I guess if you live long enough and hang out in the appropriate dives, you will eventually see fistfights and guys swinging beer bottles at each other. Normally you will not see book or pulp collectors try to strike and harm another collector. I’ve always said my favorite type of people are book collectors and since there are so few pulp collectors left, I don’t want to get into any arguments with the few that are still around.

   Today, a friend sent me an email about a British first edition by H. Bedford Jones. He mentioned that he might consult the resident H. Bedford Jones expert, Digges La Touche (see above). Upon reading this, I almost fell out of my chair laughing and yelling “So you’re the expert on H. Bedford Jones!” I was thinking back more than thirty years ago when the Pulpcon convention almost ended in a drunken brawl.

   Rusty Hevelin, the head honcho and boss of the convention, never scheduled the evening panels ahead of time. He just about always would give you an hour or even a few minutes notice that he would like you to talk about a pulp author or be part of a panel discussing some aspect of pulpish literature.

   I remember once he approached me about ten minutes before the start of the evening programming and wanted me to interview Robert Bloch. Sometimes I turned him down due to not being prepared on short notice but other times I accepted.

   Evidently, at the last minute, Rusty decided to have a panel discuss H. Bedford Jones. He found three collectors who agreed and up to the stage stepped veteran pulp collectors Darrell Richardson, Harry Noble, and Digges La Touche. All were fans of the author and the discussion kept everyone’s attention.

   Everyone behaved themselves and there was no problem. Until the banquet that night. Harry Noble and I were sitting at one of the dinner tables waiting for our food and drinking beer. Another long time pulp collector, Andy Biegel, also sat down. Without any preface or explanation, Andy blurted out, “So you’re the expert on H. Bedford Jones.” At first Harry and I thought that he was kidding and we just laughed. Andy didn’t laugh however and he repeated in a louder voice, “So you’re the expert on H. Bedford Jones.”

   We now realized that Andy Biegel was drunker that we were and was in fact insanely jealous because he had not been chosen to be on the Bedford Jones panel. Harry tried to explain that he was not an expert but just a fan of the writer and loved to talk about his books. Andy was having none of it and repeated for the third time, at the top of his voice, “SO YOU’RE THE EXPERT ON H. BEDFORD JONES!”

   At this point it was obvious that in another minute Biegel was going to fling himself across the table and try to strangle Harry Noble. Though Harry was older than Biegel, such an action would not be a good idea since Harry was a fitness buff and body builder. Since I considered Harry my best pal, I certainly would have joined in the fight and probably we all three would have been rolling over on the floor punching and flailing.

   To make things worse, Andy had a disability involving one leg being shorter than the other. I’m sure Harry and I would have been banned from Pulpcon for life for the drunken beating of a person with a physical handicap. So fortunately we stood up and without saying a word to Andy, we left the room. The next day Andy Biegel evidently didn’t remember anything about the incident and talked to us just as though nothing had happened.

   Harry Noble and Andy Biegel are no longer with us but I still remember the Pulpcon brawl that almost happened over 30 years ago. Everytime I hear that someone is an expert on H. Bedford Jones, I start to scream, “So you’re the expert on H. Bedford Jones!”

   The first time I saw Mickey Spillane was at a Bouchercon, back when he was the public face of Miller Lite beer. The second and last time I saw him was on April 27, 1995, the evening of that year’s MWA dinner. As 1994 Awards chair I got to host the pre-dinner cocktail party for Edgar nominees, and Spillane got to attend because, over vehement objections from some older mystery writers who were on the other side of the culture wars of the HUAC-McCarthy-Red Menace era, he was about to be given the Grand Master award.

   Like just about everyone else in America I had read Spillane’s early novels — the septet of bestsellers that began with I, the Jury (1947) and climaxed, if that’s the word, with Kiss Me Deadly (1952) — but almost nothing that he’d written in the Sixties and later. Like just about no one else in America except intellectuals and critics, I thought his books were terrible. What turned me off was not so much the rabid right-wing politics or the gruesome sadism of the action scenes as it was the inept plotting and linguistic boners.

   The basic storyline of I, the Jury is simplicity itself. Manhattan PI Mike Hammer vows to personally execute the murderer of his buddy, ex-cop Jack Williams, who had lost an arm in the Pacific saving Hammer’s life. In his search he meets a seductive female psychiatrist, a pair of man-hungry twin sisters, a medical student who lives with a racket boss, and other lovables. After wading through the carnage of four more murders he gets to carry out his grim sentence, gut-shooting the psychiatrist and narcotics queenpin Charlotte Manning. The last two lines of the book are justly famous, or at least infamous. Manning: “How c-could you?” Hammer: “It was easy.”

