenuity left for his adequate solution. But the tale's pleasantly complex storytelling makes for fun reading.

The only hard-boiled element is provided by the detective's assistant Brady, a tough ex-cop. The main sleuth is Doc Judson, a criminologist detective. The story has some welcome comedy - the brash teenage girl is a type that will later appear in such films as The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Preston Sturges, 1944). And roughneck Brady adds comic exuberance, too.

This tale was reprinted in High Adventure #84 (2005).

You're Killing Me. Clark's "You're Killing Me" (1943) is set in a war time chemical plant, like Hugh Pentecost's "The Dead Man's Tale" (1943), which appeared around six months later. "You're Killing Me" is a much grimmer than Clark's High Price tales, with a high body count and some gruesome murders. It has lots of plot and is quite readable. Like "Smoke Sign", the story takes place in a detailed Southern California landscape.

The story has a complex puzzle plot. Clark develops a sustained ambiguity about the characters in the tale, and their relationships to each other. Many of the characters are members of an extended family; others have business relationships to each other. The pattern of relationships, and its ambiguous double meanings, becomes quite complex. This sort of ambiguity in relationships dates back to Fergus Hume, and is often found in Agatha Christie.

Also notable in the tale: the idealized portrait of an FBI agent, Steve Harrigan. Harrigan combines scientific skills with physical toughness and determination. He is a person with surprising facets. In some ways, he is as ambiguous all by himself as are the many relationships among the suspects.

Slay, Fido, Slay. Dale Clark's stories about private eye Highland Park Price are in the school of comic detective stories of the 1940's, and such writers as Norbert Davis and Richard Sale. His detective likes to gouge his crooked clients for big fees, essentially through blackmail; this gives him his nickname of "High Price". This is played for comedy in the stories, and is largely tongue in cheek in tone. High Price claims that his clients mainly come to him for dirty work, and that it is important for him to maintain an image of being a crook. This is in the tradition of Norbert Davis, whose honest detectives such as Max Latin also pose as crooks and shysters. Clark's treatment of this, like Davis', is full of clever paradoxes and ingenious twists. Both Clark and Davis treat this theme with considerable logic. Clark's ideas on this subject develop throughout "Slay, Fido, Slay" (1944), and add to the ingenuity of the story. High Price has to justify all his schemes to his pure minded and kind hearted secretary, Beulah Randy. She is determined to keep all agency business on the straight and narrow. This makes for effective comic counterpoint.

Death Wore Fins. Warning: Dale Clark's novel Death Wore Fins (1959) is a grim, depressing turkey. Its portrait of a troubled family and its tortured personal relationships seems modeled on Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939), and the baleful influence of Chandler is everywhere in this book. The story takes place in La Jolla, California; Chapter 4 mentions such real life literary residents as Chandler, Jonathan Latimer and Dr. Seuss. One of the suspects in "The Sting of the Hornet" (1940) was a mystery writer, so Clark's interest in mystery writers as a topic had long roots.

Robert Reeves

Robert Reeves was a Black Mask writer of the late 1930's and early 1940's era. He seems to have been a minor member of the Frank Gruber - Norbert Davis school of humorous private eye writers.

The Cellini Smith novels

Unfortunately, the novel's second half becomes sordid, with ugly mob violence predominant. The idea of a detective working for a mobster sounds fun on paper, but becomes awfully unpleasant in practice. Reeves had talent - but watching this book self-destruct in the middle is a disappointing experience.

Cellini Smith: Detective. Reeves' third novel Cellini Smith: Detective (1943) takes place in a humorous world of eccentric low lifes. Most of the male characters are hoboes, and the females burlesque dancers, so the book takes place in a lower social stratum than even most hard-boiled fiction. In fact, Cellini Smith: Detective is one of the few formal detective novels to transpire among the world of the very poor. Frank Gruber's Depression era detectives also exist in a world of hand to mouth poverty, and Norbert Davis' sleuths frequently encountered people living in cheap shacks among dire financial woe. So Reeves' book is in their same tradition, although pushed to a systematic extreme.

