During the last months of World War II the editors of Esquire decided to launch a series of short detective stories and invited various mystery writers to create new characters for possible publication in the magazine.

   Among the invitees was Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967), perhaps the nuttiest author on earth. Harry got miffed at the thought of being asked to “submit a sample like a guy with a tin cup” and demanded $100 in advance. He must have fallen on the floor in shock when Esquire immediately sent him a check, although the editors specified that the advance wasn’t a commitment to accept his submission.

   Keeler proceeded to string together a 14,000-word adventure about a barking clock and an astigmatic witness, with a 7½-foot-tall mathematically educated hick from the sticks serving as detective. At first the character was named just that — Abner Hick to be precise — but before sending out the manuscript Keeler prudently changed his name to Quiribus Brown.

   When Esquire rejected the story, Keeler yanked Quiribus out of the plot, replaced him with that bedraggled old universal genius Tuddleton T. Trotter (who had starred in Harry’s mammoth extravaganza The Matilda Hunter Murder back in 1931), and added 85,000 more words to the story.

   His Spanish publisher Instituto Editorial Reus issued the result as El Caso del Reloj Ladrador (1947). Keeler’s U.S. publisher, the bottom-rung Phoenix Press, put out a shorter version that same year as The Case of the Barking Clock.

   Since Phoenix dropped Keeler in 1948, leaving him without a U.S. publisher for the rest of his life, Quiribus never saw the light of print in his native land. But Harry made him the protagonist in The Case of the Murdered Mathematician, issued in 1949 by his London publisher Ward, Lock.

   So what new detective was chosen to grace the pages of Esquire? A New York PI named Peter Chambers whose creator was Henry Kane, a lawyer and something of a Chandler wannabee. Chambers narrates his own cases in an idiom, known to connoisseurs as High Kanese, which is worlds removed from Keeler’s style but just as lovably eccentric.

   The first six Chambers stories appeared in Esquire between March 1947 and June 1948 and were collected as Report for a Corpse (Simon & Schuster, 1948).

   The timing was unfortunate in the sense that the book came out several months after Anthony Boucher was let go as reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and before he became mystery critic of the New York Times. I’d love to know what Boucher thought of this volume, but it was his predecessor Isaac Anderson who reviewed the book in the Times.

   I read the tales a few decades ago but had forgotten them completely when I started to reread them earlier this year. They’re more cleverly plotted than most PI stories during the years Chandler dominated the genre, but there’s nothing truly memorable about any of them and the narration is a pale shadow of what would soon become mature Kanese.

   According to just about any print or electronic source you might check, Henry Kane was born in 1918 and is still alive. Apparently neither of these statements is true.

   Lawrence Block had several conversations with Kane in the early 1970s and, while preparing a memoir of him for Mystery Scene, did some investigative work that was worthy of his own PI Matthew Scudder. An old girlfriend of Kane’s told Block that “he was most likely born not in 1918 but in 1908.” At least when Block knew him, he “lived on Long Island — Lido Beach, if memory serves — and spent Monday through Friday in an apartment on 34th Street west of Ninth Avenue.”

   Block tells us that he “took his work seriously, and insisted that each page be perfectly typed before he went on to the next one.” He was of Jewish descent but told Block that he “didn’t believe in any of that mumbo-jumbo.”

   His lifestyle was that of the stereotypical PI: a Dexedrine pill every morning, at least a quart of Scotch and a couple of packs of cigarettes a day. “It must have been sometime in the early ’80s that he died,” Block surmises.

   Of the eleven Henry Kanes listed in the Social Security Death Index, the one who was born in 1908 and died in 1988 is most likely our man. I would love to have met him, though not necessarily in that smoke-choked apartment.

   In his years as conductor of the “Criminals at Large” column for the Times, Anthony Boucher reviewed most of the Kane novels and collections, even though they were published in the unprestigious paperback-original format.

