STEVE FISHER “You’ll Always Remember Me.” Short story. First published in Black Mask, March 1938. Reprinted in Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy & Otto Penzler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

   When you think of “juvenile delinquents,” what probably comes to your mind first (well, it does mine) are the gangs of young hoodlums who obsessed the country everywhere in the 1950s, largely in big cities but small towns in the middle of nowhere as well.

   Well, what this this story does is to remind you that kids could be bad in earlier time periods as well, but maybe only without the accompanying gangs. The young 14-year-old narrator of “You’ll Always Remember Me” is, for example,  as bad as they come.

   It seems that the older brother of the girl that Martin Thorpe is seeing is about to be hanged for the killing of their father, and he’s run out of appeals. It won’t matter if I tell you that it won’t long for you to decide who really did it. The only question is, is he going to get away with it?

   You’d think that another mysterious, unexplained death would be enough for one story that’s only 18 pages long (in the hardcover reprint anthology), but what I found really chilling was the death of a very sick kitten. I guess it’s all in perspective. One thing’s for sure. The title is absolutely right on.

ROBERT LESLIE BELLEM “Diamonds of Death.” Dan Turner #2. Published in Spicy Detective Stories, July 1934. Reprinted in Hollywood Detective, August 1950, and in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carrol & Graf, 1988).

   I think that the best way to review a Dan Turner story may also be the easiest. It could even reflect the only reason for anyone to read a Dan Turner story. Simply quote passages from the story, taken here and there at random. Like this:

   Me again. I submit to you that prose like this is the work of genius.

FREDERICK NEBEL “Hell’s Pay Check.” Cardigan. Novelette. Published in Dime Detective Magazine, December 1931. Reprinted in Hard-Boiled Detectives, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz and Martin H. Greenberg (Gramercy, 1992). Collected in The Complete Casebook of Cardigan. Volume 1: 1931-1932. Altus Press, February 2012).

   From the second paragraph in this story, we learn that Cardigan is “a big, shaggy-headed man with a burry outdoor look,” getting off a train wearing “a wrinkled topcoat” and “a faded fedora that had seen better days.” He’s in Indianapolis on a case, but his home office, that of the Cosmos Detective Agency, is in New York. He comes with a reputation that the local cops are aware of, but it also helps to be working with an agency that has some clout. Local cops are not at all leery about pushing around independent operators.

   His job in “Hell’s Pay Check” is to help the mayor retrieve a check that he paid to a “notorious woman” on behalf of his son, a check that she didn’t cash at a bank; she seems to have gotten paid by another party who has kept the check. If it gets into the wrong hands, the mayor’s career is over.

   The story begins with a bang, and never stops moving. He’s picked up at the railroad station, but when he gets into the mayor’s car, he quickly realizes that the chauffeur is a phoney. A subsequent car chase through the back streets of the city leaves the driver dead, shot to death by his fellow gang members, who think he has turned on them.

   If you’re looking for a hard-boiled detective at work, you need not go much farther than any of Cardigan’s cases, and this is a prime example. He has a nose for trouble, and likewise trouble is never very far behind him. Nebel’s prose has a ferocity and drive to it that simply can’t be matched. Luckily for us,  all of his cases have now been published in total by Altus Press (now Steeger Books) in four thick handsome volumes.

CARROLL JOHN DALY “Not My Corpse.” Race Williams. Novella. First published in Thrilling Detective, June 1948. (Cover by Rudolph Belarski.) Reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg (Carrol & Graf, 1988).

   Race Williams had a long career in the pulp magazines, ranging in time from 1923 to 1955, and he showed up in a few book-length adventures as well. He was a tough guy with both his fists and his guns, and he wasn’t afraid to show it. If Mickey Spillane didn’t read Race Williams’ adventures before coming up with the idea for Mike Hammer, I’d be awfully surprised.

   In his heyday, all through the 1920s and early 1930s, Carroll John Daly was one of the hottest PI writers around. By the time “Not My Corpse” appeared, in June 1948 issue of one of the lesser detective pulp magazines, his luster had faded considerably, and Race Williams’ antics had tamed down considerably – but not completely, and it’s still a cracking good yarn.

   After a series of young girls have been tortured and killed, Race decides that the common factor connecting them is that they inadvertently saw something they shouldn’t, and that the killer is tracking them down, one by one, going from one to the next. A solid tip suggests that one more girl is going to be the next victim, and Race is determined to stop him.

   There are flashes of good writing in this tale, with memorable turns of phrasing, and Race is his usual cocky, confidant self, which is all to the good. The plot is a little rickety, though, and there’s too much that’s never hinted at as to the killer’s actual motive; it takes a flood of details on his dying bed before the whole story is told.

   A mixed bag, in other words, but while Carroll John Daly is often given a bad rap today as a lousy writer, he wasn’t.

JAMES M. CAIN “Pastorale.” Short story. First published in The American Mercury, March 1928. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1945. Collected in The Baby in the Icebox (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1981). Also reprinted in Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy & Otto Penzler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), as well as perhaps other anthologies.

   The introduction to this story in the Ellroy/Penzler edition claims it was Cain’s first published work of fiction, but that’s not so. The tale with that particular distinction seems to have been “Trial by Jury,” which appeared in January 1928 issue of The American Mercury.