   I could devote several pages to how and where I, the Jury goes off the rails but will limit myself to three specimens of track-jumping, the first trivial but telling, the others crucial.

   In Chapter 12 Hammer visits a movie theater and sees a crime film, calling it “a fantastic murder mystery which had more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese.” The perfect description for any Spillane novel!

   One of the things that surprised me when I revisited I, the Jury recently was that so much of the writing is so pedestrian and ordinaire. Clearly Spillane hadn’t yet mastered the psychotic rants which pockmark his novels of the early Fifties. But every so often one finds a linguistic flub that lingers in the memory:

   Talk about a distinction with a difference! Was Spillane the inspiration for all those lunatic lines that began streaming from the smoking typewriter of Michael Avallone a few years later?

   A year and some months after Spillane was named a Grand Master, the publisher of the prestigious Library of America series asked me to comment on the authors and titles tentatively selected for the Library’s two-volume American Noir project. My only suggestion for Volume One, which covered the Nineteen Thirties and Forties, was that Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man be replaced by three or four of his short novels.

   Volume Two, which dealt with the Fifties, was slated to include two books I didn’t think could be called American Noir: Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, because most of it doesn’t take place in America, and Ross Macdonald’s The Galton Case, because having a series character and first-person narrator readers can easily identify with (Lew Archer, of course) seemed to me to rule it out as noir.

   I proposed as a substitute someone who was conspicuous by his absence in the table of contents. You guessed it. Mickey Spillane. As a writer, I argued, Spillane stands beside Highsmith and Macdonald roughly where Ed Wood stands among film-makers vis-a-vis Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. But in terms of the development of noir he’s of such immense historical significance that American crime fiction and crime films of the Fifties just can’t be understood without him. (This is why I never objected to his receiving that Grand Master award.)

   Mike Hammer of course is a series character and first-person narrator just as much as Lew Archer but he’s certainly not one readers can easily identify with. In fact, I contended, critics would long ago have ranked Hammer with Lou Ford in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me as one of the genre’s most convincing sociopaths if only Spillane hadn’t labored under the delusion that he’d created a hero.

   I’ve been commenting on mystery fiction and mystery writers for almost half a century but have discussed Spillane only once in a chartreuse moon and have never advocated for him except in my correspondence with Library of America. How did Atticus Finch do? Miserably. How many of my suggestions were accepted? You guessed it. None. But I did enjoy the interchange and wound up with complimentary copies of some very nice volumes. One of which I expect to figure in my next column.

   Another baffling Ellery Queen mystery! One of the most fascinating letters from Manfred B. Lee to Fred Dannay that Joseph Goodrich didn’t include in his book BLOOD RELATIONS is dated November 3, 1958. More precisely, it’s dated “Nov. 3” with the year added in brackets, presumably by Goodrich.

   Right at the start Manny tells Fred: “The novel will not be ready on Dec. 1. Its status is as follows: About 2/3 of the rough draft was done quite a while ago, but I found large sections of it unsatisfactory…and began doing them over.” Then he starts describing the health problems that have kept him from finishing this novel.

   Which novel is he talking about? It can’t be THE FINISHING STROKE, which was published very early in 1958. But Manny never wrote another novel from a Dannay synopsis until the late Sixties when he overcame the writer’s block that had handicapped him for almost a decade.

   Is it possible that the bracketed date is a mistake, that the letter was actually written a year or two earlier? No! About halfway through the document Manny talks about the live 60-minute Ellery Queen TV series, then starring George Nader. That series was broadcast only during the 1958-59 season. Manny even mentions that the episode shown the previous Friday was based on perhaps the finest of all Queen novels, CAT OF MANY TAILS (1949). We know that the air date of that episode was October 31, 1958, and Manny even mentions that it was shown on Halloween night. There’s not a chance in a trillion that this letter was written at any time other than what its dateline says.

   What then are we left with? With the distinct possibility that there exists somewhere an “unknown” Ellery Queen novel, perhaps finished, perhaps unfinished. If so, what a find!

   There are other possibilities, but they seem most unlikely. One that I considered and quickly rejected is that the book Manny was working on late in 1958 was published in 1963 as THE PLAYER ON THE OTHER SIDE. If Manny became afflicted with writer’s block soon after writing this letter, Fred might have let his synopsis sit for a few years and then given it to Theodore Sturgeon, who expanded the outline into that novel.

   What rules out that theory? Since we know that Manny was working on the book “quite a while” before November 1958, Fred’s synopsis must have been completed earlier. But the outline for THE PLAYER ON THE OTHER SIDE can’t possibly predate the release of Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960), to which the plot of PLAYER owes so much. Even assuming that the influence on PLAYER comes not from the movie but from Robert Bloch’s novel of the same name (1959), the time element still eliminates PLAYER as the outline Fred prepared a year before Bloch’s book was published.