   I still recall vividly the time he reviewed one of those novels twice. Its U.S. title was Too French and Too Deadly (Avon pb #672, 1955). In his Times column for December 18, 1955 he called the book “probably enjoyable; Peter Chambers stories are usually amusing, and this one is said to include ‘a locked room within a locked room.’

   “But the publishers have chosen to crowd a full-length novel into 122 pages by squeezing 500 words onto a 4-inch by 6-inch page; and squinting one’s way through the book is too much to ask of a reviewer, a reader, or anyone save possibly a Lord’s-Prayer-on-Pinhead engraver.”

   Apparently Kane then sent Boucher a copy of the hardcover British edition, The Narrowing Lust (Boardman, 1956). In his column for June 24, 1956, Boucher reported that “now that it’s legible, it’s also highly readable” and “includes an unusually impossible-seeming locked room problem. It’s a welcome blend of strict detective puzzle and crisp and sexy thriller….”

   In my last column I quoted the late Fred Steiner, composer of the Perry Mason theme: “You look at those old film noir pictures, they’ve always got jazz going for some reason or other.”

   Since then I’ve discovered that this seems to be a classic case of false memory. The point was demonstrated by David Butler in his book Jazz Noir: Listening to Music from Phantom Lady to The Last Seduction (Praeger, 2002) and confirmed by William Luhr in his just published Film Noir (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012):

   “Although many neo-noir movies have used single-instrument jazz solos to evoke the film noir era, it is difficult to find a canonical film noir [i.e. one that dates from the Forties or Fifties] that opens in that way. Most used full orchestral scores, as was standard studio practice.”

   It’s only in TV private-eye series like Peter Gunn that jazz became the norm. And, as Lawrence Block points out, the strongest uncredited influence on that landmark series was the novels and stories of Henry Kane — who wound up writing the Peter Gunn tie-in novel (Dell pb #B155, 1960)!

   Is this a weird world or what? Luhr’s book is one of the few that discusses in depth both canonical noir and the more recent evocations of the genre, of which perhaps the finest is Chinatown (1974). I recommend it highly to anyone invested in that type of film. And aren’t we all?

      Previously on this blog:

A Corpse for Christmas, by Henry Kane. Reviewed by Bill Deeck.
Trinity in Violence, by Henry Kane. A 1001 Midnights review by Art Scott.
The Midnight Man, by Henry Kane. A 1001 Midnights review by Bill Pronzini.
A Corpse for Christmas, by Henry Kane. Reviewed by Steve Lewis.
Until You Are Dead, by Henry Kane. Reviewed by Steve Lewis.

   A long quote from the latter book is included as a big chunk of the review.

MIGNON G. EBERHART – Murder in Waltz Time. Short novel; first published in The American Magazine, May 1953.

   This small gem of a detective story was reprinted in two of Mignon Eberhart’s later story collections, Deadly Is the Diamond (Random House, hc, 1958) and Best Mystery Stories (Warner, pb, 1988), and calling it a “short novel” is stretching it a bit, at best. Without resorting to counting words, I’d say it would run 60 to 100 pages in an ordinary paperback, depending on the size of type.

   As I’m sure you know, many of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe tales first appeared in this same format and in this same magazine and were collected later in hardcover in groupings of three or four.

   The American Magazine was always a favorite of mine as a youngster. I liked the cartoons, the photos, and the ads. Today I’m attracted to the same things, but now I like the stories and the artwork as well, plus the tidbits of interest about the movies, and items worth noting about radio and television stars and programs.

   As for Eberhart’s story, it’s a solid detective tale, necessarily boiled down to its pure essentials because of its length. No time for but the briefest characterization, and the motivations barely more. It takes place in a Florida resort where the dancing team of Fran Allen and Steve Greene are the featured attraction, and it’s Fran who finds the body of elderly Miss Flora Halsey.

   And as the investigation goes on, besides her nephew who was staying with her, more and more of the guests staying at the Montego House are found to have known Miss Halsey in the past, making Captain Scott’s job all the more difficult.

