EDWARD D. HOCH “The Theft of the Double Elephant.” Nick Velvet. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, February 2004. Not yet collected.

   The particular task that Nick Velvet agrees to take on in this tale is the robbery he knows his friendly adversary Sandra Paris has committed, but what he does not know is how she managed to steal the ordinary Audubon print he is hired to retrieve. It was taken from an apartment on the top of a five story brownstone in New York City. Three different keys are needed to enter the apartment, and at night alarms are always set at the doors and windows.

   Unlike the Porges story (recently reviewed here) in the same issue of EQMM, Hoch takes his time (fourteen pages rather than only four), to describe the layout fully as well as the personal interest Velvet takes in his duel task: I think he took greater pleasure in outwitting Ms. Paris than he did in actually returning the print to its owner.

   As it so happens, this is the Nick Velvet story I asked Mr Hoch about when I interviewed him for the print version of Mystery*File back in August of 2004. You can find it online here. It is not, however, included in the recently published Locked Room Murders Supplement by Brian Skupin. I hope it’s not because there is no murder in it. It’s well constructed and well worthy of inclusion, and I hope to see it in Supplement Two.

ARTHUR PORGES “Stately Homes and the Impossible Shot.” Stately Homes #5. First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, February 2004. Collected in The Adventures of Stately Homes and Sherman Horn: Being the Compleat Sherlockian Writings of Arthur Porges (The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, trade papeback, 2008).

   Based on this story as my only sample to date, Stately Homes must have been Schlock Homes’ indolent brother. All he seems to do for a full quarter of this four page story is stay in his flat he shares with his assistant Sun Wat (from India) and play his violin, all the while depending on the members of the Baker Street Irregulars to do the leg work for him.

   Dead is a man found shot and killed while  sitting at his office desk with his back to the window, which was open ten inches from the bottom. The door to the fourth floor room was under close observation at the time. Obviously the shot came through the open window, but the only angle possible does not match the point of entry of the bullet.

   It sounds good, but the story fails as a story, unless you consider “humorous,” which I allow was the likely attempt, to include stories as poorly thought out as this one. One essential clue to the solution is withheld from the reader until very nearly the end, and that is that the killer was an expert at billiards. Match this up with the fact that the walls of the room were covered with rare coins and medallions. You can take it from there.

      The Stately Homes series –

Her Last Bow (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 1957
Another Adventure of Stately Homes (ss) The Saint Mystery Magazine (UK) Nov 1961
Stately Homes and the Invisible Slasher (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 2001
Stately Homes and the Invisible Giant (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 2003
Stately Homes and the Impossible Shot (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Feb 2004

WILLIAM J. REYNOLDS “The Lost Boys.” PI Nebraska (*). First published in The Mysterious West, edited by Tony Hillerman (HarperCollins, 1994). Reprinted in The Fifth Grave (Great American Murder Mysteries), edited by Martin Greenberg and Billie Sue Mosiman (Rutledge Hill, paperback, 1998).

   The asterisk in the first line above is there because the name of the PI in this case of two missing boys is never revealed. But he’s based in Omaha, and so is the PI in Reynolds’ six novels and two or three other short stories. It’s been a while since I read any of the novels (over 30 years), so I don’t remember if withholding the leading character’s name was a feature of those or not.

   The mother of the missing boys is our man’s client. She is divorced from their father, a big man back in Monument, South Dakota, and she is sure that he is the one who has taken them. The only industry in Monument is that of extracting granite from a local quarry, and our hero is forced to make his inquiries of the local townspeople under a huge handicap: he does not want to make the reason why he’s asking questions known.

   If I were to make any kind of criticism as to how Nebraska (I’ve gone ahead and said it) handles his investigation, I’d be guilty of Monday morning quaterbacking, as the story’s a good one, strongly told. What I enjoyed even more than the case itself, though, was the descriptive way Reynolds brings to life a one horse town in the middle of nowhere, and a very isolated nowhere to boot.

        The Nebraska novels —

The Nebraska Quotient (1984)
Moving Targets (1986)
Money Trouble (1988)
Things Invisible (1989)
The Naked Eye (1991)
Drive-By (1995)

   A few weeks ago I received an email from bookseller Lynn Munroe, asking me a question about the uncollected short stories of Cornell Woolrich. The result was that I got interested in how many uncollected stories there were and how many might be worth collecting. It will take more than one column to explore these questions but let’s start here.