   But no matter. It’s still a story of some great interest to noir fans. I’m sure that everyone reading this knows that one of Cain’s primary themes in the stories he told was that of a man falling for a woman who then persuades him to commit a crime for him. And how does that work out? Not well. Not usually. Not well.

   And guess what? That’s exactly the kind of story this is, even at this early date (1928). I won’t go into details. This is only a short story, after all. I did think the story ends on a flatter note than I expected, but it’s still a good one.

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.

TOD ROBBINS “Spurs.” First published in Munsey’s Magazine, February 1923. Collected in Who Wears a Green Bottle? And Other Uneasy Tales (Philip Allan, UK, 1926). Reprinted in Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy & Otto Penzler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), as well as several other anthologies. Film: Freaks (1932; produced and directed by Tod Browning).

   There is no doubt that the Tod Browning’s notorious cult film Freaks is far more known than the short story it’s based on. The film takes the basic story and expands on it by a magnitude of three or four, if not more, but the story itself still manages to hold its own as a small gem of comeuppance and pure edginess.

   To wit: When a dwarf in a traveling sideshow inherits a small fortune from an uncle, he decides it is full time he declared his love for the star of the circus’s high wire act, a veritable Amazon of a woman. To perhaps the reader’s surprise, if not Jacque Corbeé’s, who in spite of his size, is superbly confidant that she will say yes, she does indeed. Say yes, that is.

   Of course it is his money she is after, but fate being what it is, things do not progress anywhere near what she envisions. The other members of the circus — freaks, if you will – play only a secondary role in the story, mostly during the dinner after the wedding, in which a small melee breaks out – each of the participants convinced that the success of the show depends largely to their presence in it.

   I reviewed this story in my previous post on this blog, stating that I saw a couple of possible flaws in the solution. In the first comment to this followup post, I will attempt to explain why I wasn’t completely convinced. Please don’t read my comment until you’ve already read the story or if you don’t plan to anytime soon.

   Responsible and even opposing points of view are, as always, welcome.

CLAYTON RAWSON “From Another World.” Novelette. The Great Merlini. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1948. Collected in The Great Merlini (Gregg Press, hardcover, 1979). Reprinted in The Quintessence of Queen, edited by Anthony Boucher (Random House, 19620; and Whodunit? Houdini?, edited by Otto Penzler (Harper & Row, 1976), among perhaps others.

   I’m really of two minds with this one. On one hand, it has one of the cleverest ideas of how to set up a near-classic locked room mysteries. On the other, if you start to think about, the more and more you begin to think, “Would this really work?”

   Here’s the set-up: A wealthy man would like to believe that psychokinesis really works, but before he invests any money in a foundation to study it, he wants a full, hands-on demonstration. To that end, a noted female psychic agrees to these terms. Together alone in an otherwise empty room, she in a bathing suit, he across a desk from her, are to hold the equivalent of a seance. The edges of the only doorway are sealed with gummed paper tape.

   How then, when they become suspicious and break into the room, tearing the tape, do two men, The Great Merlini’s friend Ross one of them, find the man murdered, stabbed to death with a knife, the woman unconscious – not faked – and no knife to be found. Not only was the door locked, but it was sealed.

   So far, so good, or even better. As an author, Rawson wasn’t quite as good as John Dickson Carr in setting up a certain atmosphere in a locked-room story which only adds to the mystery, but he comes close. Could something akin to the supernatural be responsible?

   The answer is “no,” at least in this case, and if it wasn’t, what’s the fun in that? At first glance the solution is extremely simple — and indeed brilliant — but – and this is a huge “but” – if at story’s end, you start to realize that the story simply just couldn’t have happened the way Merlini susses it out, how then do you rate a story like that?

MAX BRAND “The Flaming Finish.” Short story. First published in Blue Book, August 1938. Not known if ever reprinted.

   Even though I’d have to say that Max Brand is my favorite western writer, I haven’t read anything by him in quite a while. That’s why when I was going through some old pulp magazines last week, it really caught my eye when I saw that he had the lead story in the August 1938 issue of Blue Book.

   It turns out that “The Flaming Finish” is of note because while Max Brand under his many pen names had already written hundreds of thousands of words for the pulp magazines, this was the first story he wrote for Blue Book. And while he was most noted for his western stories (see above), this is the first I’ve come across that’s been an aviation story.

   It takes place during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), but it’s really a nostalgic tribute to those air pilots who fought during World War I, when aviators (true or false) had a certain camaraderie, if not outright chivalry or a code of honor used as the basis for their battles in the air against each other. When one such pilot in this story crashes to the ground and is captured, his opposite partner in the air returns him to his home base instead of killing him on sight, as he had every reason to.

   I don’t know enough about the aviation pulps to know how long in time that stories celebrating this code of honor lasted, but I’d like to think this one was one of the final ones, and Brand made its length of only seven pages fly by. Pun intended.

PostScript: A blurb on the cover of the magazine announces this as the first of a “new series of air adventures” under the overall title of “Knights of the Sky.” I don’t know if the following all fall into that category, but here’s a list of the next few followup stories Max Brand did for the magazine:

      Last Flight, The Blue Book Magazine September 1938.
      The Return of the Man Who Was Killed,  The Blue Book Magazine October 1938.
      True Steel,  The Blue Book Magazine February 1939.
      Half a Partner, The Blue Book Magazine March 1939.