#13. HUGO OAKES, LAWYER-DETECTIVE, by J. Lane Linklater.

   One of the precursors of Erle Stanley Gardner’s series character Perry Mason the attorney, the Hugo Oakes series is fairly entertaining. J. Lane Linklater created this series about a criminal defense attorney who solved crimes. He appeared in twenty stories in Detective Fiction Weekly from 1929-1934, a respectable run.

   J. Lane Linklater was the pseudonym of Alex Watkins (1893?-1983?). He had two other series that also ran in the magazine: Sad Sam Salter (1937), and Paul C. Pitt, a kind of conman (1936-1941).

   One of the stories describes Oakes the person: “Hugo Oakes, lawyer, investigator, gruff friend of the penniless in trouble, had four great interests in life. Those interests were law, detection, people—and horses.” (Finishing Touches)

   A physical description of Oakes is noted in another story: “He was a wizard with flowery eloquence, too, but outside of the courtroom it didn’t seem to go with his age-colored, shapeless clothes, his casual manner, his pudgy person.” (You Think of Everything)

   He wears a slouch hat, and rolls his own cigarettes. Very little information is given about Oakes’ background and upbringing. There is a mention by Oakes himself on one occasion that he liked horses because he grew up on a farm (Not One Clew).

   He prefers to use ungrammatical, common speech that belies his education. However, when he wishes he can use much better language. Inspector Mallory prefers Oakes to use common language; he “liked Oakes much less when the lawyer used four-syllable words.” (Arsenic in the Cocktail)

   Oakes is not one of the high-priced lawyers with a fancy office and furniture. He has a shabby office that costs him twenty dollars a month, and often doesn’t have enough in his business accounts to pay that. His only employee is Mamie, who is his combination stenographer-bookkeeper-secretary.

   The reason he has very little money is that people rarely paid him for the legal work he did for them. Oakes has a thriving practice helping people with little money out of trouble. He did his own detective work rather than hire a detective agency to do it for him. However, we must remember that these stories take place during the Depression, when many people either lacked jobs or had poorly paying ones.

   Oakes is an egalitarian, preferring regular people and the poor to the better off and wealthy classes. A person’s lack of money never affected Oakes’ decision to take them on as a client.

   The only other regular in the series is police Inspector Mallory, who is usually glad to have Oakes help on his cases, but “he would never admit it. They might gibe and grouch at each other on occasion, but Mallory had intelligence enough to recognize the value of Oakes’s assistance, and Oakes was always willing to let the credit go to Mallory.” (Finishing Touches)

   Each story usually involves Oaks being called in by a client and then having to solve a murder, usually to save the client. Once his client was a murder victim before Oakes could reach the scene. Inspector Mallory was always on hand at the scene of the crime. Mallory either does not understand what is going on, or seeks the simplest explanation (always wrong, of course).

   Very rarely did Mallory actively ask for Oakes’ help on a case. One special case was in the story “A Pair of Shoes”, where Mallory asked for assistance. A rich businessman had disappeared, and three weeks of work had led Mallory to be desperate enough to ask for unofficial help. Oakes gets to work and very quickly solves the case in a logical manner.

   Another request for help from Mallory led to a murder investigation by Oakes at a high society horse show in “Not One Clew”. Oakes said he did not care for society, but he did like the horses. Part of the deal with Mallory was a free ticket to the horse show.

   Another off-beat story for the series is “Crazy People Are Smart,” where Oakes accepts the challenge of a prison chaplain and investigates an old murder. Bill Tubby had just twenty-four hours before his scheduled electric chair execution for a crime he claimed he did not commit. Inspector Mallory had solved the case to his satisfaction, and he is afraid Oakes will do something to change the outcome. Oakes goes to the scene of the crime and investigates, coming up with an unusual solution that saves Tubby.

   Hugo Oakes has a system for locating the murderer in crime situations: “Always look for the type of mind capable of conceiving and executing the particular crime under scrutiny.” (The Wild Man From Borneo)

   Inspector Mallory knows about this system, and in this story attempts to use it himself. Unfortunately he chooses the wrong person as the murderer, and Oakes has to straighten him out. This is one case where Oakes becomes involved because the victim was a friend of his. Oakes is uncharacteristically not in his usual cheerful mood; in fact he is angry and unsmiling.

   Another story gives a bit more of Oakes’ insight into crime detecting: “But a man always leaves the imprint of his personality on his crime. What a man does is the expression of what he is. He may not leave fingerprints, but he always leaves mind prints.” (Crazy People Are Smart)

   So Hugo Oakes is a believer in the application of psychology to crime-solving. The stories contain little violence, though one exception is in the story “Finishing Touches.” Here Oakes confronts the guilty party and has Inspector Mallory secretly back him up, which is needed when the murderer attempts to kill Oakes. Mallory wounds the murderer and saves Oakes’ life.

   The series is interesting to read, although there are not any great criminal masterminds, fancy destructive gadgets, or gangs of criminals running around. It took all kinds of stories in the pulp era, and this series is better than many other series in DFW.