Cellini Smith: Detective is not good enough to recommend as a whole. Although inoffensive, much of it is mediocre. The book has two chief merits. Reeves' prose comes alive in action sequences: for example, the scene where his hero is hunted down within the burlesque theater (Chapter 6), or the episode where his hero heads on back to his apartment (the end of Chapter 8).

The second virtue is the humorous dialogue that parodies mystery conventions. When the hero is caught snooping around one of the dancer's dressing rooms, he tells her he is just looking for evidence to prove she is a murderess. This sort of bright comic dialogue appears throughout the book. Norbert Davis' heroes also often spoofed mystery convention, especially ideal behavior for an honest detective. Unlike Davis' Max Latin, Cellini Smith does not pretend to be a crook, however. He is merely a two bit operator at the end of his financial rope. In any case, Smith's dialogue recalls not just Davis and other pulp writers of his school, but also Georgette Heyer's burlesque of detective fiction in Death in the Stocks (1935).

Considered as a formal, puzzle plot detective novel, Cellini Smith: Detective has one good idea. This involves the disappearance of the corpse. Corpses were always being kidnapped in Davis, Craig Rice, Richard Sale and other humorous writers of the 1940's, so this is not a new idea. In fact, one might say that any self respecting corpse in a 1940's detective story had to get kidnapped at least once. However, Smith has come up with a new motive for such a peregrination. He also does a good job with the story treatment here, making it relatively fresh in its trappings.

Short Stories

"Dance Macabre" has a puzzle plot. Strange events are taking place at the dance hall, and the hero has to try to explain and interpret them. Reeves' ideas are simple, but inventive. There are actually a whole series of odd, mysterious bits of business that need such interpretation. One is a red herring. But most of the explanations interlock, into a unified logical back-story of the crime.

Frederick Nebel

Frederick Nebel got an earlier start than most writers discussed in this article. He first appeared in Black Mask in 1926, just a few years after Hammett and Daly created the first hard-boiled detectives in 1923. None of his numerous early stories has been reprinted today. Nebel wrote three major series:

• In 1928 he created the team of police Captain Steve MacBride and drunken newspaper reporter Kennedy for Black Mask. Although the 37 stories featuring them are Nebel's largest contribution to Black Mask, appearing from 1928-1936, the stories have never been collected in book form. Six are in the giant anthology The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, three more are available today in other anthologies; none of these is especially outstanding, however.
• Nebel also wrote 15 stories in Black Mask about tough loner detective Dick Donahue. Most appeared in 1930-1933, a final, and very good tale "Ghost of a Chance" (1935) was published two years later. Six of the tales were reprinted in Six Deadly Dames, and others have appeared in anthologies. From 1928 to 1936, all but four stories of Nebel's Black Mask work fall into one of these two series.
• For the magazine Dime Detective, Nebel employed the likable series detective Jack Cardigan, with six of these tales being collected in The Adventures of Cardigan.

Periods in Nebel

I get the impression that Nebel's reputation among pulp aficionados rests with his earlier, more hard-boiled work. Admittedly, this work shows one really tough detective coping with mean streets at the very depths of the Depression. Tough it is. But I personally much prefer Nebel's later work. It shows much better storytelling. The later stories of Cardigan in The Adventures of Cardigan, seem vastly more entertaining to me than the early Donahue tales collected in Six Deadly Dames. There is also some pleasant comedy in the later tales. Nebel's change of style is correlated with some changes in his personal life: he moved from St. Louis to Connecticut in 1934, got a new agent, started selling to the slick magazines, and gave up pulp fiction for the slicks entirely in 1937, mainly selling romantic works. Nebel's two styles also are related to two poles of pulp crime writing in general: a "hard-boiled" one emphasizing machismo, brutality, tough streets, and plotlessness, and a "pulp adventure" style emphasizing plot, puzzle mysteries, storytelling, escapist adventure, and good natured comedy. I much prefer the second kind of pulp writing, and feel that the more "hard-boiled" kind has been systematically overvalued by some critics.