   Here’s a paragraph that appears toward the end of the tale. It doesn’t reveal the killer in any way, but *WARNING* it might tell you more of the plot that you’d rather know, but I think it’s entirely indicative of the kind of story it is.

   Don’t get me wrong. As a mystery writer, Eberhart was a pro, through and through, and while I feel I might be admitting something you may find a little strange, I found this story to be much, much more than minimally entertaining.

FRANCES MALM – The Woman Involved. Short novel; first published in The American Magazine, May 1953.

   There is no mention of Frances Malm in the current edition of Hubin’s bibliography of crime fiction, so unless she wrote tons of short fiction, I doubt that many readers today have ever heard of her. But since there’s more than one crime involved in this novella (my description) I’m reporting on it anyway — as I’m sure you’ve already noticed.

   In length “The Woman Involved” is somewhat longer than the one by Mignon Eberhart, or at least that’s my impression. Once again I didn’t count words.

   When a young woman, Dana Wallace, goes back home to settle her stepfather’s estate she finds, unexpectedly, both a mystery and a romance. A large sum of money is missing from Judge Poole’s checking account, and (with no apparent connection) a brash young man, on his way up and resented by the old guard residents of Middleford for doing so, offers to buy the property where the judge’s home is located.

   Dana does a more-than-decent job of detective work, discovering a number things she did not know about her stepfather, but the emphasis here is rather more with the battle of rich vs. poor in matters of status in small town America, and Frances Malm puts her finger precisely on a number of the sore spots that can arise as a result.

   A minor work, I’d have to truthfully say, and one that in all likelihood has never been reprinted. There’s no doubt that it’s mystery fiction, though, and it’s definitely worth reading.

PostScript. Frances had a sister named Dorothea Malm, who wrote a handful of novels published as gothic romance mysteries in the 1960s.

   The only “real” novel that Frances wrote that I’ve been able to uncover is World Cruise (Doubleday, hardcover, 1960; Cardinal, paperback, 1961). Here’s the cover description of the book, the Cardinal edition: “The compelling story of a beautiful divorcee seeking love and fulfillment on a luxury cruise.”

UPDATE. 01-01-12. My copy of this magazine has gone into hiding, and I’ve not been able to come up with a cover image, much less any of the interior art. Doing a Google search online, I did find a long partial description of the contents, however:

The American Magazine, May 1953. Vol CIV, No. 5. 144 pages. COVER: What’s Ahead for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor? Painting by Al Brule Articles include: AMERICA’S GLAMOROUS GODMOTHER Oveta Culp Hobby — the little woman who holds one of the biggest jobs in the US. A determined Texan, she looks out for the personal health and welfare of every one of us as US Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. by Clarence Woodbury; COVER ARTICLE: What’s Ahead for the Windsors? The Coronation next month may mean a new career for England’s jobless ex-King. By Roul Tunley. 5 page article; FUN TIME IN THE ROCKIES Canada beckons summer vacationists to its fabulous wonderland. By Richard Neuberg; A PEEK AT THE MOVIES of the MONTH; “Nature Girl” a short story by Elizabeth Stowe; “The Lie” a short story by Cynthia Hope and Frances Ancker; “Murder in Waltz Time” by Mignon G. Eberhart.

   Or in other words, a small time capsule of what life was like in May, 1953.

Dear Walker:

   My own collection is all but complete — meaning that I’ve almost acquired all of the items on my want list. Of course I’ll always be out there keeping my eye open for serendipitous books and magazines, but I only have a very few more such items that I’m actually looking for. Once I find those I’m essentially done. Then I’ll just give them all away to the Salvation Army thrift store and start over… Your advice, please!

Dear C.P.

   You have touched on a dangerous subject that all serious collectors must beware. I’ve seen many collectors fall into the dreaded trap of completing their collection. Usually once the collection is completed then many collectors lose interest and start thinking what next?