   Let’s explore another possibility. Might Fred have eventually decided that the novel Manny was working on in 1958 — and may or may not have finished — should be cut down to novelet length? There’s one Queen novelet which just might fit the time frame: “The Death of Don Juan,” which was first published in Argosy, May 1962, and is collected in QUEENS FULL (1965). I can find no positive evidence in support of this theory but nothing against it either.

   When speculation fails, search for facts. I recently emailed Fred’s son Richard Dannay, asking if he had ever seen a manuscript that fit the vague description in Manny’s letter. (If only he had left a hint or two as to what the plot was about!) Richard said no but admitted the possibility that he and his brother Douglas had overlooked something while sorting through their father’s huge accumulation of manuscripts and papers. There the trail ends — unless some intrepid literary sleuth spends months combing through every paper in the Dannay archives at Columbia University. Any volunteers?

   For three months I’ve resisted offering another assortment of quotations from the one and only Mike Avallone, but I can’t hold back any longer. Here come some more cubic zirconia from the Ed Word of the written wood, all from THE SECOND SECRET (1966, as by Edwina Noone), the same epic from which I culled quotations back in November. With the iron self-control of the Spartan boy who hid the fox under his tunic I shall limit myself to six new ones.

   Thank you, Mr. Sword. And thanks also to Mike Avallone, whose wacko way with words can lift me out of the blackest moods.

   In the 1970′s one of my main interests was collecting the Dell mapbacks. I remember at one point in the 1990′s I figured I had them all, but I’ve lost interest over the last decade or so and now I’m not sure. In the 70′s and even 80′s I was getting some good trades for my duplicates, including some original cover paintings.

   Now, I’m not even sure I could get $5 each. I know at Pulpcon about 5 years ago, I had a table full of vintage paperbacks priced at $5 each and no one was interested except for the Guest of Honor. Larry Niven was so bored and ignored by pulp collectors that he wandered over and bought one paperback to read.

   At the paperback show in NYC I saw many Dell Mapbacks priced at a couple bucks each.

   The Doc asks about the prices of vintage paperbacks over the years. There are some exceptions of course with certain authors and oddball titles, but as a general rule and across the board, paperback prices have indeed gone down over the years.

   I first started to seriously collect paperbacks in the 1960′s and 1970′s. I soon had enough Ace Doubles, Gold Medals, Dell Mapbacks, Signets, etc to fill what I call my paperback room. Many genres and titles would not fit into the room and are presently stored in my basement, such as western, SF, and mainstream novels.

   At one time back in the 1970′s, I thought that prices would increase on vintage paperbacks but I was disappointed to find out that they decreased over the years. The internet probably had something to do with this because abebooks.com and ebay made it obvious that many paperbacks were not as rare as we once believed.

   For instance before the internet I sold the 13 Hammett digest-sized paperbacks for a few hundred dollars. But after the internet it was apparent that these paperbacks were not rare (Jonathan Press, Mercury, Bestseller). Now they are available at far lower prices.

   Each year I attend the NYC Paperback Convention put on by Gary Lovisi. There have been over 20 annual shows. The last few years the average price of many vintage paperbacks were a dollar or two. Many were priced at 2 or 3 for $5.00. Discounts were available for quantity buyers. I found the same thing at the Windy City Pulp Convention and PulpFest.

   As I said, there are exceptions like Junkie and Jim Thompson firsts. But for the most part, paperback values have gone down since the 1970′s and 1980′s. In fact they have dropped so much that it’s not worth my time to bring them to sell at the conventions at $5 each. They won’t sell at that price and to sell at a buck or two is just like giving them away. I’ll keep them instead.

   ____

Editorial Comment: This latest installment of Walker’s occasional columns for Mystery*File first appeared as a pair of comments following a review by Bill Deeck of Murders at Scandal House (1933) by the all-but-unknown Peter Hunt. What prompted a followup discussion of old paperbacks and the people who collect them was the fact that the most easily found copy of Scandal House would be the Dell mapback edition (#42) published in 1944.

   During 2012 I spent more time on Ellery Queen than on any other author or character. I hadn’t planned to tackle another Queen project so soon after completing The Art of Detection, but over the holidays I did. A few months ago Joseph Goodrich, editor of the book of selections from the correspondence between Fred Dannay and Manny Lee that was published as Blood Relations (2012), had generously sent me a 97,500-word document containing virtually all of Manny’s letters to Fred, far more material than there was room for in the book.

