Mon 18 Aug 2014
Reviewed by William F. Deeck: HENRI WEINER – Crime on the Cuff.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Reviews1 Comment
William F. Deeck
HENRI WEINER – Crime on the Cuff. William Morrow, hardcover, 1936.
Cartoonists who are detectives are rare. Also infrequent are one-armed detectives. In this novel, John Brass combines the two as he investigates a dual kidnapping plus murder on his doorstep. Meant to be amusing and exciting, the novel fails on both scores.
Bio-Bibliographic Notes: This is the one of two mystery novels by author Stephen Longstreet (1907-2002) published under this name. The other is The Case of the Severed Skull, a paperback reprint of Death Walks on Cat Feet (1938), published in hardcover as by Paul Haggard.
Also in the late 30s Longstreet wrote three other works of crime fiction as by Haggard, all three with a series character named Mike Warlock, about whom I know nothing, in spite of the interesting sounding name.
As a literary novelist and playwright, Stephen Longstreet turns out to be significant enough to have a Wikipedia page of his own, and as a screenwriter, even more credits on IMDb. Says the biography page for him there: “Studied in Paris and at Rutgers and Harvard Universities, graduating from the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (Parsons) in 1929. […] Writer, cartoonist, and painter. He published over one hundred novels and five books on jazz, illustrated with his own drawings and watercolors.”
August 18th, 2014 at 6:13 pm
Says Kirkus of this same title:
“Donald tells how his boss, one-armed John Brass, ex-Secret Service Man, now a cartoonist, successfully gets to the bottom of the disappearance of a gambler friend and all its attendant alarums and excursions. High in entertainment value.”
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/henri-weiner/crime-on-the-cuff/
The character sounded intriguing enough for me to invest $20 into obtaining a copy. One I spotted in dust jacket was offered at $80, but I wasn’t quite prepared to go that high.