Tue 19 May 2020
Locked Room Pulp PI Stories I’m Reading: RICHARD DEMING “The Juarez Knife.â€
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[7] Comments
RICHARD DEMING “The Juarez Knife.†Novella. Manville Moon #1. First published in Popular Detective, January 1948. Available as an individual story in a Kindle edition (Wildside Press, 2018).
Not only is this Manny Moon’s first appearance in print, it’s also Richard Deming’s first published work of crime or mystery fiction. Not only did he go on to write hundreds of short stories for the pulp and digest magazines, but he was also the author of dozens of hardcover novels, including three featuring the same Manny Moon, known best perhaps as the private eye with only one leg.
And in “The Juarez Knife†we learn that he lost the portion of it below the knee in the war, and that to replace it, he’s been fitted with a “cork, aluminum, and leather contraption†that when he tries to get up suddenly at night without it, he finds himself “lying half under the bed on a bruised right elbow.â€
The call is from a semi-crooked lawyer who has a job for him. “Semi-crooked†is my term for him, since he has been indicted once, but nothing more. When he gets to the gent’s office, a young girl goes in before him. When he is called in, the girl has gone out a side door, but his would-be employer is lying across his desk dead, with a knife in his chest.
As it so happens, the door the girl went though was under watch, and she is the only one who came out. The windows are open, but the ledge outside is too narrow for anyone to have used it, and it’s fourteen stories up. Moon takes her on as a client anyway. He believes she is innocent simply on the fact that after leaving the office she calmly went on to a previously scheduled hairdresser appointment.
You do not expect stories tin pulp magazines to be traditional locked room mysteries, but this is a good one, and it’s fairly clued as well. The only problem is that the real killer could only be one person, and sure enough, he/she is. Beside the three Manny Moon novels, there were eighteen novelettes and short stories in which he appeared. They’ve never been collected, as far as I know, but a number of them are now available in Kindle format, reasonably priced at only 99 cents each.
May 19th, 2020 at 2:17 pm
I didn’t realize this was Deming’s first published story. It’s a good debut. I read the second one in the series not long ago and liked it even better.
May 19th, 2020 at 2:37 pm
And here’s the link:
https://jamesreasoner.blogspot.com/2020/05/forgotten-novellas-juarez-knife.html
You’re right,James. The story is a lot closer to John Dickson Carr and Ellery Queen than it is to either Hammett or Chandler.
May 19th, 2020 at 9:53 pm
I always wondered where Deming might have ended up if he had created the right series character during his paperback career. Hw as always reliable, and often more.
May 20th, 2020 at 12:10 am
I think with the bum leg, Manny Moon was just a little too pulpy to be any successful than he was, which was not very. I think John D. MacDonald would be as forgotten the general populace as say Harry Whittington if he (JDM) hadn’t come up with Travis McGee. For most mystery writers, series characters are a key. Not the only one, but key. I hardly read any standalones any more, by anybody.
May 20th, 2020 at 3:32 pm
The importance of the series character is pretty clear when you look at Rpss Macdonald vs his wife Margaret Millar, his equal, maybe even his superior as a storyteller, but with only a couple of continuing characters amid many standalones.
Dan Marlowe probably wrote his best books before Earl Drake, but it was Drake that really got his career going, and look what Matt Helm did for Donald Hamilton’s career.
If nothing else a series character is often key to being reprinted now though some specialty houses are doing wonders reprinting great early paperback fiction by writers like Deming.
May 22nd, 2020 at 4:14 pm
Jon L. Breen’s Mystery*File essay on the Manville Moon series: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=18861
May 22nd, 2020 at 7:08 pm
Totally gone from my memory, Bill, till your reminder. If Jon’s overview of the series doesn’t get me reading the books again, or for some, the first time, nothing will. Thanks!