Mon 25 May 2020
Pulp PI Stories I’m Reading: TALMAGE POWELL “Her Dagger Before Me.â€
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[7] Comments
TALMAGE POWELL “Her Dagger Before Me.†Novelette. Lloyd Carter #1. First published in Black Mask, July 1949. Reprinted in The Third Talmage Powell Megapack (Wildside Press, Kindle edition, 2020).
Lloyd Carter’s home base is Tampa, Florida, and has been for thirteen years. He’s been a private eye for almost 21 years, when you count the years he spent in the profession in New York before his wife ran out on him then died when a fast freight “got in the way of the automobile†she and her new lover were in.
He hasn’t gotten used to the heat in Tampa, though.
The case in “Her Dagger Before Me†involves a girl, tall and slim but with rather drab brown hair who could easily lose herself in a crowd. Her father, now dead, had been enormously wealthy, but she can’t inherit until she is thirty. In the meantime she is convinced that her stepmother is spending it so fast there will be no money to inherit.
Carter’s job: to scare off her stepmother’s current boy friend, a smooth operator who’s doing his best to help her spend it. When Crater goes to confront him, however, he finds hm dead. As far as suspects are concerned, there are plenty.
Powell was the author of hundreds of short stories for both the pulps and the digest magazines that followed them in a career that extended from 1944 to 1982. He was also the author of seventeen novels under both his own name as well as various pen names. This story was early in his career, but the writing is smooth and clear, and the story nicely constructed, with an ending that’s well worth waiting for.
Now here’s what’s interesting. Of the novels he wrote, five of them featured a PI from Tampa called Ed Rivers. Not only was Rivers based in the same location, but the reasons for him moving there were exactly the same as Lloyd Carter’s. Another similarity is his use of a knife as his weapon of choice. Kevin Burton Smith on his Thrilling Detective website considers Carter and Rivers to be one and the same. I agree.
May 25th, 2020 at 9:04 pm
My first thought as you began was how much that sounded like Ed Rivers. I always liked Powell, but his books weren’t that easy to find in the day.
May 26th, 2020 at 3:09 pm
Like David, I only found a few Talmage Powell mystery novels over the years. I’ve decided to buy the Megapack you mention at the begining of your fine review.
May 26th, 2020 at 4:34 pm
Well worth the money. Only 99 cents as I recall. I also have the first two (this is the third) and have been dipping into them from time to time.
May 26th, 2020 at 7:24 pm
The few Powell books I could find were often reprinted in Men’s Sweat Mags. Ed Rivers, Johnny Liddell and Carter Brown’s tecs were favorites of the Sweat Mags, in part because of the length I suspect.
May 26th, 2020 at 9:52 pm
I wonder how well those magazines have been indexed. Not well, I don’t imagine. There might be quite a few such “full length novels” hidden in them, yet to be discovered, not to mention short stories not appearing anywhere else.
May 26th, 2020 at 11:29 pm
I have passed up Talmage Powell a couple times over a nearly half century and I am still ruing over it so when I saw this review, I immediately downloaded “Her Dagger Before Me†on Kindle and read it.
The first time I passed up Talmage Powell was in the late 1970s. I was studying at Syracuse University and spending too much time in their collection of the Street & Smith archives. Besides the copies of the S&S publications from the 19th century to the end of pulp-magazine era, the archives had a spattering of unpublished manuscripts. I parceled out a batch intended for Thrill Book to be published in soft-cover and a short novel by a well-known writer that was published in hard-cover, except that it turned out that the well-known writer did not write that manuscript resulting in an apocryphal edition . Once, I found in a box of archival material, scattered among other sheets of foolscap, an unpublished hand-written Horatio Alger novel, which I had put in an envelop and labeled before it crumbled to pieces. In the mid-1980s I saw a notice in the New York Times that someone had discovered an unpublished Alger manuscript at Syracuse University; rediscovered they should have said, but Randy Cox had been poking around the same Street & Smith archives earlier in the 1970s and probably discovered the manuscript before I did.
One unpublished manuscript was by Talmage Powell. As I remember, it was intended for Detective Story Magazine. For years after that, it nagged me that I should have tried to do something with that story.
In 1998 when I was living in Zacatecas, Mexico, I came across Talmage Powell’s e-mail address. We exchanged a couple letters by e-mail. He was living on the west coast of Florida at the time.
In 1999, things took an unexpected turn and my family and I relocated to the west coast of Florida, initially to tend to my mother who was dying. Once we were established, I kept thinking I should arrange to visit Talmage Powell but I did not act quick enough. Powell died in 2000.
I was not about to make the same mistake thrice and with “Her Dagger Before Me,” originally published in Black Mask, July 1949, Powell paid off with a wallop. While the story did not reach those of Raymond Chandler in the same magazine a decade and a half earlier, it ran nicely along the same rutted road. Through it, emotions, money and morality swirled.
Expressions flashed across the faces of the characters. Lloyd Carter, the detective protagonist, caught enough of them to form a trail to follow. The identity of the murderer was not very well concealed from the reader, and the greater interest was how Carter would sift through the bits and pieces to find the solution.
The setting is Tampa Bay where I have lived for the past twenty years on the St Pete side and here Powell also passed the test, writing authentically about the area. Carter’s apartment was outside Ybor City, once known for the hand-rolled cigars produced there. Now it is a night club district, slightly chic, but outside Ybor City, the brick streets are not level and the buildings definitely not chic. The island at the end of Central Avenue is occupied by the city of Treasure Island, and as Carter said, Coquina Beach was the name he used in lieu of its real one. The Morro Hotel in the northeast section could be the Vinoy, where Bouchercon was held two years ago.
Well Talmage, I never got your unpublished story published. I never stopped by when I had the chance. However I enjoyed a story that I suspect you enjoyed writing.
May 26th, 2020 at 11:41 pm
Thank, you, Darryl. I enjoyed your comment as much as I did the story itself, and that was a lot.