   This results in the selling off of many collections because the enthusiasm of the chase and the drive to collect is now finished. Collectors that limit themselves to a favorite author or magazine are prone to losing interest once their goal of completion has been achieved.

   Since collecting can be so much fun, how do we avoid falling into the abyss and losing interest in our collections after completion? The answer I have found is very simple, you do not allow yourself to complete your collection. You have to keep expanding your interests.

   For instance, in your case, if you are close to completing your SF wants, then you have to develop an interest in another genre, another subject, other magazines. Maybe detective fiction or adventure pulps or original art to go along with your SF collection. Something else!

   For instance in my own case, I started off in 1956, at the age of 13 collecting SF. This continued for around 10 years until I discovered detective pulps thanks to Ron Goulart’s Hardboiled Dicks anthology. This led me to collecting all sorts of mystery fiction like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald. It led me to completing sets of such great magazines like Black Mask and Dime Detective.

   But then around 1980, I was faced again with the horrifying realization that I was nearing completion of the detective and mystery wants. I quickly expanded to adventure and western fiction and started to work on extensive sets of Western Story, West, Short Stories, Adventure, All Story, Argosy, Blue Book, Popular, Sea Stories and many others.

   As I started to complete these magazines and run out of reading matter, I decided my job was taking up too much of my time and interfering with my reading and collecting activities. So in 2000 I retired to concentrate on building up what may be the world’s largest collection of literary magazines.

   I’ve yet to meet another collector that is interested in these artifacts, but I love them, and I can fall into a trance looking and smelling the scent of rows and rows of literary quarterlies like the Hudson Review, The Criterion, Scrutiny, The London Magazine, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, and The Virginia Quarterly. I could go on and on forever but I’m sure you are all disgusted and fatigued reading about someone else’s collecting addictions. Hell, I actually read these things.

   But the end may be near, even for me. I’ve mentioned before about almost being crushed by the collapsing of one of my basement bookcases due to overloading. Then a year or so later several bookcases fell on top of me and my son. Then last month a bookcase of literary magazines showered me with more than a hundred issues of the Sewanee Review.

   It was heavenly. I just stood there as the magazines rained down on me and I felt at peace. Then I had to go to work picking them up off the floor and stacking them before my wife came to investigate the noise. She’s heard the sound of collapsing shelves and stacks falling, so she never asked me until a couple days later about the crashing noise that she chose to ignore.

   Probably, she was hoping that I had tempted fate once too often and had been pounded flat as a pancake by the old magazines that she now hates with a passion. But no, I survived once again, just like some pulp super hero!

   So I say to you, C.P., don’t stop collecting. There are unknown fields still to conquer. Don’t spend all your salary on your bills, your family, college fees for your children. You work hard for your money; spend some of it on collecting!

   Now I have to go back to a discussion I’ve been having with myself for 50 years. What is the greatest fiction magazine ever? Is it Adventure in the 1920′s, All Story in the teens, Black Mask and Weird Tales in the 1930′s, Astounding and Unknown in the 1940′s, Galaxy in the 1950′s and 1960′s?

   How about The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which has to fit somewhere. How about the SF fiction in Playboy and Omni, or the mystery fiction in Manhunt or EQMM?

   Maybe I better fix up these bookcases so they don’t collapse; I need answers to the above questions!

Previously in this series:   Collecting Manhunt.

   Recently, I was walking through my house trying to find a set of magazines on the bookshelves. I wasn’t having too much luck because I must have double stacked another set of magazines in front of them. Then I started wondering, how did I get to the point that I have so many books and magazines that I can’t find them? It’s not as if I have them hidden in boxes or storage units, they are mostly on bookshelves, though I do see some stacks on the floors.