Subjects

Nebel's detectives also crusade against bribery and civic corruption, a recurring theme of Nebel's work.

Much of Nebel's work is set in St. Louis, a city that otherwise does not figure prominently in American fiction, and which makes an interesting background to his tales. Nebel was much influenced by his friend Dashiell Hammett, and Nebel's treatment of St. Louis reminds one of Hammett's treatment of his home town of Baltimore. Hammett did not describe Baltimore as exotic, the way he did San Francisco. Instead he used Baltimore when he needed a "typical" American city.

Visual Description in Nebel

Both works have a similar kind of narration, where we see the outward manifestations of the characters' actions, and we have to guess at their inner feelings. The brief flair of color and texture in Nebel's opening paragraphs, where he mentions a blue leather divan, recalls the blue brick at the opening of Hammett's The Dain Curse (1928).

Nebel is conscientious about describing how things in his stories look visually. Characters, postures, the weather, buildings, offices, and means of transportation are all Nebel's favorite subjects for description, and usually described very well indeed. As a storytelling technique it is a bit mechanical - the reader knows that each scene is going to have so much dialogue, so much plot, and so much description - but it all functions quite effectively together. After all, readers are interested in plot, dialogue and description - they are elements of good fiction. There is a functionalist aspect to Nebel's technique. He was a commercial writer, and like other pulp writers had to grind out large amounts of work to keep afloat economically. His stories resemble the Bauhaus aesthetic of mechanical production, where following modern industrial techniques will help produce quality work in large quantities.

The early scenes in "Hell's Pay Check" describe a rainy city on a wet night. They are among the most vivid anywhere in the pulps, and repay study. The description involves looking at how buildings appear and vehicles respond to the wet, as well as direct descriptions of the weather.

Both the opening, and the finale set in the yard around a mansion, emphasize fences. Nebel seems interested in different kinds of fencing and their physical properties, including the different kinds of gaps they create that allow passage. All of this makes his descriptions have a "you are there" quality. Fences return in "Dog Eat Dog", and "Murder by Mail" describes the back yards of two buildings vividly.

Hell's Pay Check: A Plot Analysis

The opening of "Hell's Pay Check" is a dramatic encounter between the sleuth and crooks. After its completion, Nebel immediately reruns the encounter, as told from two new perspectives. First, we see how the events appeared to some innocent bystanders. Next, the police confront the sleuth with their version of the events. All of this allows Nebel to generate three different scenes, out of the same plot development. Furthermore, it allows for interesting variants on the plot. It is like a "theme and variations" in classical music. Later, an encounter between the sleuth and the villainess, will also generate some multiple perspectives, although not quite as complex as the above.

"Hell's Pay Check" shows Cardigan creating cover stories for his activities, first with a telegram, later with an alibi. The cover stories also allow for the generation of plot, with Cardigan constructing an alternative "reality". They also allow for humor and comedy relief.

"Hell's Pay Check" pits Cardigan against a representative of a sleazy tabloid newspaper. The tabloid guy is small, well-dressed but very deadly, a bit like villain Joel Cairo in Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1929). Unlike Cairo, however, the tabloid guy is both a WASP and apparently straight - Nebel is not into the bigotry here that disfigured the Cairo character. The tabloider also has the enormous power of his sinister paper behind him, making the fight more evenly matched.

One can find similar techniques in other Nebel tales, such as "Dog Eat Dog" (1928). "Dog Eat Dog" opens with the policeman hero reconstructing a crime, based on evidence at a crime scene. Then Nebel immediately produces variations on the "night of the crime": first an account by another policemen, who turns out actually to have witnessed some of the events; then from the point of view of one of the suspects involved in the night's events; and finally by the policemen grilling the employees at the road house where much of the night's activity took place. This "story & variations" approach actually allows for good storytelling: each perpective allows for different aspects to emerge, such as the suspect's emotional response to the crime, or the forensic details at the crime scene.