      The Hugo Oakes series, by J. Lane Linklayer:

Hello, Jim!     September 7, 1929
Court Costs Saved     October 5, 1929
The Wild Man From Borneo     February 22, 1930
The Watchful Woman     May 10, 1930
Not One Clew     May 24, 1930
Crazy People Are Smart     May 31, 1930
The Seventh Green Murder     July 26, 1930
The Lady Confesses     August 23, 1930
Three Old Crows     October 18, 1930
A Pair of Shoes     November 15, 1930
Finishing Touches     January 3, 1931
You Think of Things February 7, 1931
Women Always Mean Trouble     March 28, 1931
Arsenic in the Cocktail     April 4, 1931
He Died Laughing     July 4, 1931
Murder Next Door     September 5, 1931
Find the Silencer     October 10, 1931
The Second Floor Murder     November 19, 1932
The Dead Client     December 2, 1933
On the Brink     June 2, 1934

    Biographical sketch of Linklater from the March 16, 1929 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly:

   HERE is a personal greeting from J. Lane Linklater, author of “One O’Clock in the Morning,” in this issue. We asked him to stand up and say a few words to you:

   You can’t mean me, cap’n?

   Oh, well—

   We’ll avoid the statistical as far as possible and get down to the vital.

   I have lived more or less decidedly and existed more or less uncertainly, in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana; that is, down the Pacific Coast from British Columbia to the Mexican border, and across the south to Louisiana. Thus it will be seen that I have never set foot on any but a coast or border State.

   I have held down — sometimes for a very brief period — forty-three jobs, in offices, restaurants, hotels, boarding houses, and again in offices; in large cities, small towns, construction and logging camps, in green valleys and desert plains. If I was working in a town, it was never far away from a restaurant; if in a camp, it was never very far away from the cookhouse.

   Incidentally, the transition from job to job was at times sudden and drastic. On one occasion, for instance, I was night porter in a “coffee and” dump, and a week later I was head bookkeeper for a chain store system some two thousand miles away. Honestly — or perhaps I should say, actually — I am a very fair bookkeeper.

   While I’m on the question of jobs — and what is more important? — I might add that the last regular job I had, and the one I was on longer than any of the others, was as editor of a farm paper. I was never better fitted for any job than for this one inasmuch as I had never in my life touched my hand to a plow and couldn’t tell the difference between a Jersey heifer and a Shorthorn bull. Now I know what a Shorthorn bull is, having met one in a dissatisfied mood.

   Among the people I have met and become friendly with — and this is vital, from the point of view of both life and letters — were bankers, labor agitators, gamblers, ministers, politicians, hoboes, Chinese cooks, mining-stock promoters, hard-working bohunks, and waitresses. Of these I should say that the bohunks were the most useful, the hoboes the happiest, the Chinese cooks the most successful, and the waitresses the most interesting — to me.

   Perhaps the most accurate indication of the kind of life a man has led is where he has slept. Well, I have slept in very expensive hotels — when I was working there — in middle-class hotels, in cheap hotels, and in fifteen-cent flophouses; also in bunk houses, ditches, city parks, fields, woods and swamps. Of these I should say that the woods were the most comfortable and the flophouses the most interesting.

   I have never been arrested. This I now regret exceedingly. I have had several opportunities, although I never offended society very seriously, except by going broke. I have been accosted on the street around three o’clock in the morning in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans and other minor municipalities which suspected that my financial status warranted my arrest as a vagrant. Their suspicions were correct, but I was always able to convince them otherwise. As I say, I now regret it. I may yet overcome this disadvantage.

   In these emergencies my tongue was assisted by my face, a deceptively mild arrangement that never seemed to fit the role of roving mendicant. I have been mistaken for a well-known Methodist minister in Portland, Oregon, and for a Chatauqua lecturer in Sweetwater, Texas.

   My formal education, unfortunately, was not very extensive. However, I have read rather incessantly, if not systematically. Meditating upon what I had seen and what I had read I decided, about a year and a half ago, to forsake the discussion of ton litters and live stock diseases for the production of fiction. I inquired about it. I read the writers’ journals. I asked advice of people who know about these things — I was always keen for advice.

   They all told me to hang on to my job for five or perhaps ten years, the while I tried to write fiction. I thereupon quit my job cold. Advice is fine, but I have always thought that if you’re going to do a thing, the thing to do is to go ahead and do it, sink or swim. I’m not rich yet, but the wife and I are going back down to California for the winter.

   I have never been well enough to undertake anything violent, and never sick enough to take to my bed. It is a condition that presages a long life. Under the head of more good luck, I have a wife — acquired about eight years ago — who is a good scout and a smart woman; a father and mother, both alive and well, who are intelligent and good natured—they had to be to put up with me—and a number of friends who stick through the years.

   All of these things count. Not that it matters, but I am now thirty-six years old.