   I started collecting magazines in 1956 and I still have the very first one that I bought off the newsstand: the February 1956 issue of Galaxy. I keep intending to frame it and hang it on the wall. So I’ve been at it now for 55 years and I guess that is how I now have so many magazines that I cannot find some of them. Each year I pick up more or start collecting another title that I’ve been thinking about reading. It all adds up as the years march on.

   When I bought the Galaxy I was hooked for life on science fiction. I was 13 and my allowance was $1.50 each week. Doesn’t sound like much but that’s $6.00 a month which enabled me to buy all the SF digests and paperbacks. I also had a job on Saturdays which paid me another $1.50 per week, cleaning a barbershop (sweeping floors, dusting bottles, cleaning the mirrors).

   Since the SF digests only cost 25 cents I was within my budget. But then in the summer of 1956 I discovered Manhunt and all of a sudden I had a cash flow problem. Manhunt had a lot of hardboiled crime competition from such titles as Pursuit, Hunted, Two Fisted, Offbeat, etc.

   This was the age of the digest revolution and the newsstands were full of the small fiction magazines. If you try and find the digests nowadays, you will realize we are at the end of the digest era and perhaps entering the days of the electronic magazine or e-book.

   As a lover of the physical books and magazines, this makes me very unhappy. The e-book looks pretty sorry next to the beautiful artifacts that I have been collecting for so many years. The feel of the physical book, the dust jacket, the smell of the pulp paper or digest, might soon disappear and be replaced by the humming of a electronic gadget.

   No e-book could have ever made me fall in love like I did when I saw my first Galaxy or Manhunt. We all know about the attractions of the SF covers but the Manhunt covers struck a deep sexual chord within my body. The brassy blondes, the shameless hussies, the girls about to be beaten, or something worse.

   Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough money to buy SF and crime digests, so after reading a few Manhunt’s, I had to reluctantly stop buying them. Fast forward about 20 years and now I have a job with more money to spend on collecting. But I also have the usual things like a wife, kids, mortgage, etc.

   Somehow I managed to squeeze out enough to put together a complete set of Manhunt, all 114 issues. By the way, the magazine is well known as just about the best of the hardboiled crime digests, lasting from 1953 to 1967, so this fact makes collecting the title a prime objective.

   For about 25 years I read many of the stories by Ed McBain, William Campbell Gault, Richard Prather, Ross Macdonald, etc. But then around the year 2000, I started to get annoyed by the amount of hours I was spending each day working at my job. I figured if I took early retirement, I could read and watch film noir movies all day long! I must have been wasting 10 hours a day working.

   So in order to make all this happen, I did some downsizing and made the mistake of selling my set of Manhunt’s. To make matters even worse, I sold it for only $500, which included the 12 very rare large sized issues.

   Now I began to question my sanity and judgment as a serious collector. I missed the magazine terribly and spend many years whining and complaining about my stupid decision to sell.

   A few years ago at Pulpcon I stumbled across an art dealer who had two of the 1956 original cover paintings used on Manhunt. I immediately bought both and hung them in my living room, despite the nervous complaints from my wife about the scenes showing women being strangled.

   The copies of the magazine came along with the paintings and I rapidly reread both, meanwhile muttering under my breath about mentally defective collectors who sell favorite magazines.

   So for over 10 years, I felt this regret eating away at me until finally this year at the Windy City pulp convention, my desire to rebuild the set burst forth. In a mere two hours, I had gone through 140 dealer’s tables like a buzzsaw and found 39 issues of Manhunt, or about 1/3 of the run.

   The price averaged about $11 or $12 each, some higher, some lower. Now, you would think that this would make me feel relieved and happy. No, not at all. I wanted the complete set of 114 issues. 39 issues were not enough, a mere drop in the bucket.

   Another blog that I follow, hosted by a collector like Steve Lewis who also loves books and magazines, was having to downsize his collection because he was selling his house. Normally he would never consider selling what he also thought was the greatest hardboiled crime digest.