Also, at the end of "Dog Eat Dog", the sleuth's friend Kennedy provides a cover story for him, a simple form of the far more elaborate cover fictions in "Hell's Pay Check". The cover story in "Dog Eat Dog" does provide a coda to the tale, serving as an emotional device stressing the friendship between the two men. The cover activities in "Hell's Pay Check" also develop male bonding, between the sleuth and the chauffeur who helps him.

"Murder by Mail" (1936) opens with an attack, that is immediately recounted for some people who did not fully witness it, and then for the police. More creatively, the second part of the story involves Cardigan and two other operatives from his agency each tracking down crooks. The tracking is done in parallel, with all three sleuths on the same trail - but separately. This makes for one of Nebel's "variations": three different versions of three sleuths, all on the same route following criminals. The sleuths' paths intersect in interesting ways, making for pleasing plot patterns. "Murder by Mail" is reprinted in Bernard Drew's anthology Hard-Boiled Dames (1986).

Spades Are Spades

• Open with Cardigan arriving in St. Louis on a case, to meet bad weather (snow in "Spades Are Spades").
• Have Cardigan immediately threatened and attacked by crooks opposed to his mission.
• Have an obnoxious newspaperman pestering Cardigan (a more comic character in "Spades Are Spades").
• Have a tough local policeman (also a more comic character, who likes to rib Cardigan in "Spades Are Spades").
• Have Cardigan developing an elaborate cover story, with the aid of his home office.

MacBride & Kennedy

The closest ancestor to these stories of which I know, is not another pulp story. Instead, they resemble Bartlett Cormack's hit play The Racket (1927). The Racket stars:

• Tough Police Captain James McQuigg battling gangland - an ancestor of Nebel's Captain Steve MacBride;
• Newspapermen hanging around the police station - prototypes of Nebel's crime reporter Kennedy;
• Ethnic gangster villains.

In addition to serving as the debut of MacBride & Kennedy, "Raw Law" (1928) includes an ex-cop named Jack Cardigan. It is not quite clear that this is the same sleuth that will be the subject of Nebel's long-running Jack Cardigan series in Dime Detective, starting in 1931. The grim, ruthless, violence-oriented Jack Cardigan in "Raw Law", who mainly likes to be violent against crooks, is a long way from the confident, famed detective sleuth of the Dime Detective tales. The later Cardigan is a major detective, the early Jack Cardigan mainly a trashy figure of violent vengeance.

Hugh B. Cave

In addition to his mystery fiction, Hugh B. Cave is a well-known author of supernatural and horror fiction. The Cave collection Long Live the Dead (2000) contains a bibliography of Cave's mystery fiction, and much useful historical background on his mystery work.

Hugh B. Cave's crime stories are often structured as a duel between the detective hero, and a killer. The killer's identity can either be known or unknown, i.e. the story could either be a thriller or a mystery. There is often an ingenious, unusual setting, one that plays a major role in the development of the plot. Cave often likes night scenes, and darkness in general. The solutions to his stories often show ingenuity in the puzzle plot tradition, although they are not always structured as puzzle plots. At his best, Cave is a gripping storyteller. All of this shows some resemblance to Mary Roberts Rinehart. Then again, pulp tales in general often remind me of Rinehart's work.

As Cave wrote much in both the supernatural and mystery genres, it is not surprising that he sometimes wrote Weird Menace stories. Weird Menace tales were pulp fiction's version of the Impossible Crime: seemingly supernatural events that are eventually given a logical, non-supernatural explanation. His "The Lady Who Left Her Coffin" (1936) falls into this category. It stars Mark Lane, Cave's "supernatural detective", a tough private eye who specializes in such crimes. Like other Cave stories, it features a nocturnal setting with a complex architectural background.

Cave's tales about Peter Kane

Hugh B. Cave wrote nine stories in Dime Detective about alcoholic private eye Peter Kane. They have been collected in Bottled in Blonde (2000). Most of the Peter Kane mysteries include clues. Cave clearly intended them to be fair play, puzzle plot detective stories. There is little sign in them of the "pulp style of plotting". Instead, they seem like Golden Age style plots, fused with hard-boiled settings.

