Sat 21 Feb 2015
Mystery Review: ROBERT ARCHER – The Case of the Vanishing Women.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews[5] Comments
ROBERT ARCHER – The Case of the Vanishing Women. Howell Soskin, hardcover, 1942. Handi-Book #10, paperback, 1943 (probably abridged).
According to Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, Robert Archer was the author of one other mystery under this pen name, Death on the Waterfront (Doubleday, 1941) and a third as by Robert Platt: The Swaying Corpse (Phoenix, 1941). Archer’s real name was Robert Vern DeWard, about whom Google reveals only that he was “born in Iowa on 8 Aug 1894 to Robert Archer and Addie Platt. Robert Vern married Ruby Fay Harris and had a child. He passed away on 4 Apr 1984 in Los Angeles, California.”
This case of the “vanishing women” is tackled head-on by a pair of sleuths who as far I know were never involved in another. The story is told by a newspaperman named Marty Prentiss, just back in town (New York City) and trying to make a name for himself again by tagging along with a cop named Tiny Tim Lannahan when an unidentified body on a pier jutting into the North River along Manhattan’s west side.
But Prentiss’s actual companion in solving the crime is a PI named John Stacy, whose path crosses that of Prentiss as he’s working on a kidnapping case that has led him into the same area along the docks. Missing is the adopted daughter of a well-known inventor who has plans for a weapons system for submarines that enemy agents would just love to get their hands on.
Could the dead man be the inventor? The girl, once rescued, says yes. The man’s wife, once found, says no. And both the girl and the man’s wife seem to go missing every so often again, hence the title, but as titles go, it’s still a rather uninspired one.
And so seems the case. A lot appears to be happening in a big chunk of the middle part of the book, but if you were to stop reading and think about it, you’d realize how much wheel spinning has really been going on.
Nor does the writing ever seem inspired. It’s competent enough, in a semi-breezy style that’s better then 80% of the pulp detective fiction that was being written at the time, but it’s nowhere nearly as well done as the work usually turned in by the guys who wrote for Black Mask, for example.
Until the ending, that is, when Prentiss finally shows he hasn’t been sleeping all the way the case. (A bad metaphor. He actually doesn’t get a lot of sleep in this book.) I’m still not sure if the pieces all fit together, but Archer definitely had had something up his sleeve all along, and it shows. Not a classic, by any means, but as a detective novel, it’s a memorable one.
February 21st, 2015 at 11:06 pm
I don’t know when I bought the hardcover edition of this book, but I came across it in a storage box the other day and thought since nobody else had probably read it in the last 30 or 40 years, I ought to give it a try.
It was slow going for a while, but I’m very happy I didn’t give up on it. The ending is well worth waiting for.
I don’t have a copy of the paperback handy, but I’m fairly sure all of the early Handi-Book reprints were condensed. It’s also one of those paperbacks that’s harder to find than the hardcover. The cheapest one on abebooks is double the price asked for a decent copy of the hardcover.
February 22nd, 2015 at 12:57 am
One from Phoenix House and Howel and Soskin, and Handi Books doesn’t bode particularly well for this, plus this is one I absolutely never heard of before.
Still, if you say it has merits I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. I enjoyed a couple by James O’Hanlon so who am I to judge?
I think I might read it, but I can’t see to going to the trouble to buy one if you know what I mean. I’m not that much of a completist.
February 22nd, 2015 at 1:30 pm
The gamut of publishers Archer’s book came out from caught my eye, too. Phoenix and Doubleday were nearly polar opposites, in terms of the mysteries they did, Phoenix well toward the bottom end, and Doubleday’s Crime Club somewhere toward the top. Howell and Soskin seemed to be most active in the 1940s, mostly non-fiction as far as I’ve bee able to learn, but they did a small handful of mysteries too. Mostly of them are as unknown as Archer, maybe even more so, but they did one by Gavin Holt, and believe it or not, two first American hardcover editions by James Hadley Chase, No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1952) and Twelve Chinks and a Woman (1941).
February 22nd, 2015 at 2:21 pm
David, Even if you don’t care to read this you will at least know something about it from having read the review. This blog is a real time saver for me and many like me in that respect.
February 22nd, 2015 at 4:18 pm
Randy
I agree. It’s just unusual for me to stumble on one I simply never heard of whatsoever from this period.