   I had done some organizing and rearranging and had added a number of bracketed annotations explaining obscure points in the letters but I hadn’t yet made myself thoroughly familiar with the material. This I set out to do over the holidays. Some remarkable discoveries rewarded me. Here’s one of them.

   Among the many problems Fred had to deal with as founding editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine was figuring out who would take over in that capacity if he were to die or become disabled. Manny had no interest in short detective fiction and very little editorial experience, but neither man relished the prospect of the magazine being run by a stranger. So, for a short time anyway, Manny was sent some of the stories submitted to EQMM and undertook to write comments on them for Fred.

   Among those he evaluated was a 57-page manuscript by Charlotte Armstrong (1905-1969), who was best known for the spectacularly successful suspense novel The Unsuspected (1946). “Night Mustn’t Fall” begins when a dog is found poisoned in a quiet suburban neighborhood one summer Saturday afternoon. A young visitor named Mike Russell tries to help its 11-year-old owner and his sixth-grade buddies find out whether the poisoner was the homeowner on whose lot the dog was found — and with whom most of the neighborhood kids had had run-ins — or someone else.

   Manny found many things wrong with the tale. In a letter dated April 29, 1950, he agreed with Fred that the story was “at times too sentimental and gushy” and that its “psychological and emotional aspects are over-inflated.” He also considered it far too long. “I could guarantee to take this manuscript as it now stands, without changing one word…, and cut its 57 pages down to, say, 30 (or less!) and thereby improve it one thousand percent. It is repetitious throughout, and whatever is good in the writing is blunted by the sheer bludgeon blows of over-and-over-again.”

   But, he went on, “the story is worth saving. It has its potentialities, certainly, not the least of which is the kernel of its message, which is that truth is a hard job and that children have to be trained to look for truth … and that if more children were so trained, this would be a far different adult world.”

   After some conversations with Fred, Armstrong resubmitted her story as ”The Enemy.” It was published under that title (EQMM, May 1951), won first prize in the magazine’s annual short-story contest, and a few years later became the basis for a feature-length movie (Talk About a Stranger, 1954). The story is included in Armstrong’s collection The Albatross (1957).

   From reading the published version it’s clear that she thoroughly cut, revised and improved the manuscript Manny read. The repetitious writing has been eliminated, the emotions are tightly controlled as in Hemingway or Hammett. Manny had complained that altogether too many people in the neighborhood were able to tell Russell and the boys at exactly what time they had seen the dog, but apparently Fred wasn’t bothered by this point.

   What puzzles me is the number of plot flaws that survived the revision. One minuscule problem: The story needs to take place on a Saturday because the boys couldn’t be on the scene if it were a schoolday. But near the end we learn that one of the witnesses who noticed the dog before its death was a girl had a sore throat that day and was sitting on her porch, “waiting for school to be out, when she expected her friends to come by.”

   A much more serious flaw to my mind is in the solution, which I must reveal in part if I’m to discuss the story seriously. The man on whose property the dog’s body was found lives with his wheelchair-bound wife and crippled stepdaughter. At the climax we discover that when he went out to play golf that Saturday morning, the younger woman, who cooks for the three of them, gave him a lunch box containing hamburger sandwiches laced with arsenic.

   Unable to stomach her cooking, the lucky man ate out. But instead of disposing of the burgers in a trash can like any normal person, he brought them home and threw them onto the empty lot next to his house, where the unlucky dog found them and died minutes later! “The Enemy” is a fine story overall, but was it the best choice for first prize winner?

   I hadn’t read one of John Rhode’s detective novels about Dr. Lancelot Priestley in several years. Over the holidays I decided it was time to revisit that curmudgeonly old amateur of crime and chose Death on the Boat Train (1940), which I’d first read in my teens but had completely forgotten long before the 21st century began.

   At the end of a train’s run between the English Channel port of Southampton and London’s Waterloo Station, the body of a poorly dressed man is found in a first-class compartment and Inspector Jimmy Waghorn of Scotland Yard is summoned. The cause of death turns out to be a poison called ricin which was injected into the man’s butt (which Rhode discreetly calls “the right-hand side of the back”) with a hypodermic syringe.

   The victim turns out to be steel magnate Sir Hesper Bassenthwaite, who for some obscure reason had chosen to travel on the Channel steamer from the island of Guernsey to Southampton and then on the Southampton-Waterloo boat train more or less in disguise. Since Sir Hesper had had a compartment to himself both on the steamer and the train, how could anyone have injected poison into his kiester without his knowledge? In due course Waghorn and his boss, Superintendent Hanslet, drop in on Priestley to discuss the case over dinner and drinks and their host, true to form, offers one inspired suggestion after another.