    Previously in this series:

1. SHAMUS MAGUIRE, by Stanley Day.
2. HAPPY McGONIGLE, by Paul Allenby.
3. ARTY BEELE, by Ruth & Alexander Wilson.
4. COLIN HAIG, by H. Bedford-Jones.
5. SECRET AGENT GEORGE DEVRITE, by Tom Curry.
6. BATTLE McKIM, by Edward Parrish Ware.
7. TUG NORTON by Edward Parrish Ware.
8. CANDID JONES by Richard Sale.
9. THE PATENT LEATHER KID, by Erle Stanley Gardner.
10. OSCAR VAN DUYVEN & PIERRE LEMASSE, by Robert Brennan.
11. INSPECTOR FRAYNE, by Harold de Polo.
12. INDIAN JOHN SEATTLE, by Charles Alexander.

   I spent a goodly chunk of April on the road, driving to the east coast with many stops along the way, then taking Amtrak from New York to Salem, Massachusetts, where I visited Bob Briney’s grave and conferred with the attorney handling his estate.

   He drove me out to Bob’s house, which I hadn’t seen in almost 22 years, and together we went through some of his files. Among them were several manila folders containing letters to Bob from me, hundreds of them, dating as far back as the late Sixties.

   Recently I received a huge package in the mail which turned out to contain those letters, returned to me by the attorney. Since then I’ve spent several hours re-reading them. A strange and sort of spooky experience, almost like going back in time to the decades when I was young and, judging from all the projects I was involved in, bursting with energy.

   After a few years of corresponding with Bob I got into the habit of passing along to him some of the dreadful lines I had encountered in my reading. Care to sample a few? Here’s one from Harry Stephen Keeler’s The Monocled Monster:

   And another from the king of Malapropia, Michael Avallone:

   To commemorate the current celebrations in London I offer this exchange of dialogue from William Ard’s The Sins of Billy Serene:

   From John Ball of In the Heat of the Night fame:

   Finally a gem that would have bedecked my own novel Corrupt and Ensnare (1978) if I hadn’t caught it in time. Loren Mensing reflects that Incident A and Incident B “bore the earmarks of the same hand.” At the bottom of the letter in which I shared this gaffe with Bob I found in his handwriting: “And the handiwork of the same mind, no doubt.”

   More than forty years ago I copied for Bob the following paragraph, which is supposed to be the first-person narration of an educated woman. “Sweet, dear, impossible man. I wonder who he’s making love to now. I wish it were me. I have the education and breeding to appreciate a gentleman like he is.” Anyone want to guess who perpetrated it?

   I don’t usually go back to old columns of mine months later but a few weeks ago for some unfathomable reason I revisited one that was posted in January 2011. Part of it dealt with a radio director named Fred Essex, now in his nineties, who in a memoir talked about having directed an episode of The Adventures of Ellery Queen in which Ellery was played by Carleton Young, the guest armchair detective was comedian Fred Allen, and the murder “was committed in a radio studio that was supposedly rehearsing a crime program.“

   The problem, as I pointed out, is that there’s no known episode during Young’s tenure as EQ where Ellery solved a crime in a radio studio and no episode at any time where Fred Allen was the armchair sleuth.

   Among those who happened to read my column was Fred Essex himself, who insisted that his memory hadn’t played him false. In August of last year, Queen expert Kurt Sercu gave us the answer to this conundrum. What Essex remembered was not an EQ episode with Fred Allen as guest sleuth but an episode of The Fred Allen Show (June 6, 1943) which featured an EQ spoof skit with Carleton Young himself playing Ellery and Allen and a couple of his comedy characters as armchair detectives. Vielen Dank, Herr Sercu!

   When a writer trying to come across as an authority on the mean streets makes a mistake that his most sheltered readers catch, the egg on the guy’s face just won’t rub off.

   In putting together last month’s column I caught a classic howler of this sort in one of the earliest stories of Henry Kane. In “The Shoe Fits” (Esquire, ??? 1947; collected in Report for a Corpse, 1948) private richard Peter Chambers tells us about a gangster who had taken over a top spot “directing traffic from Old Mexico to California, hashish traffic, call it marijuana….”

   No, you did not dream you read that. Kane thinks hash and pot are the same substance! At least he did in 1947 when very few were drug-savvy.

   Among the treasures of my library are two signed mint copies of James Ellroy’s first novel, the paperback original Brown’s Requiem (Avon, 1981), which I first read back in the Eighties.

   Its protagonist and narrator is Fritz Brown, a lover of classical music (German Romantic composers exclusively) who after being kicked out of the LAPD became a repo man and occasional PI. The plot is a Chandleresque labyrinth — a beautiful cellist, a serial arsonist, golf caddies, corrupt cops, a welfare racket — but the style is closer to Bill Pronzini and, with its dysfunctional family and ceaseless journeys into the past, the mood is closer to Ross Macdonald.

   Anyone expecting the telegraphic non-sentences and epic bloodletting of the later Ellroy will be surprised to discover that Requiem is coherently written and minimally violent, although when it comes the violence is pretty gory.

   There are some laughably self-indulgent moments, as when Brown treats us to a farrago of irrelevant anecdotes about caddies (or, as they call themselves, loopers) and later — twice in five pages! — to a loony poem he’s composed in a dream.

