Tue 21 Aug 2018
Pulp PI Stories I’m Reading: HARRY LYNCH “The Ape.”
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[9] Comments
HARRY LYNCH “The Ape.” John Jaffray #2. First published in Clues Detective Stories, May 1935.
In spite of reading and collecting pulp magazines for about 40 years, there always seem to be new authors to come across that I’d never heard of before. And of course what that means as well is that I’ve never heard of the characters they wrote about, either. Harry Lynch is such an author, and his series character, private eye John J. Jaffrey, is brand new to me too.
Jaffray is not in Lynch;s two dozen or so pulp stories; the list below of the ones he is known to be om comes from the online FictionMags Index, and may or may not be complete. (Identifying series characters in old and hard-to-find magazines such as Clues Detective Stories that are over 80 years old is not the easiest thing in the world to do.)
And given its age, “The Ape,” which is tentatively numbered two in the series, is certainly a relic of its time, but I enjoyed it. If you ever happen to come across a copy, I think you may too, especially if you like mystery stories with murderous apes in them, just as this one does. (No surprise there.)
It begins with Jaffrey on the trail of a wealthy businessman who has gone missing. Having been hired by the man’s partners, he has found someone to follow who may lead him to the man. But wouldn’t you just know it — the train they are on together derails and the man he is following is killed.
Obviously what Jaffray does next — you guessed it — he changes clothes with the dead man and under these false pretenses he is picked up by members of the gang who have abducted the man he is searching for, and off they go to their hideout. Then begins the wildest series of events you can ever image. First a dead man om a bier attended to by a beautiful Asian woman. Then a mad man in shackles who wanders around shooting bent pins with a rubber band. Plus another beautiful woman who seems to have been a captive of the gang and who spends much of the story totally nude. Then at last the leader of the gang who is totally blind.
And of course the ape, who fondly carries the head of a dead man around with him wherever he goes. What more could you want?
The John Jaffray stories —
Rattlesnake! (nv) Clues Detective Stories Dec 1934
The Ape (na) Clues Detective Stories May 1935
One Hour to Live (nv) Clues Detective Stories Jun 1935
Prevue of Hell (nv) Clues Detective Stories Aug 1935
Fury (ss) Clues Detective Stories Dec 1935
The Hooded Men (nv) Clues Detective Stories Apr 1936
Blast (nv) Clues Detective Stories Jul 1936
August 22nd, 2018 at 8:08 am
Damn that sounds fine. I remember commenting at the time that what the recent Royal Wedding really needed was a suit in an ape suit to give it a touch of class.
August 22nd, 2018 at 3:03 pm
I’ve read a lot of short stories over the years, maybe too many, as it takes something special to impress me any more. This one did — maybe for all the wrong reasons — but catch my attention? Yes!
August 22nd, 2018 at 1:57 pm
Great post. Who could possibly resist a story about a “murderous ape”? Not me for sure.
There doesn’t appear to be much info about Lynch online. In case anyone cares, Harry Milliard Lynch (1881-1936) was born, raised & died in Indiana. The earlier part of Lynch’s career was a fairly long stint in journalism, first at the Indianapolis Star (1900-1903), then the Kokomo Dispatch (1903-1905), and finally settling at the Kokomo Tribune (1905-1917). Lynch left journalism in 1917 to enter the advertising business. After establishing and operating his own agency for a few years, Lynch joined forces with a man named Ben Wilson to form a new one. The resulting firm, Lynch & Wilson, lasted until 1929; whether it was a casualty of the Crash is unclear. Lynch then joined Advertising Service, Inc., acting as a supervisor of its copy writing. Lynch remained there pretty much the rest of his life, although failing health (due to the heart condition that eventually killed him) resulted in increasing absences from the office.
It was during the Kokomo Tribune period that Lynch began to experiment with fiction. In 1909 he was a police reporter for the paper, and it was in that year that Lynch published his first story, “The Necklace of Happiness”, in Blue Book. According to later accounts Lynch had cherished the idea of writing stories from an early age. This first effort, however, remained almost the only one he published for some twenty years (the only exception I’ve so far discovered is the story he wrote for Clues in December of 1926). Lynch appears to have seriously returned to writing fiction only in the years after the dissolution of Lynch & Wilson in 1929. It was during the last seven years of his life that almost all of the stories attributed to him were written and published.
Incidentally, Lynch apparently made no attempt to hide his work for the pulps; it not only bore his own name, but local clippings make it clear that the fact was well known in Kokomo. One example is a snippet in the June 18, 1932 issue of the Kokomo Tribune which mentions the appearance of “The concluding part of the ‘Riddle of the Darkened Room’ by our own Harry Milliard Lynch in Real Detective Stories for July”
August 22nd, 2018 at 2:03 pm
My mistake; I hit submit without rereading what I wrote. In addition to the stories from 1909 and 1926, Lynch is known to have published three more in Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories in 1927.
August 22nd, 2018 at 3:01 pm
Jon
Thanks, Jon. For an author there isn’t much known about online, there certainly is now. Wonderful!
I considered looking online for information about him myself, but I quickly gave up on the idea. Harry Lynch is just too common a name.
If “The Ape” is an example of his over the top work, I’d welcome a reprint collection of all his Jaffray stories. I know I’d buy it!
August 22nd, 2018 at 3:08 pm
I’d buy it too!
You’re right about Harry Lynch; the name’s too common to make research easy. What turned the key was finding out that his middle name was Millard (which I see I misspelled in my original comment).
August 22nd, 2018 at 7:23 pm
There is always someone in some corner of pulpdom who comes as a revelation. I’ve recently been reading some of the aviation pulps (quite a few are spy and even detective tales or at least crime) and opened up a whole new world of authors, some whose name I knew, some who are new.
This sounds like one of those great pulp stories of a type that didn’t quite make the transition into the paperbacks which might have been sexier, but were certainly more staid when it came to the likes of grinning gorillas and mad apes.
August 23rd, 2018 at 10:39 am
Steve, Is that a typo in your list of the Jaffrey stories? It says “The Ape” (na). Should it be (nv)?
August 23rd, 2018 at 10:47 am
No, that’s correct. (na) on the FictionMags Index designates what they consider a novella. In magazine form, it’s 34 pages long, all pf which I should pointed out in my review.