   For the first two years in which Woolrich published crime-suspense stories, the number of uncollected tales is zero. Why? Because I brought together all three of the tales that first came out in 1934 and all ten of those that appeared in ‘35 in the collection DARKNESS AT DAWN (1985). Woolrich’s output grew exponentially in 1936: a total of 26 crime stories, earning him a total of $4,300, which was a respectable annual salary back then.

   Some of them—for example “The Night Reveals” (Story, April 1936), “Johnny on the Spot” (Detective Fiction Weekly, May 2, 1936), “The Night I Died” (from the same magazine’s August 8 issue) and “You Pays Your Nickel” (Argosy, August 22, 1936), which is usually reprinted as “Subway”—rank among his most powerful short stories. Others from that year—including, I fear, most of the dozen that remain uncollected—are pretty terrible.

   The year kicked off with one of the worst tales he ever perpetrated; perhaps the worst of his career. The mild success of the Popular Publications pulp chain with weird-menace magazines like Dime Mystery inspired rival entrepreneur Ned Pines of Thrilling Publications to launch a competing monthly called Thrilling Mystery, which debuted in October 1935 under editorial director Leo Margulies (1900-1975).

   During its 50 issues the magazine offered a parade of strange cults, diabolic rituals, gruesome murders, sadistic villains, slavering beasts and (of course) beautiful young women shivering in peril. Woolrich dipped his toes into these weird waters just once. Like the 1935 classic “Dark Melody of Madness” (better known as “Papa Benjamin”) and the 1937 classic “Graves for the Living,” “Baal’s Daughter” (Thrilling Mystery, January 1936) is about hapless innocents falling into the clutches of repulsive religions.

   But this version of the story is so sloppily and luridly written, so overloaded with stupid inconsistencies and grotesque twaddle, that to claw one’s way through its pages is an act of masochism. Narrator Bob Collins visits his psychiatrist friend Dr. Dessaw to ask for help in freeing his fiancée Gloria’s dotty aunt from a Westchester cult.

   As Woolrich Coincidence would have it, the head of the cult is Dessaw, who drugs Bob and spirits him to the religion’s headquarters mansion on the banks of the Hudson, where in rapid order our hero is stripped to his shorts, flogged by a tongueless black giant, menaced by a man-eating panther, tortured with boiling oil injected into his veins, forced to kneel before a woman calling herself the reincarnated goddess Ishtar, forced to help lure Gloria to the mansion for ritual sex with with the god Baal who of course is Dr. Dessaw, and so on and on long past our endurance.

   The narrative throbs with clunkers like “The fiend on the throne stood up and turned to me as I quivered there, ashen-faced” and “I was prone there, at the mercy of the he-devil and the she-devil….” How desperate must Woolrich have been to have cranked out this garbage?

   Of the dozen uncollected Woolrich stories from 1936, Detective Fiction Weekly was the original home of seven, including two that might well deserve collection. Not, though, the first pair we consider here. “Blood in Your Eye” from the March 21 issue is an insanely bad cop story set in an anonymous city on which Woolrich sticks the label Los Angeles.

   Mitchell, a rambunctious young homicide dick, is the only one who sees the truth when a murder victim is found in a rooming house with the image of his killer apparently imprinted on his eyes. Instead of sharing his insight, Mitchell throws down his badge in disgust at his colleagues’ willingness to believe medieval superstition and goes out to solve the crime lone-wolf style.

   The hunt takes him to two venues that Woolrich was to use over and over, a manicurist’s booth and a dance hall. For this one you have to accept that neither a roomful of cops nor the medical examiner can tell the difference between genuine and glass eyes, but the climax is violent and the central gimmick Guignol-gruesome.

   Just two weeks later, in the magazine’s April 4 issue, came “The Mystery of the Blue Spot,” which Woolrich submitted as “Death in Three-Quarter Time.” In a lifetime of reading whodunits I’ve never come across an alibi gimmick as wacko as this one. Homicide cop Dennis Small happens to be in the Curfew Club on the night when the specialty dancer Emilio is shot to death in his dressing room just a few minutes after he and his partner Lolita have finished performing a bizarre new number.