   But it’s a powerful read, and offhand I can’t recall any other non-series PI novel that deserves to stand on the same shelf with Stanley Ellin’s 1958 classic The Eighth Circle. Which, thanks to the alphabetical proximity of their names, is just where it stands in my library!

   During the last months of World War II the editors of Esquire decided to launch a series of short detective stories and invited various mystery writers to create new characters for possible publication in the magazine.

   Among the invitees was Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967), perhaps the nuttiest author on earth. Harry got miffed at the thought of being asked to “submit a sample like a guy with a tin cup” and demanded $100 in advance. He must have fallen on the floor in shock when Esquire immediately sent him a check, although the editors specified that the advance wasn’t a commitment to accept his submission.

   Keeler proceeded to string together a 14,000-word adventure about a barking clock and an astigmatic witness, with a 7½-foot-tall mathematically educated hick from the sticks serving as detective. At first the character was named just that — Abner Hick to be precise — but before sending out the manuscript Keeler prudently changed his name to Quiribus Brown.

   When Esquire rejected the story, Keeler yanked Quiribus out of the plot, replaced him with that bedraggled old universal genius Tuddleton T. Trotter (who had starred in Harry’s mammoth extravaganza The Matilda Hunter Murder back in 1931), and added 85,000 more words to the story.

   His Spanish publisher Instituto Editorial Reus issued the result as El Caso del Reloj Ladrador (1947). Keeler’s U.S. publisher, the bottom-rung Phoenix Press, put out a shorter version that same year as The Case of the Barking Clock.

   Since Phoenix dropped Keeler in 1948, leaving him without a U.S. publisher for the rest of his life, Quiribus never saw the light of print in his native land. But Harry made him the protagonist in The Case of the Murdered Mathematician, issued in 1949 by his London publisher Ward, Lock.

   So what new detective was chosen to grace the pages of Esquire? A New York PI named Peter Chambers whose creator was Henry Kane, a lawyer and something of a Chandler wannabee. Chambers narrates his own cases in an idiom, known to connoisseurs as High Kanese, which is worlds removed from Keeler’s style but just as lovably eccentric.

   The first six Chambers stories appeared in Esquire between March 1947 and June 1948 and were collected as Report for a Corpse (Simon & Schuster, 1948).

   The timing was unfortunate in the sense that the book came out several months after Anthony Boucher was let go as reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and before he became mystery critic of the New York Times. I’d love to know what Boucher thought of this volume, but it was his predecessor Isaac Anderson who reviewed the book in the Times.

   I read the tales a few decades ago but had forgotten them completely when I started to reread them earlier this year. They’re more cleverly plotted than most PI stories during the years Chandler dominated the genre, but there’s nothing truly memorable about any of them and the narration is a pale shadow of what would soon become mature Kanese.

   According to just about any print or electronic source you might check, Henry Kane was born in 1918 and is still alive. Apparently neither of these statements is true.

   Lawrence Block had several conversations with Kane in the early 1970s and, while preparing a memoir of him for Mystery Scene, did some investigative work that was worthy of his own PI Matthew Scudder. An old girlfriend of Kane’s told Block that “he was most likely born not in 1918 but in 1908.” At least when Block knew him, he “lived on Long Island — Lido Beach, if memory serves — and spent Monday through Friday in an apartment on 34th Street west of Ninth Avenue.”

   Block tells us that he “took his work seriously, and insisted that each page be perfectly typed before he went on to the next one.” He was of Jewish descent but told Block that he “didn’t believe in any of that mumbo-jumbo.”

   His lifestyle was that of the stereotypical PI: a Dexedrine pill every morning, at least a quart of Scotch and a couple of packs of cigarettes a day. “It must have been sometime in the early ’80s that he died,” Block surmises.

   Of the eleven Henry Kanes listed in the Social Security Death Index, the one who was born in 1908 and died in 1988 is most likely our man. I would love to have met him, though not necessarily in that smoke-choked apartment.

   In his years as conductor of the “Criminals at Large” column for the Times, Anthony Boucher reviewed most of the Kane novels and collections, even though they were published in the unprestigious paperback-original format.

   I still recall vividly the time he reviewed one of those novels twice. Its U.S. title was Too French and Too Deadly (Avon pb #672, 1955). In his Times column for December 18, 1955 he called the book “probably enjoyable; Peter Chambers stories are usually amusing, and this one is said to include ‘a locked room within a locked room.’

   â€œBut the publishers have chosen to crowd a full-length novel into 122 pages by squeezing 500 words onto a 4-inch by 6-inch page; and squinting one’s way through the book is too much to ask of a reviewer, a reader, or anyone save possibly a Lord’s-Prayer-on-Pinhead engraver.”

   Apparently Kane then sent Boucher a copy of the hardcover British edition, The Narrowing Lust (Boardman, 1956). In his column for June 24, 1956, Boucher reported that “now that it’s legible, it’s also highly readable” and “includes an unusually impossible-seeming locked room problem. It’s a welcome blend of strict detective puzzle and crisp and sexy thriller….”