   Death on the Boat Train is among the more solidly plotted Rhodes but, as always, the characters are wooden and the prose leaden. (In the novel’s innumerable Q&A sequences anyone’s answer to a question is followed by the words “he [or she] replied.” It was my noticing that the same linguistic oddity infested the detective novels of another Golden Ager, Miles Burton, that allowed me to deduce, way back in the Pleistocene era, that Rhode and Burton were the same man.)

   What most surprised me about the book is that amid the dry-as-dust exposition and dialogue are a few gaffes almost in the Mike Avallone league. “‘I seem to remember that at one time you knew how to make unprotected females unbosom themselves.’” (219) “She returned her shoulder to him and read a few lines of her magazine.” (221) “His glance wavered round the room as though seeking some form of liquid refreshment.” (273) “Late that night a very weary Jimmy unbosomed himself into Diana’s sympathetic ears.” (281)

   Could this most staid and stolid of English crime novelists have been fixated on a certain body part which shall be nameless?

   While working on the last tedious chores in connection with ELLERY QUEEN: THE ART OF DETECTION, which will come out in January, I expected to devote my final column of the year to someone besides EQ. Almost anyone. But back in October Joseph Goodrich — a name you’re familiar with if you read this column regularly — emailed me a long document consisting of a large number of letters from Manny Lee to Fred Dannay that for space and other reasons he hadn’t included in BLOOD RELATIONS, his collection of the correspondence between the cousins whose byline was Ellery Queen.

   Many of these letters were undated, those that had dates were often out of chronological order, typos abounded, but — Wow! For the next few weeks I alternated between slogging away at the ART OF DETECTION index and working on the Lee document: reorganizing, trying to date the letters that were dateless, adding material in brackets to explain (where I could) who or what Manny was talking about, doing pretty much the same things Joe Goodrich himself had done so well in BLOOD RELATIONS.

   One item I discovered I was able to work into the text of my book at the last minute. The earliest letter in the document dates from very late 1940. Fred Dannay had recently been discharged from the hospital after suffering serious injuries in an auto accident. Manny’s letter mentions that among the people who had called asking about Fred was one Laurence Smith, whom he identifies as the ghost writer behind the then recently published novelization based on the movie ELLERY QUEEN, MASTER DETECTIVE (1940).

   Laurence Dwight Smith (1895-1952) has long been forgotten but a few minutes with Google brings him back to life. Under his own name he wrote four or five whodunits, several mystery/adventure books for young adults, and a few nonfiction books like CRYPTOGRAPHY: THE SCIENCE OF SECRET WRITING (1943) and COUNTERFEITING: CRIME AGAINST THE PEOPLE (1944). His short story “Seesaw” was one of the first originals to be published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (July 1942). What else he may have written under other bylines, or even whether he ghosted the other EQ movie novelizations, THE PENTHOUSE MYSTERY (1941) and THE PERFECT CRIME (1942), remains unknown.

   It’s long been known that Fred Dannay devised the plots for the Ellery Queen novels, stories and radio dramas and Manny Lee did the actual writing — and also that at a certain point in the nine-year life of the radio series Fred, whose wife had been diagnosed with cancer that eventually (on July 4, 1945) killed her, couldn’t perform his function any longer.

   Exactly when that happened would remain unclear today except for the Lee document. In a letter written on June 30, 1948, shortly after the Queen radio program was cancelled, Manny mentions that he had taken over the series “in January of 1944, when you dropped out of active work.” For most of that year, Manny reminds Fred, he made do by recycling 30-minute scripts from earlier seasons and condensing some of the original 60-minute scripts (1939-40) to half-hour length.

   Eventually, Manny says, he “began doing originals from bought material.” When? In October 1944, at the start of the program’s fifth season. Does this mean that every new weekly episode from then on was based on a plot synopsis by someone other than Fred? Not at all! Manny’s correspondence with Anthony Boucher informs us that Fred was several synopses ahead of schedule at the time he dropped out.

   These Manny squirreled away and fleshed out into scripts over the next two years, the last one (“The Doomed Man”) being broadcast late in August 1946. But most if not all of the new scripts for the fifth season were probably based on “bought material.”

   Bought from whom? For the first several months of the new regime, the plots were devised by a long forgotten scribe named Tom Everitt. Even in the age of the Internet almost nothing is known about this man, but we know a great deal about what Manny thought of him because his letters to Boucher are full of snarky remarks about Everitt’s competence and character. On May 24, 1945, he described himself as “hating [Everitt’s] smug, treacherous guts” and Everitt’s recent plot synopses as “sloppier…even than usual….”