   All the evidence points to chorus line dancer Mary Jackson, for whom Emilio was about to dump Lolita. This tale too is never likely to be reprinted or collected so I might as well give away the solution: Lolita herself killed Emilio before the dance, then rigged herself in a crazy costume and went out into the spotlight and convinced a clubful of people that she was both herself and her partner! The story becomes interesting only in the final scenes when Woolrich makes us empathize with her for two crucial noir reasons: she had lost her love and she’s about to die.

   For the next uncollected story we jump into the summer months. “Nine Lives” from the June 20 number is set in the waterfront district around New York’s South Street. Demon newshawk Wheeler stumbles onto the story of an old bum who’s been treated by three sinister strangers to booze, food, clothes, and to an insurance policy on his life. The best scene finds Wheeler bound, gagged and left for dead at the bottom of an old-fashioned bathtub filling with water, but even in this serial-like incident there’s nothing terribly urgent.

   Later that summer, in the August 15 issue, came “Murder on My Mind,” the earliest appearance in Woolrich and perhaps the earliest in crime fiction of a plotline which was a staple of film noir classics like SO DARK THE NIGHT (1946, directed by Joseph H. Lewis) but ultimately goes back to the Greek tragedy OEDIPUS TYRANNUS.

   Marquis, the detective narrator, is assigned with his partner Beecher to the brutal murder of a harmless cigar-store clerk, but as the investigation goes forward, countless tiny details push Marquis and the reader closer and closer to becoming convinced that the murderer is Marquis himself.

   This tale has never been reprinted or collected as it first appeared but a heavily revised and less crudely written version was included as “Morning After Murder” in the paperback collection BLUEBEARD’S SEVENTH WIFE (Popular Library pb #473, 1952, as by William Irish).

   The trademark Woolrich combination of breathless urgency and plot flubs permeates the long story which he submitted as “Right in the Middle of New York,” but it’s so packed with action and tension that one barely notices that nothing in it makes sense, not even the published title, since no murder is committed at all in “Murder in the Middle of New York” from the September 26 issue.

   Tony Shugrue, a relatively honest protégé of mobster Chuck Morgan, is set up by his mentor with phony references and gets hired by wealthy Cole Harrison as chauffeur for his beautiful and spoiled daughter Evelyn. Unaware that he’s married, Evelyn makes several passes at her driver, and for a while we’re reminded of the romance between another flighty heiress and her chauffeur in Woolrich’s 1927 pre-crime novel CHILDREN OF THE RITZ.

   Finally Tony realizes that Morgan plans to kidnap Evelyn, hold her for ransom, kill her and leave him to take the fall. From this point on the story morphs into a wild roller-coaster ride crammed with thrills, anguish and suspense as Tony fights to save himself and his wife and Evelyn from the gang. Some of the dialogue creaks—“‘Rats!” he hissed viciously through his teeth. ‘Lower than rats, even!’”—and the crucial scene requires Tony literally not to recognize his wife at close quarters.

   But the irresistible Woolrich urgency sweeps away all nitpicking into the ash heap and suggests that this one of the uncollected dozen may deserve being revived.

   I feel the same way about “Afternoon of a Phony” from the November 14 issue—so much so that it was reprinted in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (June 2012) at my recommendation and with a new introduction by me.

   The story is something of a departure for Woolrich, a charming, clever and bizarre whodunit where the detective role is played by a con man. Clip Rogers steps off the train at the Jersey seaside resort of Wildmore and is instantly mistaken by the brainless local cops for Griswold, the supersleuth from Trenton, whom they’d sent for to help solve the bludgeon murder of a woman in one of the town’s vacation hotels.

   What complicates the case beyond the local yokels’ power to unravel is that the woman’s eight-year-old son, who witnessed the crime in the middle of the night but is too young to understand its meaning, has identified as the murderer a man with a perfect alibi. Rogers exposes the real killer rather neatly, but the story becomes distinctively a Woolrich tale only afterward when, as in “The Mystery of the Blue Spot,” a criminal motivated by lost love takes center stage and, for a page or two, becomes a deeply sympathetic character. His comment that the impostor Rogers is more humane than any cop he’d ever met is evidence that when Woolrich drew genuine cops as brutal thugs he wasn’t doing it inadvertently.

   His final 1936 appearance in Detective Fiction Weekly was one of his weakest, but for anyone with a little knowledge of law, it’s a coffee-out-the-nose classic. The year’s last issue, dated December 26, included “The Two Deaths of Barney Slabaugh,” in which Woolrich dusted off his favorite James M. Cain plot twist, backdated it forty years, and threw in so much of the tinny insult humor and gangster stereotypes from the current James Cagney movies that the illusion we’re in the New York of the 1890s isn’t sustained for a microsecond.