   In my last column I quoted the late Fred Steiner, composer of the Perry Mason theme: “You look at those old film noir pictures, they’ve always got jazz going for some reason or other.”

   Since then I’ve discovered that this seems to be a classic case of false memory. The point was demonstrated by David Butler in his book Jazz Noir: Listening to Music from Phantom Lady to The Last Seduction (Praeger, 2002) and confirmed by William Luhr in his just published Film Noir (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012):

   â€œAlthough many neo-noir movies have used single-instrument jazz solos to evoke the film noir era, it is difficult to find a canonical film noir [i.e. one that dates from the Forties or Fifties] that opens in that way. Most used full orchestral scores, as was standard studio practice.”

   It’s only in TV private-eye series like Peter Gunn that jazz became the norm. And, as Lawrence Block points out, the strongest uncredited influence on that landmark series was the novels and stories of Henry Kane — who wound up writing the Peter Gunn tie-in novel (Dell pb #B155, 1960)!

   Is this a weird world or what? Luhr’s book is one of the few that discusses in depth both canonical noir and the more recent evocations of the genre, of which perhaps the finest is Chinatown (1974). I recommend it highly to anyone invested in that type of film. And aren’t we all?

      Previously on this blog:

A Corpse for Christmas, by Henry Kane. Reviewed by Bill Deeck.
Trinity in Violence, by Henry Kane. A 1001 Midnights review by Art Scott.
The Midnight Man, by Henry Kane. A 1001 Midnights review by Bill Pronzini.
A Corpse for Christmas, by Henry Kane. Reviewed by Steve Lewis.
Until You Are Dead, by Henry Kane. Reviewed by Steve Lewis.

   A long quote from the latter book is included as a big chunk of the review.

        #12. INDIAN JOHN SEATTLE, by Charles Alexander.

   This next installment of my columns for Mystery*File features a look at another series character who appeared in the pages of Detective Fiction Weekly. The “Indian John Seattle” stories by Charles Alexander made up a short series of at least fifteen stories published in DFW from 1933 through 1939, plus two stories in Ace-High Detective Magazine 1936-37.

   The stories are rural in setting. Stories published in DFW were a mixture of settings, both urban and rural. Many stories took place in urban environments, but there were a large number that were rural in setting. The Tug Norton series by Edward Parrish Ware was one that had stories in both urban and rural settings. Ware’s Ranger Jack Calhoun series was mostly rural, with a little in small towns. Even an urban series such as Morton & McGarvey by Donald Barr Chidsey had some stories in a rural environment.

   Indian John Seattle is a sheriff of primarily rural Plainview County in Oregon, and his shabby office is in the courthouse in the town of Plainview. He gets his name from his learning all about Indian ways and outdoor skills. He spent his boyhood with the Nez Perce Indians. “He was an instinctive and Indian-trained hunter; criminals were his prey.” (Head Hunt)

   The first story, “Death Song,” states that to catch a killer, “he must play Indian cunning on them.” This seems to work, as he flushes out the guilty man into running and later confessing the murder. This story also notes: “Many crimes of the forest Seattle had solved. He knew men—knew them through and through when they placed themselves against the background of canyon and forest where he had gained his wisdom.” In a later story, “Up Death Creek,” Seattle is called “A human steel-trap in the path of the evil-doer.”

   In the second story, “Head Hunt,” his deputy sheriff is introduced: “Hal Minton, … a tall and neat and taciturn man in his late twenties.” He is also described as “tight-lipped and grim of eye, advertised the dignity of the law.”

   Minton does not always approve of the way Seattle does things. Seattle, by contrast to his deputy, was “a bandy-legged figure in worn moleskins, wearing a time-honored Stetson, …” He is slightly bent from much time in the saddle, although he regularly uses an ancient Ford automobile he calls Flap-fender.

   No mention is made of any family of Seattle’s, nor is it known where his home was. He kept odd hours as sheriff, and was likely to turn up making the rounds of the town of Plainview at 3 A.M. He seems to have lived for his job.

   His cases were murder-involved, and Sheriff Seattle had plenty of experience. He “had a nose for trouble, a reaction, perhaps instinctive, to the lurking threat of danger. Years in the wilderness had equipped him with the wariness of the wolf, the cat-like cunning of the cougar.” (Head Hunt)

   In “Head Hunt” he tracks down two murderers and finds the missing head of their victim, meanwhile avoiding a death-trap. Seattle carries an old .45 Frontier Model Colt, and certainly knows how to use it.

   In the story, “The Weeping Lorena,” there is also no mystery as to who are the murderers and what they did. The story is regarding Indian John Seattle’s discovery of the crime and dealing with the criminals. The criminals in this story are contemptuous of the local law enforcement, calling them “hick cops.”

   However, they find that Sheriff Indian John Seattle is no fool as he quickly uncovers their scheme and crime. This story reveals that Seattle has no confidence in the abilities of his deputy, Minton. Seattle mentions that Minton is usually the first on the scene of the crime, but the last to solve the crime. In “Death Watch,” Minton actually interferes with Seattle’s attempt to uncover the crime and fasten the guilt where it belongs.