The first four Peter Kane stories are not much good. They are among Cave's earliest detective tales. They emphasize horror material. Then the series picks up steam with "The Screaming Phantom" (1935) and "Brand of Kane" (1935). These both have mild aspects of horror, being filled with spooky adventures in eerie nocturnal surroundings, but this material is much less horror oriented and more enjoyably atmospheric. These two tales also show good storytelling. There is then a six year gap, before the next Kane pieces appeared in 1941-1942. These last three tales are much more comic, even exuberant in tone, and have no horror aspects. "Ding Dong Belle" (1941) is especially breezy and enjoyable. It also has one of the better puzzle plots in the series. "No Place to Hide" (1942) is also fun. "The Dead Don't Swim" (1941) is a great title, and the story is fairly entertaining reading. However, the solution is a bit disappointing: the actions of the characters seem poorly motivated. The story shows the same high tech interest in radio and electronics found in Richard Sale.

Cave and Nebel

Several of the Kane stories have settings that were also popular with other pulp writers. "The Screaming Phantom" (1935) has an amusement park setting, like Frederick Nebel's "Hell Couldn't Stop Him" (1935) (the first of these tales to be published), Donald Wandrei's "Merry-Go-Round" (1935) and Robert Leslie Bellem's "Homicide Highball" (1943). And the sanitarium in "No Place to Hide" (1942) reminds one of those in Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and Fredric Brown's "Madman's Holiday" (1943), although it is much less sinister than either.

The introductory section of Long Live the Dead quotes a 1933 letter from Cave hailing Frederick Nebel as the best writer in Dime Detective. Much of Cave's mystery work seems to echo Nebel's tradition. The alcoholic Peter Kane and his friend, honest policeman Moe Finch, resemble Nebel's sleuthing team of alcoholic reporter Kennedy and honest cop MacBride. They two pairs even have the same initials: K and M. Both Kane and Kennedy are constantly, deeply inebriated in the stories. Both are independent, anti-authority oriented people who take a tone of deep, humorous skepticism about everyone around them, especially social authority figures.

Kane's motives as a sleuth are often to help out his friend Moe Finch when he is in trouble. Such helping out a friend was a common theme in Nebel.

As a solitary private eye working for an agency, Peter Kane also resembles Nebel's sleuth Dick Donahue. Cave's non-series tale "Curtain Call" (1938) has a police detective named Bill Donahue in it. The hard-boiled world of "Curtain Call" recalls the work of Nebel. Both authors describe crusades against civic corruption. "Curtain Call" also has scenes in the fancy office of a manager of a night club-casino; such scenes were common in Nebel's work.

Nebel's Donahue stories took place in the depths of the Depression, in an extremely hard-boiled world. Cave's stories often show the seedy side of the Depression, with businesses closed down, and well to do people involved in financially shady schemes. Ex-cop Peter Kane often represents working class people getting a glimpse of all this corruption and failed financial enterprise. It is a critique of a society in decay from a working class perspective. Kane's humorous skepticism towards the upper crust people he meets, and his rough neck attitude and lack of respect, represent how many working people felt towards their social leaders during this era.

Just as Nebel often set his stories in his home town of St. Louis, so did Cave set the Kane tales in his home town of Boston. Both are cities that only infrequently appear in the works of other crime writers.

Cave's "Headstone For a Heel" (1942) is a rousing adventure story, of police versus the mob. It emphasizes male bonding, between policeman hero Richard Simms, and special police operative Paul Parker. The lone-wolf Parker functions without much use of the resources of the police, like Cave's typical solitary detectives. And the bonding between Simms and Parker recalls Kane's friendship with Moe Finch, although the relationship here is more one of equality. While "Headstone For a Heel" is not a formal puzzle plot tale, it does benefit from plenty of elements of mystery. There are a large number of bad guys, and the police only gradually piece together all their mysterious inter-relationships. These eventually form an intricate design. The rich man involved with the crooks is another example of Cave's interest in social corruption among the wealthy. "Headstone For a Heel" is reprinted in Guns in the Shadows (2003), edited by Larry Estep, an anthology of pulp gangland stories.

