Tue 9 Jun 2020
Pulp PI Stories I’m Reading: ROBERT WALLACE “The Mark of the Beast.”
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[7] Comments
ROBERT WALLACE “The Mark of the Beast.” Dexter Wynne #1. First published in Thrilling Detective, February 1933. Facsimile edition published by Adventure House, paperback, January 2012.
Robert Wallace is a house name known to have been assigned to the work of eight or more authors. Unless there is someone who reads this and knows, I have no way of telling you which one of them wrote this particular story.
Billed as “a complete book-length novel,” it is the longest story in the magazine, but even so, it takes up only 33 pages. In it, private eye Dexter Wynne is asked by a client to check into a mysterious telegram from his sister, telling him that she is afraid of something in the mysterious house where she is living with their stepfather.
Wynne asks his client, Harry Bates to stay while he investigates, but when he gets there, he find Bates has gotten there ahead of him, dead on the road, with half his face torn away. More than one death follows, making the guilty person all the more apparent as soon there is no one left to suspect. Lots of hidden passageways add to the atmosphere, or at least that was the intent. The build-up to the conclusion fails badly, with a rather prosaic explanation making the whole affair rather shoddy and shopworn.
I have not said anything about Dexter Wynne, the PI in this tale, and whose only appearance this probably was. There is a reason for that. There is nothing to say. His name could have been chosen out of a hat.
It is wonderful to have artifacts such as the magazine this story first appeared in reproduced in such a beautiful format, but I’ve sampled the rest of the stories in it, and I haven’t found any of them to be any better than this one. Not all of the detective pulps published in 1933 were of Black Mask caliber.
Complete contents:
The Mark of the Beast by Robert Wallace
The Banding Murder Case by Allan K. Echols
The Black Ram by Perley Poore Sheehan
The Face That Came Back by Wayne Rogers
The Den of Skulls by Jack D’Arcy
Death Talks Backs by John H. Compton
The Trail of the White Gardenia by Donald Bayne Hobart
The Coward by Ken Rockwell
Reflections by John Lawrence
The Crumpled Clue by J.S. Endicott
June 9th, 2020 at 10:53 am
Whoever actually wrote this must have seen The Philadelphia Story and thought Dexter a cute name; it was when Cary Grant played him, anywhere else, it should be reserved for a puppy.
June 9th, 2020 at 11:24 am
That’s an interesting theory, Barry, but the timing just doesn’t work. The story was written in 1933, and Cary Grant played Dexter Haven in 1940. Dexter really is a strange name for a private eye, though. It sounds way too high toned for me. But I suppose society people sometimes need PI’s too.
June 9th, 2020 at 1:38 pm
I suppose underlying my observation about The Philadlephia Story is that Dexter is a ridiculous sounding name but played for romantic comedy, in at least that one instance, can be charmingly effective. For a private detective….justification required.
June 9th, 2020 at 6:58 pm
Dexter used to be a common name without the connotations it has today. Believe it or not people were actually named Ellery, Philo, Gaylord, Bruce, and Percival with no satiric context.
It only takes one movie, book, or comic book though to change the context of a name forever. I say this as the son of a man whose middle name was Edsel.
June 9th, 2020 at 7:05 pm
Right. I even listen to a jazz saxophonist named Dexter all the time.
On the other hand, Corliss Archer’s boy friend was named Dexter. I think the name’s popularity faded fast around that time. Then Dexter Morgan came along.
June 10th, 2020 at 2:29 am
I went to elementary school with a kid named Adolf in the early sixties. His parents were recent German immigrants to Canada. Apparently being tone deaf didn’t disqualify them.
Wait a minute? Ellery, Philo, Gaylord, and Percival I understand, but Bruce?
June 12th, 2020 at 10:12 pm
The more serious treatment of Batman in films finally redeemed Bruce, but there was a period when the name Bruce was usually associated with a limp wrist (thank God that sort of stereotyping is no longer as common or as vicious). I don’t know exactly why, but when I was growing up unless your last name was Wayne you really didn’t want to be a Bruce.