   There were other series in DFW about rural sheriffs who solved crimes. One of these was the series about Sheriff Whitcher Bemis, written by Harold de Polo and published in DFW from 1927-1928. De Polo also had another rural sheriff series in DFW: Sheriff Ollie Bascomb from 1931-1941. Both of de Polo’s series have a bit of humor in them, and the Whitcher Bemis series attempts a rural dialect for the characters.

   The Sheriff Indian John Seattle series is different than these two series primarily in having no humor present in the stories, and presenting the sheriff as a person of dignity, and not just a hick sheriff.

   â€œDeath Watch” involves another criminal who thinks he can outsmart Sheriff Seattle, and tries to kill him when his plans are failing. However, the criminal overlooks a simple thing in his plan, and it comes back to point the finger at him. In this story, Seattle actually kills one of the criminals. Usually he prefers to catch them alive for trial, although a number of times he has to wound the criminal in order to get his man. One of the better stories in the series.

   In “Up Death Creek” Seattle has to solve a bit of a puzzle in order to finish this case. The blurb for the story reads as follows: “The bullet pneumonia of Whisky Brown, the torn boot with the missing calk—Indian John had to read those sinister signs to save an innocent man from the gallows.”

   In “Claws of the Killer” the two murderers think they have a good plan by killing someone and claiming a wild bear did the crime. However, Sheriff Seattle manages to capture both and point out a large flaw in their scheme.

   â€œDeath is a Hummingbird” involves a bizarre and very improbable method of murder that I have not seen before. Using hummingbirds to start fires! An absurd idea. The story basically falls apart, and Sheriff Seattle uses a ridiculous bluff on the murderer to make him confess.

   In “Rat Nest,” a much better story, Seattle is investigating some poachers, and when he arrests one of them for murder he winds up making the biggest mistake of his career. However, when he investigates further, he learns the truth behind the matter.

   In “Deputy Sheriff Rattlesnake” the murderers kidnapped Seattle and placed him in a death trap, from which he escaped. However, while he was missing, deputy sheriff Minton and the coroner argued over who should be sheriff if Seattle did not show up. So it sounds like he was feared, but not missed.

   This was an average series of stories compared to the many other series that ran in DFW, but it is better than the two rural sheriff series written by Harold de Polo. I prefer the series without much humor in it, compared to the humor present in the de Polo series.

      The Indian John Seattle series, by Charles Alexander:

   In Detective Fiction Weekly:

Death Song     April 8, 1933
Head Hunt     August 12, 1933
The Weeping Lorena     October 7, 1933
Bullet-Hole Business     January 27, 1934
The Hicks Have It     March 17, 1934
Death Watch     June 16, 1934
Up Death Creek     June 30, 1934
Back-Fire Murder     July 28, 1934
The Lady Says     October 6, 1934
Claws of the Killer     March 23, 1935
Homicide Expert     November 23, 1935
Death Walks on Water     June 4, 1938
Death is a Hummingbird     June 18, 1938
Rat Nest     September 24, 1938
Deputy Sheriff Rattlesnake     February 4, 1939

   In Ace-High Detective Magazine:

Black Creek Brimstone     September, 1936

Drummer of Doom     February-March, 1937

    Previously in this series:

1. SHAMUS MAGUIRE, by Stanley Day.
2. HAPPY McGONIGLE, by Paul Allenby.
3. ARTY BEELE, by Ruth & Alexander Wilson.
4. COLIN HAIG, by H. Bedford-Jones.
5. SECRET AGENT GEORGE DEVRITE, by Tom Curry.
6. BATTLE McKIM, by Edward Parrish Ware.
7. TUG NORTON by Edward Parrish Ware.
8. CANDID JONES by Richard Sale.
9. THE PATENT LEATHER KID, by Erle Stanley Gardner.
10. OSCAR VAN DUYVEN & PIERRE LEMASSE, by Robert Brennan.
11. INSPECTOR FRAYNE, by by Harold de Polo.

   When stuck for something to write about, browse the Web. I did that recently and discovered on the Bernard Herrmann Society website an excellent item to kick off this column with, an interview with composer Fred Steiner (1923-2011), whose main claim to fame for mystery lovers is that he wrote the theme for the Perry Mason TV series, which you may listen to here.

   Here, laboriously transcribed by my own fingers, is what he had to say on that subject in the 2003 interview:

   During the late Fifties and early Sixties when Perry Mason was in prime time, the head of the CBS west coast music department was Lud Gluskin (1898-1989) and the best-known composer working for him of course was Herrmann (1911-1975), whose ominous music was heard frequently in the episodes from the first two years of the series.

   Steiner went on to tell of another Herrmann-Mason connection:

   Listening to Steiner’s words as Perry Mason would listen to the testimony of a witness against his client, do you detect the ambiguity I do? If Steiner were on the stand and you were cross-examining him, wouldn’t you ask the same question I would?

   â€œMr. Steiner, do you know whether Herrmann actually wrote a new theme for the series before he persuaded his bosses that they didn’t need one?”

