Sun 10 Sep 2017
Stories I’m Reading: LESLIE T. WHITE “Tough Guy.”
Posted by Steve under Authors , Magazines , Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[14] Comments
LESLIE T. WHITE “Tough Guy.” Reprinted in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, September-October 2017. This issue’s Mystery Classic, selected and introduced by Jim Doherty. First published in Liberty, 21 June 1941. Reprinted in Liberty Quarterly: 19 Tales of Intrigue, Mystery & Adventure (Vol. 1, No. 1, ca. 1950).
In his introduction to this story, Jim Doherty makes a solid case for Leslie White as one of the very first practitioners of the police procedural novel. Up for discussion in particular are Me, Detective (1936), a biographical account of White’s own career, Harness Bull (1937), and Homicide (1937).
Most of White’s work was done for the pulp magazines, producing as he did well over 100 short stories for that market, beginning with “Phoney Evidence” in The Dragnet Magazine, January 1930. To substantiate his case, Doherty describes some of White’s career in police work, and how he used it to give all of his crime fiction a solid, believable setting.
“Tough Guy” was written toward the end of his pulp fiction days, and that’s even a stretch, as Liberty magazine was not really a pulp. It’s the story of a tough cop named Gahagan who lives for nothing other than his job, a primary part of which is nailing a notorious killer and crime boss by the name of Danny Trumbull.
Things go awry in his life when the trail leads him to Trumbull’s eight-year-old daughter Penny, who lives alone with her father but who has no idea how totally bad he is. This one starts out in full tilt pulp mode, but by the end, it’s become, as you might have expected, a long way from being a hard-boiled tale of a tough guy cop. Quite the opposite.
Which does not make it a bad story, by any means. In fact, I enjoyed this one more than any of the other twelve stories in this latest issue of AHMM, many of them (to my mind) rather weak efforts and/or not interesting to me. It’s starting to get difficult to justify spending $7.99 an issue for a magazine that I can’t get excited about any more.
September 10th, 2017 at 11:46 pm
In 1949 Leslie Turner White wrote Lord Johnnie, a swashbuckler, that was a major best seller, sort of, but not quite, in the vein of Samuel Shellabarger’s work, and those titles include Captain From Castile, Prince of Foxes and Lord Vanity. Of these, Lord Vanity is of particular interest because Clifton Webb and Robert Wagner were set to do it, a screenplay prepared and an hour or so of excellent second unit photography shot on location in Italy before the project was abandoned by Fox. No idea why. Anyway, Lord Johnnie is pretty good.
September 11th, 2017 at 12:27 am
It sounds as though it could have been a good one. A movie, that is. I’ve had a paperback copy of the book at one time, but I never got around to reading it.
Of White’s books that Jim Doherty wrote about in his introduction, one of them, HARNESS BULL, was the basis of a film, that being VICE SQUAD (1953) with Edward G. Robinson and Paulette Goddard. I’ve never managed to see it, but the synopsis on IMDb tells me that I should.
September 11th, 2017 at 1:24 pm
AHMM is eight bucks?! Each?!? I remember when it was 4-bits a shot.
September 11th, 2017 at 3:08 pm
It’s been $7.99 an issue since it changed to bi-monthly, which I think was about a year ago. They jumped the page count to 192 pages at the same time, so it has a good solid feeling to it that was missing for a long time. I remember buying the first issue on the newsstand late in 1956 and enjoying every story, from cover to cover. Times change, or I have.
September 11th, 2017 at 2:33 pm
This story is interesting.
But it doesn’t have a mystery to be solved. It’s the only thing I’ve ever read by White, unfortunately. Wonder if some of the others involve cops who solve mysteries.
VICE SQUAD is a likable, but not great film.
September 11th, 2017 at 3:14 pm
It’s been a long time since I read anything else by White myself, but I don’t think this story is all that typical of he ones he wrote for the actual pulp magazines, those such as DIME DETECTIVE, DETECTIVE STORY and DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY. There had to be cases to be cracked, mysteries to be solved in some if not most of them.
September 11th, 2017 at 4:21 pm
As a followup to my Comment 4:
The first issue was dated December 1956, was 128 pages long, and cost me 35 cents, which was probably a third of my allowance at the time.
