Sun 19 May 2019
Pulp PI Stories I’m Reading: WYNDHAM MARTYN “The Shadow’s Shadow.”
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[3] Comments
WYNDHAM MARTYN “The Shadow’s Shadow.” Novelette. Bentley Mayne & Captain Dashwood #1. First appeared in Flynn’s Weekly, 14 May 1927. Probably never reprinted.
Wyndham Martyn was the pen name that author William Henry Martin Hosken (1874-1963) seems to have used more often than several others. While he produced dozens of short stories for the pulps and other fiction magazines in the teens and 20s, Martyn may be more well known, if at all, for his long series of hardcover thrillers published in the UK featuring a master criminal named Anthony Trent, whose specialty was solving mysteries the police are having trouble with.
Other than three serialized novels for Flynn’s, Trent appeared in only one pulp magazine story. The private eye in “The Shadow’s Shadow” is a young fellow named Bentley Mayne, who has obtained a fine reputation for cleverness and success for the cases he’s worked on.
Enter steel magnate John Dawbarn, who has been trying to convince someone in Washington that his new method of processing steel is something our country’s government ought to have. Fearing that the secret may fall instead into enemy hands, Dawbarn calls on Mayne, who is happy to take the case.
But instead of working on it himself, he assigns an associate named Captain Dashwood to act as Dawbarn’s bodyguard. Dashwood is (um) a dashing Englishman in dapper dress and a monocle, and fits in well with Dawbarn’s society-minded wife’s life style.
After the secret plans is a master criminal known only as The Shadow (no relation to the fellow who came along later). The problem is, no one knows what he looks like. He could be anyone. Now Dashwood is competent enough, but his eye is as much on Dawbarn’s daughter Betty as on ferreting out who The Shadow might be or where he may strike next, but happily to say, both halves of the story work out well.
[PLOT ALERT] There is a strange twist in the tale that I ordinarily wouldn’t bring up, but since it may not be easy for yous to obtain the copy of Flynn’s the story is in, I have decided to tell you about it anyway. It seems that Mayne and Dashwood are one and the same. I haven’t decided what purpose the hoax is for — he doesn’t even tell Dawbarn what’s going on — but personally I think Dawbarn is something of a dolt to not to have recognized Mayne’s alter ego almost immediately.
But now that the impersonation has been revealed, it might explain why this was Bentley Mayne’s first and last appearance. That and the fact that at story’s end, he and Betty seem to be on their way to settling down in fine matrimonial fashion.
May 19th, 2019 at 10:48 pm
I still have my set of FLYNN’S and DFW but these early issues I consider to be almost unreadable and very dated. It was not until Howard Bloomfield came in mid-1928 and started to put some life in the stories that the magazine became really interesting. And even then it took him awhile to clear the decks of this bland and dull type of plot. Maybe by 1930 the magazine was more update.
May 19th, 2019 at 11:26 pm
Not your cup of tea, then, Walker? I can;t say I blame you, but I guess I was in the right mood for this one, since I kind of enjoyed it.
Not that I’d care to make a steady diet of vintage pulp material such as this, but I’ve been selling off my accumulation of several hundred FLYNN’S and DFW, and now that I’m down o only a couple of dozen, I thought I’d maybe finally try reading some.
This may be one of only a few FLYNN’S stories I’ve ever read, before it became DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY.
May 20th, 2019 at 12:06 am
I ran across a Wyndham Martyn story just the other day in an issue of JUNGLE sharing space with Ki-Gor. He had a long career, mostly with former cracksman turned adventurer Anthony Trent, who, if memory serves, had his last adventure in the late fifties or early sixties. Trent was eventually as likely to encounter a lost world as a criminal mastermind, but any series running that long has something going for it.
The handful I’ve read were entertaining, and his style improved over the years, though the early Trent’s were better than this sounds.
The first two Trent novels are fairly easy to find as free ebooks to read online or download.