   His letters to Fred Dannay in the Lee document offer more of the same. On November 4, 1947, he called Everitt “a son-of-a-bitch” who at the rate of $400 per synopsis got “tremendously overpaid” even though “the bulk of the creative work was done by me, out of sheer necessity….[Y]ou don’t know the things…that bastard has been saying and is still saying in the advertising business about his ‘part’ in the Queen show. There is no protection against his kind of conscienceless and unscrupulously shrewd self-propaganda….”

   Manny would love to have worked exclusively with Boucher but Tony was unable to come up with complex Ellery Queen plots on a one-a-week basis and Manny had no choice but to continue buying from Everitt until late in the program’s radio life.

   At least 33 of the Queen scripts between January 1945 and September 1947 came from Everitt raw material and are identified as such in my book THE SOUND OF DETECTION (2002). Most of the scripts between October 1944 and mid-June 1945, when the first episode based on a Boucher plot was broadcast, were probably derived from Everitt too. “Cleopatra’s Snake” (October 12 and 14, 1944) finds Ellery as backstage observer at a live production of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA for experimental TV when the genuine poisonous snake being used in the death scene (yeah, right) bites to death the actress playing Cleopatra.

   In “The Glass Sword” (November 30 and December 2, 1944) Ellery tackles the case of the circus sword swallower who died when the sword in his stomach broke while the lights were out. These concepts strike me as way too wacko to have come from the mind of Fred Dannay. Therefore they almost certainly came from Everitt.

   The vast majority of Everitt-based EQ episodes have never been published as scripts and don’t survive on audio. But it now seems quite possible that one of them was mistaken for a Dannay-based episode and published a few years ago — as the title story in the collection THE ADVENTURE OF THE MURDERED MOTHS (Crippen & Landru, 2005). The episode with that title was broadcast on May 9, 1945. The plot is nowhere near as off-the-wall as those of “Cleopatra’s Snake” or “The Glass Sword” and therefore might be one of those Fred completed before he left the series. We just don’t know. Maybe we never will.

        #16. Detective X. Crook, by J. Jefferson Farjeon.

   Detective X. Crook is another of the many series characters in Flynn’s/Detective Fiction Weekly. He appeared in 57 stories from 1925-29, all written by the English detective story novelist J(oseph) Jefferson Farjeon (June 4, 1883-June 6, 1955).

   Farjeon was a descendant of Thomas Jefferson, and was named after his maternal grandfather, Joseph Jefferson, a well-known actor of the time. One of his works, “Number 17”, was originally a stage played that was filmed twice: once in 1928 and the second time in 1932 by Hitchcock. Three other films were also based upon some of his approximately eighty books. He also wrote a novelisation of the thriller movie The Last Journey. This was published in No. 398, July 18, 1936 issue of The Thriller, a weekly fiction magazine published in the UK.

   His sister was Eleanor Farjeon, author of works for children. One brother was Herbert Farjeon, a playwright. Another brother was Harry Farjeon, a musician. Their father was novelist Benjamin Farjeon (1838-1903). It is clear that this was a literary family, and to get an idea of the author’s first twenty years see the book written by sister Eleanor: Portrait of a Family (1936) in the US, A Nursery in the Nineties (1935) in the UK. It gives a good insight into their younger years up to about the age of twenty. As teenagers, Jefferson and his brother Herbert edited and wrote a very small circulation magazine, undoubtedly giving them some experience they would use in later years.

   The X. Crook stories that appeared in Flynn’s/DFW is an average series that seems to have been popular enough to have run into quite a few tales. The mysteries in the stories are often simple and tame, and their solution by X. Crook is mostly a bit too plodding. However, there are some stories that stand out for their exceptions to the above, and many of these are later in the series.

   From what I can determine from very little information, most or all of the stories had previously appeared in the magazines Pictorial Magazine and Pictorial Weekly in Britain. “The Fourth Attempt” appeared in the British magazine Pictorial Magazine, August 28, 1926 issue. It then appeared in the July 9, 1927 issue of Flynn’s.

   The main character is something of a two dimensional personality, and really very little is made known about him throughout the series. In fact, his blandness and personality are such that he tends to blend into the background. From his name, it is clear that he is not using his real name. Crook is a reformed criminal who, upon release from prison for some unnamed offense, changes his name and takes up the profession of private detective. He means to start a new life and cut off ties from the old law-breaking ways.

   In a number of stories he meets up with former acquaintances, but his real name is not mentioned. He has good relations with the police, after proving his true reformation. His viewpoint in his new life is pointed out in one of the stories: “My second duty is to my clients, my first to justice and humanity.” And “Theoretically they are the same,” he answered, “but as we practice them they sometimes differ…” (Elsie Cuts Both Ways).