The magazine has been bi-monthly since the Jan-Feb issue of this year. Before that it was $4.99 and had only 112 pages.
September 11th, 2017 at 9:43 pm
Lord Johnnie is very good as are his other historical novels including THE LADIES FROM HELL about Scots fighting in the French and Indian wars.
I’ve read some of his crime fiction and it is quite good.
September 13th, 2017 at 9:24 pm
Thanks for the mention, Steve. In fact, HARNESS BULL and HOMICIDE are the only procedural novels White ever wrote. After that, as Barry notes, the bulk of his fiction was historical adventure novels. He wrote a few more short stories (all for the slicks rather than the pulps) into the ’40’s.
Another interesting item about White’s career as a cop is that he was one of the investigators into the Doheny case, which Raymond Chandler fictionalized as “The Cassidy Case,” a suicide-murder Phil Marlowe, in THE HIGH WINDOW, describes at length to two cops to explain why he doesn’t really trust official law enforcement. The inference is that his refusal to go along with the official story (despite the fact that the physical evidence doesn’t bear this out) might have been what led to the end of Marlowe’s police career, and the beginning of his career as a PI. It’s worth noting that White, like Marlowe, spent the bulk of his career in police work as a DA’s Investigator.
And that may be why Chandler made Marlowe a former DA’s man.
September 14th, 2017 at 5:55 pm
Fascinating stuff, Jim. I love it when connections like this can be made.
September 13th, 2017 at 11:55 pm
I’ve been following this discussion with interest for two reasons. The first being because I’ve read several stories by Leslie White, mainly in DIME DETECTIVE and DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY. He’s not one of my favorites and I’ve never read one of his historical novels but I have no big objection to his work.
The other reason concerns AHMM. I collect the magazine and have most of the back issues but I have to admit that I have not bought the recent issues and in fact it has been several years since I regularly read it. So I have the same problems with AHMM that Steve mentions above.
I guess I should subscribe to it like I do with the SF digests because I want to support these last examples of the fiction magazines that used to crowd the newsstands by the dozens. If they finally cease publication I don’t want to feel guilty because I didn’t buy them.
I so miss the days when the newsstands groaned under the weight of dozens of fiction magazines. I guess that’s why I collect and have thousands of the magazines. Sort of my vain attempt to recreate part of our literary history that doesn’t exist anymore.
Well, *recreate* at least in my house!
September 14th, 2017 at 7:59 pm
White was one of a number of pulp writers including Edison Marshall and F. Van Wyck Mason who transitioned o historical fiction from the pulps. Though he wasn’t as spectacularly successful as Marshall or Mason LORD JOHNNIE did push him to the comfortable edge of the bestseller list meaning he could usually count on a paperback edition and book club sales.
Unlike Marshall and Mason he never found a paperback home, and his books were never reissued in multiple editions, though many had multiple printings.
Thanks to Jim for the comment and Walker for leading me to it. It’s always fascinating when someone discovers real life ties to fictional works. Makes you wonder about Hammett and the Flitcraft story.
September 14th, 2017 at 10:02 pm
Happy to see Edison Marshall pop up here, or anywhere. A new novel during my high school years was a treat. Other than Yankee Pasha, far superior to the film, Gypsy Sixpence, Castle In The Swamp, Benjamin Blake, a re-issue, and The Vikings, not at all like the film, and again, much more complex, and for me memorable. American Captain, a dull title for a superior work sticks in my mind.
August 4th, 2021 at 6:06 pm
A good case can be made that White was the inspiration for Philip Marlowe. White and Raymond Chandler were both active members of the Mystery Writers, and White himself took the famous photo of the Black Mask writers that features both Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. White and the fictional Marlowe were both ex-DA investigators who left the police dissatisfied with its practices, both were from agricultural CA (Oxnard for White – Santa Rosa for Marlowe), both had a rare innate and self-enforced sense oF honor, and both White and Chandler were accomplished Hollywood screenwriters as well as being contemporary pulp writers. So the likelihood that White was a source for Chandler is strong. I own all three of White’s crime novels, including his tour de force Me, Detective, and they are all quite good.