Mon 13 Dec 2021
Pulp Stories I’m Reading: MADELEINE SHARPS BUCHANAN – The Subway Murder.
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[15] Comments
MADELEINE SHARPS BUCHANAN – The Subway Murder. NYPD Homicide Lt. Ransom #1. Serialized in five parts in Detective Fiction Weekly, February 8 through March 8, 1930. Hardcover editions: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1930; Grosset & Dunlap, no date stated.
If Lieutenant Ransom was given a first name in this better than average detective novel, first serialized in the pulp magazine Detective Fiction Weekly, I seem to have missed it. It’s also quite possible that this was not his first and only appearance in print, but I can’t find a reference to a later case he was involved in, or even an earlier one.
I’ve not been able to research this, but The Subway Murder may actually be the first defective mystery in which the victim is killed in a subway, as Ransom briefly wonders to himself early on. Given that the Manhattan subway system opened in 1904, though, there’s a good chance that another author came up with the same idea before Mrs. Buchanan did.
The dead girl is a young woman of no great beauty, and it takes Ransom and Jim Pensbury, his chief aide, some time to identify the body. What they discover astounds them. The woman had led two lives, married, in fact, to two different men. One is a lowly salesman for a hosiery firm; the other is a rich millionaire, who does not at first recognize the woman, she is so poorly dressed.
It is quite a puzzle, then, that faces Ransom and Pensbury. It takes a lot of legwork on their part, and any number of interviews with people with whom they come in contact, all somehow connected with the case, which is a deliciously complicated one.
There is also a matter of $70,000 worth of radium that has gone missing, so there’s plenty to plot to keep the reader interested all the way through, with only an ending that feels a little flat. No big twist at the end, in other words, just a matter of good police work that slowly but surely eliminates all of the possible solutions, one by one, until there is only one left.
Madeleine Sharps Buchanan, the author, had only seven novels published in hardcover, but she wrote several dozen others that were serialized in pulp magazines such as DFW, Clues, and Detective Story Magazine. There’s probably little hope of putting together a set of consecutive issues of any of them to put a full novel together. On the other hand, you could hunt down the novels in book form, but for example, there are only two copies of the hardcover edition of this one now offered for sale online, the lowest asking price (on eBay) being just under $100. I’d like sample her work a little more, but it looks like it may be a bit of a challenge.
December 14th, 2021 at 12:16 am
I have almost complete sets of Flynn’s, Detective Fiction Weekly and Street & Smith Detective Story magazine, so I must have almost all the dozens and dozens of serials that Buchanan wrote for these pulps.
However, I’ve never had any interest in reading her fiction even after over a half century of collecting pulps. I’m sure I’m at fault for this neglect but maybe your interesting review will make me finally read her.
But then again, maybe not. I’m presently rereading many of the series characters stories in the forties Black Mask and Dime Detective.
I’m running out of time!
December 14th, 2021 at 12:46 am
I’ve seen her name often enough, but this was the first time I’ve read anything by her. I’d say that well over half of her work for the pulps was in serial form. I have a copy of the book, and I admit that I was a little surprised I enjoyed it as much as I did. A little fusty, but it kept me reading. A lot of books are failing me in that regard any more.
December 14th, 2021 at 9:38 am
A novelette in Five Novels Monthly: “Murder at Sky Lodge” set in a winter ski resort:
https://archive.org/details/FiveNovelsMonthlyV26N02193405/page/n121/mode/2up
December 14th, 2021 at 1:19 pm
Thanks for the link, Bill. Do you know, I started reading this and it felt all very familiar. An isolated ski lodge with all kinds of spooky things going on at night, including — in the morning– the discovery of a girl’s body. I may somehow have started this once but never finished, since I have no idea where the story goes from here.
December 14th, 2021 at 3:30 pm
I’d never heard of this writer before.
Thank you for telling us about her!
Just finished “Death at Sky Lodge”.
Good feature: The opening account of the murder is vivid. Lots of eerie atmosphere and events in the frozen outdoors setting.
Bad feature: No cleverness or ingenuity in the solution. No clue to the killer.
This does not resemble Hammett or Chandler at all – despite being a pulp magazine tale.
It’s more like a Golden Age who-done-it.
A pulp feature: A fair number of pulp tales like settings at frozen winter institutions. Don’t ask me why!
December 14th, 2021 at 7:21 pm
Oh, no. A magazine like BLACK MASK would never have published Madeleine Sharps Buchanan. Their readers would never have stood for it.
December 14th, 2021 at 7:58 pm
I would be surprised if there wasn’t at least a murder in the London Underground before 1930. I don’t know about the New York Subway.
They weren’t murder mysteries, but when is the earliest ‘Thubway ‘Tham ‘Thullivan story by Johnston McCulley?
December 14th, 2021 at 8:02 pm
That’s a good question. I had to look it up: June 4 1918.
December 14th, 2021 at 8:22 pm
Baroness Orczy
The Old Man In The Corner
The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway (1901) (Chapters 10-11 of the book)
December 14th, 2021 at 8:58 pm
Now that’s one that’s going to be hard to beat. Thanks, Mike!
December 14th, 2021 at 9:19 pm
If I had to gamble on an earlier mystery story with a murder in the subway, I would confidently bet that some Nick Carter story used the subway as the setting for a someone’s unfortunate demise. Writers kept the Carter character contemporary by using the latest advancements. The New York subway opening in 1904 on Carter’s home ground is exactly the newfangled that would be typical of those stories.
December 14th, 2021 at 9:31 pm
I miss Randy Cox. He would know.
December 15th, 2021 at 12:59 pm
Am I reading right?
Is the murder victim in “THe Subway Murder” married to two men at once? Secretly a bigamist?
SPOILERS. If so, this anticipates the premise of “Halfway House” by Ellery Queen.
December 15th, 2021 at 1:08 pm
Yes, you read that right. This may be more of a first than the fact that the murder took place in a subway station.
December 15th, 2021 at 1:01 pm
As a 14th post:
I added a brief entry on to my website on Madeleine Sharps Buchanan:
http://mikegrost.com/green.htm#Buchanan
Thank you for telling me about this writer.