   Later in the story he tells a criminal he is trying to reform: “. . . and my life’s work is to try and help those who, like myself, are trying to wipe out their old mistakes.” He tends to make optimistic sayings to criminals, trying to convert them. When speaking of time in prison, he states: “There is always hope, when one comes out,” said Crook. “Always.” (The Hotel Hold-Up)

   This new life means new ways of thinking and behaving. In one story (Darkness), Crook became involved in trying to prevent a murder, and found himself becoming angry: “Blackguards!” he muttered, and, for a moment, almost saw red. But he stamped out his emotion, for that interfered with clear thought and intelligent action.

   In another informative paragraph there is a bit more about his new attitude in this new life of fighting crime:

   The first story in the series appeared in the June 20, 1925 issue: “Red Eye”. One of the regulars in the early stories was Edgar Jones, Scotland Yard detective. He worked in Crook’s household as a butler under the name William Thomas. He was certain that Crook was still a criminal, and determined to get the evidence.

   It is very similar situation to the one in the Lester Leith series written by Erle Stanley Gardner, which also appeared in this same magazine later. And like that series, the employer (Crook) knows that the servant is a detective but does not let him know that.

   In the first group of stories from 1925, X. Crook is still developing his reputation and proving to the police that he is really a reformed person. This came to a climax with the story “Thomas Doubts No Longer”. In this story some criminals and former associates of Crook give him an ultimatum, demanding that he give up trying to be honest and come back to their gang. He refuses, causing the criminals to try to frame him. He resolves that to the satisfaction of the police, who doubt him no longer. The fake butler becomes Crook’s assistant, but soon disappears from the series.

   In the story “Elsie Cuts Both Ways”, Crook finds himself the victim of a plot by criminals to revenge themselves upon him. However, Crook is not easily fooled and the criminals wind up captured by the police and himself. Not a totally satisfying story, and it does not bother to explain on what grounds the criminals are arrested because they actually did nothing criminal.

   Farjeon presents small puzzles in many of the stories, and Crook usually solves these fairly easily, though occasionally one presents a harder solution. These puzzles are not where the clues are given to the reader in the Golden Age of Detection style. Crook takes on cases of many kinds, from searching for missing persons to catching thieves and murderers. He occasionally becomes involved in crimes by accident, such as in “The Hotel Hold-up”. This is a very short story which shows Crook at his best, outwitting a criminal with ease. Though he is now a great believer in honesty, Crook does admire cleverness in his opponents and notes this here.

   Unlike many other crime solvers of this period, Crook does not work on cases for only the well off and higher classes (for example, see the Dr. Eustace Hailey series). He will take cases from lower class shopkeepers and ordinary workers. A good example of this kind of case is “The Absconding Treasurer” (July 23, 1927), where the Christmas fund of a number of people is missing. The amount involved is less than one hundred pounds, so this shows Crook does not let this low amount influence his decision to take the case. He doesn’t mention a fee in this case, so he might have done it for a nominal or no fee at all.

   He mentions in one story that he “never ate heavily when engaged on a case” (The New Baronet). There is little or no violence in most of the cases he works on, like many other stories in Flynn’s at this time. That degree of violence in the magazine gradually changed over a period of time, until by the early 1930s there was plenty of violence, like many other detective pulps.

    However, to show that the Crook stories didn’t need to be violent to be effective, see the September 3, 1927 story, “The Man Who Forgot”. While in Dulverley on a case, Crook is sitting on a seashore bench. Another man also on the bench strikes up a conversation with Crook, revealing that he is an amnesiac. The conversation between the two, steered by Crook’s questions, gradually reveals information about the man. The two leave the bench and backtrack the amnesiac’s trail in an effort to learn the truth about him. They uncover the truth and discover a crime, but Crook’s optimism about people gives the story a kind of upbeat ending.

   Some of the stories are excellent, without any of the faults noted. “The Stolen Hand Bag” in the March 19, 1927 issue, is an example. Crook overhears a restaurant conversation about a woman’s handbag theft, and shortly afterwards comes the news of the suicide of a baronet nearby. He sees a connection between the two events, and his investigation proves it.

   This investigation involves Crook working with the police investigator on the case. In a number of cases, showing his standing and reputation with the police, Crook was called in or called himself in to work on a police case. Crook also worked with the police on a case of apparent suicide in “No Motive Apparent”, another of the better stories. In this story, it was noted:

   The characters and stories are nothing like Farjeon’s novels. Having read Greenmask and The 5:18 Mystery, the difference is clearly seen. The lead characters in both novels are young men who accidentally happen into mysteries, and also into romantic entanglements. They are caught up in mysterious affairs out of their control, similar to the plots of a number of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies.