   Steiner died last June so the answer may never be known. But if he had replied that Herrmann did indeed write such a theme, wouldn’t you love to knew where it is? Or better still, to hear it?

   At least we can see Steiner and hear the interview on YouTube.

   From the Fifties let’s retreat to 1928, the year Fred Dannay and his cousin Manny Lee were writing The Roman Hat Mystery and creating Ellery Queen. How did they come up with the name?

   It’s been known for decades that Ellery was the name of Fred’s closest friend when he was growing up in Elmira, New York. How they settled on Queen was explained in an audio recording played at the Columbia University’s Queen centennial conference in 2005.

   The speaker is Patricia Lee Caldwell (1928- ), Manny’s oldest daughter, who had the story from her mother, Manny’s first wife, Betty Miller (1909-1974). Manny had married her in 1927 when she was 18 years old and he was 22. They were living in an apartment on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn when their daughter was born.

   And which of us shall say that it wasn’t?

   Now let’s jump forward to a time when Ellery Queen was a household word, specifically to the fall of 1946 when the first volume of The Queen’s Awards brought together the prizewinners in the first annual story contest that Fred Dannay conducted for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

   Among the winners of the six second prizes — $250 apiece, which was a nice chunk of money in those days — was William Faulkner for “An Error in Chemistry” (EQMM, June 1946), the future Nobel laureate’s only original contribution to the magazine. (The two other Faulkner stories Fred bought were reprints.)

   From various Faulkner biographies we learn that he lost no time deriding both the magazine and the prize. “What a commentary,” he wrote his agent. “In France I am the father of a literary movement. In Europe I am considered the best modern American and among the first of all writers. In America I eke out a hack’s motion picture wages by winning second prize in a manufactured mystery story contest.”

   A true Southern gentleman, yes?

   I collect and read quite a few other types of magazines besides the pulps. A couple of members of FictionMags, an online Yahoo discussion group, asked me about my favorite magazines, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to discuss the subject.

       Slicks —

   This is easy for me to answer. My favorite slick magazine without a doubt is The Saturday Evening Post. They used the best authors and the best artists. It was weekly and some issues in the 1920’s were 200 pages.

   Usually collectors of the Post concentrate on certain authors or artists. Since thousands of issues were published you do not find many people trying to collect the entire run. However, I was one of the completists and at one point I had over 3,000 issues during the 1900-1970 period.

   The last time I moved not only could I not pick up the yearly boxes of the magazine (each box had 52 issues), but the movers had trouble also because of the weight. Eventually I sold much of the collection but I still have a complete run of 1940-1970.

   Another slick I liked a lot was American Magazine, mainly because of the mystery short novels they published. Jon Breen edited a collection of these novellas called American Murders.

       Digests —

   This is a far more difficult category for me to choose a favorite but I’ll go with Galaxy for the SF genre and Manhunt for the crime genre.

   Galaxy was the first magazine I bought off the newsstand in 1956 and it led to my present collection of many different titles. But my reason for picking Galaxy is not just nostalgic. I really feel that it was the best of the SF digests especially under the editorship of H.L. Gold and Fred Pohl.

   Pohl was smart enough to offer Robert Silverberg a deal to buy all of his stories submitted to Galaxy in the 1965-1972 period or thereabouts. Some of the best SF ever written appeared during this period and I’ve read many of Silverberg’s stories and serials more than once.

   Has there ever been a greater or higher quality number of novels in any SF magazine? I mean, think of it: The World Inside, Tower of Glass, Downward to Earth, Dying Inside, all in about two years.

   Alfred Bester wrote two great novels but they were in 1952 and 1956. J.G. Ballard wrote some great novels but they all did not appear in the SF magazines. Maybe Philip K. Dick comes closest but again, he did not write all of them for the SF magazines. Sturgeon had some great work in Galaxy but it was all novelette length.

   Can anyone show me a comparable run of novels in the SF magazines?

   Manhunt lasted 114 issues during 1953-1967 and during the fifties started the hardboiled crime digest craze. At one time there seemed to be dozens of Manhunt imitators but none of them could match the quality of the magazine that started it all.

   Unfortunately by the sixties it was all downhill and the hardboiled crime era was just about over. Two crime digest still exist, though they are not really hardboiled like Manhunt: Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

   Circulations are dropping fast and in these days of the e-book revolution, we will probably see the end of the digest magazines.

       Literary Magazines —

   By literary I mean such magazines as the Hudson Review, T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, Scrutiny, Kenyon Review, and so on.

   I have just about all the back issues of many of the quarterlies and I love the Hudson Review, but my favorite is Horizon, not the hardbound art magazine but the monthly British magazine edited by Cyril Connolly during 1940-1949. It lasted 120 issues and I like it so much that I have two sets, one of loose issues and one bound set.

   There are other magazines that I have in two sets, loose and bound and you know you have to love a magazine to have it in bound and loose sets! Let’s face it, collecting books and magazines can be an addiction like alcohol, smoking, gambling, and drugs. But at least we get something to read and sometimes the books are even worth money. Not to mention that collecting old magazines won’t harm your health.