Cave, Doyle and Intuitionist Detective Stories

Peter Kane solves his mysteries through pure thinking. There is typically a period in his tales where he goes off and does some deep thinking about the case. At the end of this period, he has had some deep insight into the case, and has seen clues that allow him to determine the identity of the murder, and sometimes other hidden facts about the mystery. Such solving of mysteries by pure thought is the key element of the intuitionist tradition, the approach used by Carr, Christie, Queen and many others, and before them by much of Doyle. Cave's approach is especially close to that of Doyle, who also sometimes had Sherlock Holmes withdraw for a period of deep thought, during which he would solve the case: see Doyle's "The Man With the Twisted Lip" (1891), for instance. The introductory section of Long Live the Dead describes how Cave read Doyle extensively as a kid.

Peter Kane also resembles somewhat the amateur sleuths of the intuitionist tradition, at least in his behavior as a detective. Although he is a private eye working for the Beacon Agency, he rarely draws on the resources of the agency or its other operatives to solve problems. Instead, he is just one single isolated guy, with no other detective resources than using his wits, to solve his cases. Such pure brain power recalls intuitionist sleuths. Nor does Kane has much involvement with his agency's clients, unlike most private eyes. Instead, he often takes on cases to help his friend Moe Finch, an honest but much victimized cop. Intuitionist detectives were often brilliant amateurs who helped the police with their gifts; Kane falls somewhat into this tradition, at least with his detective skills. One hurries to point out that socially, Peter Kane is far removed from the gentlemanly sleuths of many amateur detective stories, being a tough, rough, alcoholic ex-cop who mainly hangs around low lifes in his personal life.

The puzzle plots in the Peter Kane mysteries tend to focus on something in the basic situation of the crime. Often times, Kane eventually understands that it tells him something about the background or profession of the killer. There is something in the very structure or situation of the crime that is most likely the result of a person in a certain profession or employment. This sort of deduction is most intelligent, and it allows Kane to deduce the probable killer. One notes that such a deduction is restricted to probabilities; it is not absolutely impossible for someone else to be guilty, but it is much less likely. This is a little different from the ironclad logic of the Ellery Queen tales, for instance. Still, Cave's approach has real merit.

T. T. Flynn

Thomas Theodore Flynn was a prolific author of Westerns, both novels and short stories; many of these have recently been reprinted. The best known today is perhaps The Man From Laramie, which was made into a movie by director Anthony Mann. Flynn also wrote many mystery short stories for the pulps. Only a few crime tales of his have been reprinted today. Considering their quality, one would like to read more of Flynn's work.

Mike Harris and Trixie Meehan Stories

The plot elements of blackmail, a female crook, and how the plot line is resolved, all link "The Deadly Orchid" to "A Scandal in Bohemia" (1891) in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

"The Deadly Orchid" depicts detectives catching a criminal, but there is no actual plot element of mystery to it. In this it differs from Nebel's Cardigan tales, which often deal with the detective investigating some mysterious crime. Flynn and Nebel were exact contemporaries, and their work seems related, at least in subject matter. The use of a couple in Flynn's tale, combined with a great deal of humor, also anticipates the comic TV mysteries of the 1980's, such as Moonlighting or Remington Steele.

Relations between men are also prominent in Flynn. Mike's interaction with the local agency manager, with their male client, with the hotel staff and the bellboys, are a running theme throughout. The bellboys are uniformed - like Mike and his new tails, they are in special clothes.

"The Deadly Orchid" is reprinted in Bernard Drew's anthology Hard-Boiled Dames. Like the other Mike & Trixie tales, it first ran in Detective Fiction Weekly.

The Letters and the Law. "The Letters and the Law" (1936) is another enjoyable Mike and Trixie romp. Once again, this is a tale of adventure, without a murder mystery. However, Flynn does include some mini-mysteries along the way. There are a great diversity of criminal types here, and Flynn only gradually elucidates all their relationships with each other. He drops tantalizing clues along the way to their relations, which mystify the detectives and the reader, and eventually comes up with logical explanations of these clues in the bad guys' inter-relationships.