   Farjeon is noted in one source as “one of the first detective writers to mingle romance with crime.” This may be true of his novels, but not in the Detective X. Crook series. No romance ever creeps into Crook’s life. He seems to have come to terms with the way the world is and has devoted his life to criminology. Sounds like some of the other manhunters of the pulp era.

   Other novels were not as the two described above. One of his later novels was Aunt Sunday Takes Command (1940), involving three elderly women taking a trip to visit their niece and inadvertently becoming involved in crime. A rather low-key story, unlike the other two described.

   The mystery writer Dorothy Sayers considered Farjeon one of her favorite writers (Crime Time, “Reviewing The Reviewer: Dorothy L Sayers as crime critic 1933 – 1935″, by Mike Ripley). However, nowadays he seems to be a forgotten writer, and the Crook stories seem rather dated in comparison to some of his novels. Not having access to all of his books, it is not known as to whether the stories were ever gathered in collection form, though it would take more than one book to do so. However, Farjeon has quite a long list of published books so one of them may contain some of these stories.

       The Detective X. Crook series by J. Jefferson Farjeon:

Red Eye June 20, 1925
The Bilton Safe June 27, 1925
The Way to Death July 4, 1925
Thomas Doubts No Longer July 11, 1925
Fisherman’s Luck July 18, 1925
Where the Treasure Is August 1, 1925
The Hidden Death August 8, 1925
Nine Hours to Live August 22, 1925
Elsie Cuts Both Ways August 29, 1925
Crook’s Code December 19, 1925
Percy the Pickpocket December 26, 1925
A Race for Life January 2, 1926
Seeing’s Believing January 9, 1926
The Deserted Inn January 23, 1926
Death’s Grim Symbol February 6, 1926
Crook Goes Back to Prison April 10, 1926
Who Killed James Fyne April 17, 1926
Caleb Comes Back April 24, 1926
The Vanished Gift May 1, 1926
The Death That Beckoned May 15, 1926
Footprints in the Snow July 17, 1926
The Shadow July 24, 1926
Cats Are Evil August 14, 1926
The Silent House August 28, 1926
The Kleptomaniac September 18, 1926
The Knife October 23, 1926
The Hotel Hold-up November 20, 1926
The Silent Client November 27, 1926
Darkness December 11, 1926
It Pays To Be Honest December 18, 1926
Kidnaped December 25, 1926
Whose Hand? January 8, 1927
The Datchett Diamond January 29, 1927
Vanishing Gems February 5, 1927
The Murder Club February 26, 1927
LQ585 March 5, 1927
The Stolen Hand Bag March 19, 1927
Prescription 93b March 26, 1927
The Thing in the Room May 7, 1927
In the Diamond Line May 28, 1927
The New Baronet June 4, 1927
The Fourth Attempt July 9, 1927
The Absconding Treasurer July 23, 1927
The Man Who Forgot September 3, 1927
No Motive Apparent September 24, 1927
The Cleverness of Crockett October 29, 1927
August 13th September 8, 1928
The Photograph September 15, 1928
Between Calais and Dover September 22, 1928
The Bloodstained Handkerchief October 6, 1928
Wanted October 13, 1928
The Third Act December 29, 1928
The Secret of the Snow February 9, 1929
Open Warfare February 16, 1929
The Photographic Touch March 9, 1929
The “Times” Advertisement March 30, 1929
The Golden Idol April 13, 1929

    Previously in this series:

1. SHAMUS MAGUIRE, by Stanley Day.
2. HAPPY McGONIGLE, by Paul Allenby.
3. ARTY BEELE, by Ruth & Alexander Wilson.
4. COLIN HAIG, by H. Bedford-Jones.
5. SECRET AGENT GEORGE DEVRITE, by Tom Curry.
6. BATTLE McKIM, by Edward Parrish Ware.
7. TUG NORTON by Edward Parrish Ware.
8. CANDID JONES by Richard Sale.
9. THE PATENT LEATHER KID, by Erle Stanley Gardner.
10. OSCAR VAN DUYVEN & PIERRE LEMASSE, by Robert Brennan.
11. INSPECTOR FRAYNE, by Harold de Polo.
12. INDIAN JOHN SEATTLE, by Charles Alexander.
13. HUGO OAKES, LAWYER-DETECTIVE, by J. Lane Linklater.
14. HANIGAN & IRVING, by Roger Torrey.
15. SENOR ARNAZ DE LOBO, by Erle Stanley Gardner.