   I made a good offer and he quickly accepted. Also included were the Manhunt companion digests such as Verdict, Murder, Menace, and Mantrap. He also threw in several Giant Manhunt’s, which rebound leftover issues, and the British version titled, Bloodhound.

   The condition was nice, especially the 12 large sized issues which are so rare. One problem was how to smuggle three large boxes into the house without my wife detecting the arrival of over 100 more magazines. The house is already sinking under the weight of thousands of books and magazines(I won’t even go into the subject of the thousands of DVDs).

   When the mailman delivered the boxes I quickly put them into the trunk of my car, giggling insanely at my clever actions. Then I slowly introduced them into the house and no one noticed because I’m always walking around with stacks of books or magazines.

   So ends another successful Adventure in Collecting. Welcome home Manhunt!

Taken in December of either 1902 or 1903…

For an image with considerably more detail, one in which you can actually read the titles, go to:

http://www.shorpy.com/node/7392?size=_original

UPDATE. [01-01-10] The Internet is wonderful. The copy of Scientific American along the top right edge of the extended newsstand is dated 13 December 1902. See below:

   Back in May it was that I posted an inquiry from John Herrington about some records in North Carolina that should shed some light, he thought, on the true identity of British mystery writer A. Fielding, until recently thought to be a pseudonym of Lady Dorothy Feilding, 1889-1935.

   Catching up with what John’s learned since then, here are a couple of emails from him. From late July:

   More recently, here’s an email from John that reached me a couple of days ago:

   Just another reason for everyone with an interest in Golden Age and (mostly) traditional mysteries to anxiously await the next issue of CADS (short for Crime and Detective Stories).

   Geoff Bradley, the editor, doesn’t maintain an online presence, but information about issue 50 can be found here. The issue most recently mailed is #54. His email address is Geoffcads @ aol.com

   The latest issue of the online magazine Black Horse Extra is out, devoted primarily as always the western fiction recently put out by UK publisher Robert Hale, but again, as always, branching out in many different ways.

   For example, in this, the September-November 2008 issue, the main topic is an attempt to answer the question, Can western fiction also be noir?

    If I’d been asked before reading this issue, except for a tendency for traditional westerns most often to have happy endings, my answer would have been yes, of course. Happily I�m reinforced in that opinion by James Reasoner�s comments about one of his current favorite western authors, Lewis Patten (1915-1981) in a review of Rope Law (Gold Medal, 1956), about which he says in part:

    �… as the posse waits for nightfall so they can close in, Patten backtracks to fill in the story of what brought the characters to this point, and it�s a years-long saga of drunkenness, prostitution, robbery, and murder worthy of any of the more contemporary Gold Medal’s. Sex serves as the motivation for most of this, and while the scenes aren�t graphic, there are quite a few of them for a traditional western published in 1956.�

   Chap O�Keefe (aka Keith Chapman, who leaves comments here under one or the other of each of the two names every once in a while) follows with story descriptions of several of Patten�s other books, one or two of which I�ve read myself, reviews of which I really ought to post here sometime soon. Chap points out in each of them what in his opinion makes them noir, including the imagery of the writing.

    From Giant on Horseback (Ace,1964) for example; �Rain fell, gently drizzling, shining on the slicker worn by the stationmaster, dripping softly from the eaves of the weather-beaten, yellow-frame station. The train hissed patiently as it waited for the passenger to alight. . . .”

   Concerning �happy endings,� James suggests that authors were constrained into doing so by editors, and Chap follows up by pointing out that editors still have great influence in that direction today.

   In that regard, he goes into specific detail with a behind-the-scenes look at what his editors wanted (and didn’t want) in two of his own most recent books, A Gunfight Too Many and Misfit Lil Cleans Up, both published by Hale under their Black Horse imprint, which makes for very interesting reading.

   If you�re a fan if either western or noir fiction, you�ll want to read the whole issue yourself. And I haven�t even begun to mention any of the other interviews and news items it contains. (How old is Ernest Borgnine? And what western movie is he going to be in next??)