Tue 22 Dec 2020
Pulp PI Stories I’m Reading: T. T. FLYNN “The Deadly Orchid.â€
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[15] Comments
T. T. FLYNN “The Deadly Orchid.†Trixie Meehan & Mike Harris #1. First published in Detective Fiction Weekly, April 15, 1933. Reprinted in The Pulps, edited by Tony Goldstone (Chelsea House, hardcover, 1970) and Hard-Boiled Dames, edited by Bernard Drew (St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, 1986).
I have written about the bickering pair of PI’s by the name of Trixie Meehan and Mike Harris before. You can find my review of “Barred Doors,†the seventh in the series, here. To recap quickly, though, they both work for the Blaine Agency and are always casting barbs at each other – in a friendly way, you know — or at least I think so.
In this, their first appearance, they go undercover in a plush hotel disguised as husband and wife (but in a suite of adjoining rooms, with a lock on the door between them). With the benefit of an unlimited expense account, they also are pretending to be a fabulously wealthy pair of Texans (oil money), and living it up greatly.
Their target: a incredulously beautiful wisp of a girl, nicknamed the Orchid, who is also a notorious blackmailer who has also been known to kill her victims when things don’t work out perfectly with one of her schemes.
Mike is the one who tells the story and the one who works up the plan to discover where the love letters she is holding over her latest victim are located, but Trixie is no slouch either when she is needed to take part in the action.
There’s not a lot of depth to the tale, but it’s smoothly told, in something of a screwball story sort of way. Somebody really ought to put together a complete collection of their adventures together.
The Mike Harris & Trixie Meehan stories –
The Deadly Orchid (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly Apr 15 1933
Falling Death (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Oct 28 1933
Murder’s Masquerade (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Mar 31 1934
The Yin Shee Dragon (na) Detective Fiction Weekly Sep 29 1934
Murder Harbor (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Dec 1 1934
The City Hall Murders (na) Detective Fiction Weekly Mar 23 1935
Barred Doors (na) Detective Fiction Weekly May 18 1935
Nitro! Nitro! (na) Detective Fiction Weekly Apr 4 1936
The Letters and the Law (na) Detective Fiction Weekly Jun 27 1936
Abbey of the Damned (na) Detective Fiction Weekly Oct 30 1937
Murder Circus (na) Detective Fiction Weekly May 21 1938
The Secret of the Swamp (na) Detective Fiction Weekly Feb 25 1939
Brother Murder (na) Detective Fiction Weekly Dec 2 1939
Mike Finds Trouble (sl) Detective Fiction Weekly Aug 17 1940, etc.
Build Up for Murder (nv) Detective Fiction Aug 20 1941
Killer in the Clouds (ss) Detective Tales Mar 1951
December 22nd, 2020 at 7:54 pm
I wish a lot more Mike & Trixie tales were available too.
This one is lots of fun. (The whole “Hard-Boiled Dames” anthology is full of interesting work.)
December 22nd, 2020 at 8:23 pm
These really do have the feel of a good B programmer from the era, fast, crisp, smart, and just enough plot and action to keep you turning the pages.
December 22nd, 2020 at 8:49 pm
Now that you mention it, yes! There isn’t quite enough plot in this one to be filmed scene for scene, but with a little bit of padding added to the squabbling protagonists and the glamorous villainess, plus the flashy setting and the sparkling diamonds used as bait, it would be a natural.
December 22nd, 2020 at 9:45 pm
I’m a bit late to this party. The Mike and Trixie stories are fun, and even though this depends on a creaky old device I first encountered in A Scandal in Bohemia, Flynn’s storytelling keeps you going through rapidly.
Detective Fiction Weekly in the early to mid 1930s was full of these fun series, a drastic change from the stodgy English cozies of years past. All due to editor Howard Bloomfield.
What series! Erle Stanley Gardner’s Lester Leith. Flynn’s Mike and Trixie. Richard Sale’s Daffy Dill. Stories by Max Brand and Cornell Woolrich.
A great magazine at that time. I was lucky enough to find a few (but not a complete run) at a reasonable price. I hope you didn’t sell yours before reading them.
December 22nd, 2020 at 10:01 pm
DFW was always available at reasonable prices, until recently, and they still go for far less than either BLACK MASK’s or DIME DETECTIVE’s. Probably rightfully so, since those two were the absolute best, but the stories in DFW were no slouches in comparison. I may have owned two hundred of them at one time, maybe more, since it came out 52 times a year for many many years. But did I read them all before letting them find new homes? Alas not all of them!
December 22nd, 2020 at 11:41 pm
I have over 900 issues, most of the run. I’m missing a few issues at the end before it became a large size mens adventure magazine.
I talk about prices and collecting DFW at
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=5118
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:14 am
Based on your count of many issues there were, Walker, I’m going to update my estimate of how many DFW’s I had in my collection to somewhere between 300 and 400. I never had any interest in the early FLYNN’S issues, and the prevalence of too many serials discouraged me from buying too many when the going price was $1.00 an issue. On the other hand my teaching salary back then was less than 10% of my retirement income now.
December 23rd, 2020 at 12:20 am
Uh, oh. I’ve just taken a look at Walker’s DFW article, and all of the cover images have disappeared, and I mean completely. When I have a chance, I’ll have to replace them, but manually, from scratch, one at a time.
UPDATE. It looks like all of the images for that entire year are gone. This must have happened during the switch over to a new host for the blog, and I never noticed. EXPLETIVE DELETED.
December 23rd, 2020 at 1:21 am
Steve, I hope you find the time to restore the photos and cover images because they are so necessary to understanding much of what we talk about when we discuss pulp magazines.
But the photos are missing in recent posts also. For instance my review of Laurie Powers book on Daisy Bacon and Love Story lack the original cover images and photos.
December 23rd, 2020 at 11:41 am
Yes, you’re right. Images are missing all over the blog. I’ll get to the Daisy Bacon post ASAP. But so many images need fixing that I’ve had to make a choice. Spend blogging time fixing old posts or work on new ones, pretty much one or the other.
December 23rd, 2020 at 8:37 am
Might the original images be available, in versions stored in the Wayback Machine at archive.org? (I have no idea!)
December 23rd, 2020 at 11:46 am
Some images I still have myself. All it takes is adding “jpg” to the HTML code already present. But when the images have disappeared altogether, as with Walker’s DFW article, I have to start from scratch. I’ll check the Wayback Machine, though, and if it’s useful, it might move “from scratch” a step or two in the right direction.
December 25th, 2020 at 8:38 pm
Sai S. Wrote
“What series! Erle Stanley Gardner’s Lester Leith.”
I only recently discovered the Lester Leith stories. Enormous fun!
May 28th, 2021 at 7:47 am
A (Black) Gat in the Hand is about to make its annual summer return over at BlackGate.com. I think I’m going to kick it off with a Trixie and Mike story (‘Brother Moon’). I have Deadly Dames, and will mention ‘Deadly Orchid’ as well.
May 28th, 2021 at 9:50 am
Wonderful!