   Manhattan racket boss Emerald Eddie Danberry is persuaded by his shyster lawyer Horace Lipscomb that the proper way to kill rival mobster Barney Slabaugh is to take the man prisoner, frame himself for Barney’s murder beforehand, and get himself acquitted in court. Then, Lipscomb explains—foreshadowing an infamous recent comment by Donald Trump?—even if Danberry were to murder him in full view of a thousand people he could never be prosecuted for it.

   Danberry asks for the name of this marvelous rule of law. Lipscomb replies: Why, it’s the Statute of Limitations! (Cue the coffee.) Fighting DA Barry McCoy, one of the city’s few uncorrupt officials, tries to snooker the plot, and fate works another Cain trick to help him out in this super-pulpy tale, which is full of police brutality, casual racism and enough Woolrich-style wisecracks to sink an aircraft carrier.

   So much for eight out of the dozen, and quite enough for one column. I’ll finish the tabulation next month. With perhaps a bonus thrown in to boot.

BILL CRIDER ‘Who Killed Cock Rogers?” Sheriff Dan Rhodes. First published in The Mysterious West, edited by Tony Hillerman (HarperCollins, 1994). Collected in The Blacklin County Files (Kindle edition, 2012).

   Here are the first two paragraphs that slide us right into the story with infinite ease:

   And here are the last three paragraphs, as the author winds up his tale:

   In between is a tale of murder, that of a radio host whose technique of choice was to boost his ratings by any controversial means he could. Bill’s way with a story stands out, as always: a hint of dry downhome Texas humor (well, more often than not, more than a hint) along with a serious crime to be solved, one that both he and Dan Rhodes take very seriously. This story is no exception.

REX BURNS “Dust Devil.” “Snake” Garrick #1. First published in The Mysterious West, edited by Tony Hillerman (HarperCollins, 1994). No record found of a later printing.

   And likewise no record found of a subsequent appearance of Boulder-based PI “Snake” Garrick. The story is too short to get more than a general sense of who he is as a man, save for the description provided by his client in this story. She says to him:

   Snake may have been a lightweight in her eyes, but he’s smart enough to solve the case he agrees to take on in only eighteen pages. It seems as though the woman’s brother sold a horse named Devil Dust to a fellow rancher the day before he died in an auto accident. The woman cannot now find any trace of the transaction in the dead man’s papers, but the man who has now claimed the horse has a signed invoice for it.

   The detective story is a minor one, but it’s well made up for by the the several picturesque passages Burns uses to describe the largely untrammeled grassland area in which the smallish city-town of Boulder. Colorado, is located. I’d like to read more about the cases Snake Garrick has worked on, but alas, this one’s all there is and probably will be.

EDWARD D. HOCH “The Other Eye.” Short story. Al Darlan #11 & Mike Trapper #1. First published in Crime Wave: World’s Winning Crime Stories 1981, selected by judges for the Swedish Academy of Detection for the Crime Writers’ International Congress (Collins, UK, hardcover, 1981; Fontana, UK, paperback, 1983). Introduction by Desmond Bagley. Reprinted in The New Black Mask No.4, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli & Richard Layman, (HBJ, paperback, 1986).

   Apparently (and inexplicably) “The Other Eye” never appeared in EQMM, where Hoch had a historic run of over 34 consecutive years of having one of his stories included. PI Al Darlan (earlier known as Al Diamond) is talked into taking a partner in this one, a young enthusiastic law school dropout named Mike Trapper. Al is in his 50s, and business is slow, so he allows himself to be talked into it — that and an infusion of cash in the amount of ten thousand dollars.

   In their first case together they are hired by a businessman who seems to followed (or sometimes preceded) by someone pretending to be him, no matter where he goes — even briefly in his own office and at home. Their job is to find out why. What does he have in mind?

   Darlan seems to have the same questions about their client that I did, but he’s too late to prevent a terrible accident from happening, but his deductions do come soon enough to save young Mike from an even worse disaster.

   This is one of a very few of Ed Hoch’s many stories that definitely depends on the protagonist being a private eye, and even more, that the junior partner is young and still wet behind the years. Overall, I’d say it’s in the middle of the pack in terms of Hoch’s overall output, but that still puts it way above average, as compared to the competition, as far as I’m concerned.