Another mini-mystery: Mike is knocked out by the criminals, and when he comes to, he is in a crooks' hideout he has never seen. He only gradually learns about his new environment. Roland Phillips will include a similar mystery of location in his pulp mystery "Death Lies Waiting" (1944). Phillips' and Flynn's solutions will be very different, but both Phillips and Flynn will embody the Golden Age interest in landscapes, buildings and architecture.

"The Letters and the Law" has something of the same feel as the mystery stories that would later show up in 1960's comic books, such as Lois Lane. These too tended to take place among the rich, in escapist settings (here Miami and environs). Comic book stories often had their detectives going undercover in new, glamorous identities, to ferret out criminals, just like Mike and Trixie. Flynn's story opens with the detectives getting their assignment from their boss; this was a perennial comic book opening. Flynn's tale concludes with a costume party; such parties were very popular in the comic books. Flynn also includes much about glamorous means of transportation, such as yachts and planes; these too are comic book favorites. Flynn's cheery, comic, escapist tone also persisted in comic book tales.

Brother Murder. "Brother Murder" (1939) is another tale where Mike and Trixie go undercover, this time on the grounds of a lavish-but-sinister religious cult. The tone is much darker here, with a lot more violence. Some ugly racial stereotypes sink this tale, which cannot be recommended. It is reprinted in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. It is part of a long series of California mysteries by many authors, dealing with evil cult groups.

There is a murder mystery of sorts, but, in general terms, the culprits are obvious from the start (somebody from the cult). Only the motive is a mystery, and the story does an OK job with that. Once again, there is also a bit of a mystery, about the precise relationships between various bad guys at the cult.

The tale does a good job with the Roman togas the cult members are required to wear, integrating them with bits of business throughout the thriller plot. Once again, new clothes for men are a Flynn theme. Since everyone is wearing them, they have the aspect of a uniform.

Relations between men are once again prominent in "Brother Murder". The two cops who run through the story are well characterized, as is the motorcycle cop who arrests the hero at the start. So is Mike and Trixie's boss Lew Ryster at the detective agency. All of these are lightly comic characters. One wishes they were gracing a story with fewer stereotypes than "Brother Murder".

D. B. McCandless

D. B. McCandless is a little known pulp fiction writer. It is not clear if D. B. McCandless is male or female. McCandless never seems to have published any mystery books - only magazine work.

McCandless is remembered for a series of short stories, about tough, skilful woman private eye Sarah Watson. These ran in the pulp magazine Detective Fiction Weekly. A few have been reprinted today: "Cash or Credit" (1937) in Bernard Drew's anthology Hard-Boiled Dames (1986), and "The Corpse in the Crystal" (1937) and "He Got What He Asked For" (1937) in Otto Penzler's anthology The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (2007).

The stories are noted for their welcome sense of humor. Both intelligent, earthy Sarah Watson, and her good-natured but frequently bewildered young man assistant Ben Todd, are well characterized, and they and the other characters get some funny dialogue. Bernard Drew pointed out that the pair resemble and anticipate Erle Stanley Gardner's team of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, who debuted in 1939. They differ in that Sarah Watson is the major brains of her outfit, coming up with most of the detective schemes. Ben Todd does usually get roughly one good detective idea per story, which prompts Sarah to say he's earning his salary.

The Watson tales are genuinely feminist. Sarah Watson is an excellent detective, and while the stories are far from preachy, they support a woman being able to do (and think) everything a man can.

"He Got What He Asked For" is the best of the Sarah Watson tales available today. It's a delightful adventure story, about Watson's attempt to recover some stolen jewels. There are some simple murder mystery elements, but they are not clever, and form only a minor part of the story. Mainly, this is a comedy-thriller. Watson does do a good job, unraveling some mystery aspects of the jewel theft.

Julius Long

The one sizable Julius Long story that is available today is "Carnie Kill" (1945), a Black Mask piece reprinted in David C. Cooke's Best Detective Stories of the Year (1946). It combines a good whodunit puzzl