  ARTHUR LEO ZAGAT “Crawling Madness.” Novelette. First published in Terror Tales, March 1935. Reprinted in Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!, edited by Otto Penzler (Black Lizard, softcover, 2011) and in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Fall 2016, edited by Matt Moring (Altus Press, softcover).

   Ann and Bob Travers are newlyweds who are heading for Bob’s new job located somewhere out west. He has a new formula for extracting gold from otherwise tapped out mines, and he’s anxious to try it and find out how well it works. Driving along in their car, they are sideswiped off the road by a truck filled with crazed, terrified miners speeding madly off in the opposite direction.

   Their car is wrecked, and Bob’s ankle is broken. What is she to do? Luckily the mine is only a short distance away. It can’t be totally deserted, can it? Well, no, not exactly. Nearing the mine, she is confronted on all side by creeping emaciated men, crawling on their stomachs closer and closer…

   Thus begins “Crawling Madness,” a story that once started, just doesn’t stop. A stranger who claims to be the foreman frightens off Ann’s attackers, but there is something about his Satanic visage that she just doesn’t trust. It’s then a cat and mouse game all the way, in shelter and out, in the mine and out, then trapped in one of the furthermost caverns, always with the threat of unspeakable horror from the monstrously disfigured creatures lurking just beyond the only small sources of light she has.

   This is the stuff of nightmares, no doubt about it, but of course it ends happily, with an explanation that actually works (I think), and most surprisingly at the very end, the equivalent of a PSA about the need for more safety regulations in mines all across the country.

HUGH PENTECOST “Jericho and the Nuisance Clue.” Short story. John Jericho #6. First appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystey Magazine, August 1966. Collected in The Battles of Jericho (Crippen & Landru, 2008).

   Some clarification is needed. This is the sixth of 25 John Jericho stories that Hugh Pentecost wrote for EQMM between 1964 and 1987. It does not include six novels he appeared in between 1965 and 1970, nor several dozen stories he appeared in as a member of the Park Avenue Hunt Club for the pulp magazines, mostly Detective Fiction Weekly, between 1934 and 1944, all under the author’s real name, Judson Philips.

   The two earlier incarnations are not really the same person as the one in this story, but if television can re-invent or re-imagine old series characters every so often, why can’t mystery writers? Nor, for example, do I think that Ellery Queen was the same Ellery Queen in every novel over the years as time went on.

   The more recent John Jericho was a painter/social activist whose eye for detail stood him in good stead when it came time to solve mysteries. He’s described in “Nuisance Clue” as being a giant of a man, about 40, six-feet-six inches tall, weighing 240 pounds, a giant with red hair and red beard.

   Not only does he have an eye for detail, but he also has the knack of being in the right place at the right time. In :this story he’s sitting at a local bar, minding his own business, when a local mobster picks a fight with him, not knowing who he is.

   Why, Jericho can’t help but think, is he trying to establish an alibi? Sure enough. The story’s only ten pages long, and it flies by quickly and smoothy, showing that telling a well-reasoned out detective story doesn’t need 400 pages to do so.

ROBERT TWOHY “McKevitt–100 Proof.” Short story. Albin McKevitt 1. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1968. Probably never reprinted.

   Thus begins this tale, an absolute gem of a throwback to the pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s, in which detective heroes could be as drunk as a hoot owl and still be able to solve the cases they somehow stumble into.

   Albin McKevitt is not a PI, but he might as well be. Instead, however, he’s a reporter with a nose for news, and in the room, besides the members of the local police force, are one man and two women. And a dead man, a bullet hole squarely in the middle of his forehead.

   They claim it was a matter of self-defense, one of the women having shot and killed her husband, with the other woman there as a bona fide witness. McKeviit asks a few questions, wanders around, then called his editor, telling him, to the astonishment of the good lieutenant, it’s murder all right. Premeditated murder.

   Besides its obvious comic overtones, this is also a bona fide detective story. One could only wish that there had been many more adventures of Albin McKevitt that Robert Twohy could have told us about, but alas, this is a one and done.

   As an author of detective mysteries and short stories, Robert Twohy wrote almost 80 of them between 1957 and 1994, all for either Ellery Queen’s or Alfred Hitchcock’s magazines. Someone named Jim Quark was in four of the; otherwise all of his other work were standalones like this one.