       Men’s Adventure Magazines —

   This is a sore point with me and maybe some of you can help me out. I have hundreds of issues from the 1950’s and 1960’s, most showing sensationalistic covers like Nazis partying with half nude girls, while GI’s wait to gun them down. I have yet to find a title that ran decent fiction other than maybe Cavalier in the fifties.

   I’m not talking about Playboy which actually ran high quality fiction, but the titles like Men’s Adventure, True Men and so on. The only redeeming value to these magazines are the crazy covers but I’m hoping someone here can convince me otherwise.

   Phil Stephensen-Payne has a great link to many titles of men’s adventure magazines published in the 1950’s and 1960’s http://www.philsp.com/mfi2.html

   Please someone show me something else about these magazine that is readable! I’ve just about given up. The covers are stunning and very eye catching but that’s all I see about these magazines. I guess the WW II vets loved these things but I can’t see anything other than the covers worth collecting.

   Check out the link to menspulpmags.com. It’s a real laugh.

   At one time I had a great cover painting from one of the men’s adventure magazines. It show Nazis turning girls into gold ingots. No wonder they lost the war.

          PULP MAGAZINES:

   I haven’t even touched the pulps which are such a big subject they deserve their own section separated by genre:

       General Fiction Pulps —

   These pulps are often called adventure pulps by collectors but I prefer the label General Fiction. The best ones lasted for very long periods and were very popular with male readers. All Story, Argosy, Short Stories, Blue Book, Adventure, and Popular Magazine were the main titles and I’ve collected them all:

   Adventure Magazine is my favorite and the pulp years lasted from 1910-1953, for 753 issues. The best period was during the 1920’s when editor Arthur Sullivant Hoffman managed to obtain the very best action and adventure fiction. Richard Bleiler wrote the standard history of the magazine in his Adventure Index. Also Blood n Thunder Magazine devoted a special issue to Adventure a couple issues ago. I had an article picking my favorite stories.

   All Story lasted for over 400 issues, 1905-1920, when it was absorbed by Argosy. Famous for providing Edgar Rice Burroughs with a market for his Tarzan and Mars novels. Sam Moskowitz wrote an interesting history of the magazine in Under the Moons of Mars.

   Argosy became the first pulp in 1896 and lasted into the 1940’s when it became a man’s adventure magazine.

   Short Stories began in 1890 and lasted into the 1960’s. For much of that period it came out every two weeks like clockwork and printed the best action adventure. Blood n Thunder had a long two part article covering the 1920’s and 1930’s.

   Blue Book was known for quality fiction and Mike Ashley wrote a long history of the magazine which appears in Pulp Vault 14. This is the best single issue of a pulp fanzine and can be ordered on Amazon.

   Popular Magazine lasted over 600 issues, 1903-1931 and was called the training ground for the Saturday Evening Post. Another high quality pulp that had a two part article in Blood n Thunder.

       Detective and Mystery Pulps —

   This is easy because of what collectors call “The Big Three”: Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly. Hammett started in Black Mask and Chandler wrote for all three.

       Western Pulps —

   Western Story lasted over 1200 issues and is my favorite. But West during the Doubleday years of 1926-1935 was also quite good. So was Star Western and Dime Western, both published by Popular Publications.

       Hero Pulps —

   Most were aimed at the teenage boy market but at least two stand out: The Spider because of the crazy, fast moving plots and weird menace elements and Secret Agent X because it was not as childish as the others.

   I have to admit that I have a problem with many of the hero pulps because of the silly and sometimes stupid sidekicks. I know they were in there because someone figured the teenage boys would like them. Sort of like the childish sidekick humor in the B-westerns of the 1940’s.

   Some of the pulp sidekicks make the western sidekicks look brilliant. In Doc Savage we have Monk and Ham, for instance and their dialog and attempts at humor are enough to make me stop reading. Same thing with G-8 and His Battle Aces. Nippy and Bull have made me consider ripping up a $100 G-8 pulp.

       SF and Supernatural Pulps —

   Astounding definitely was the best SF pulp. Weird Tales and Unknown Worlds, the best supernatural. Strange Tales, if it had lasted longer than seven issues, it would have been as good or better than the other two.

   Famous Fantastic Mysteries and the companion magazine, Fantastic Novels, are beautiful pulps. It is still possible to get a set without breaking the bank, and these magazines are another example of sets that I have in two formats: bound and unbound. I admit it’s crazy to have two sets, but who said love is logical?

       Sport Pulps —

   Street and Smith’s Sport Story was by far the best sport pulp.

       Love Pulps —

   These were the best sellers of the pulps because teenage girls and young women bought them. Love Story was the best with a circulation that reached 500,000 a week. Edited by the great Daisy Bacon.

   I’d appreciate any feedback on the above that you would care to provide. Do you disagree or have other favorites?

ADDED LATER:

   Todd Mason mentioned that the Daisy Bacon years where she edited Detective Story are underrated. This is certainly true especially the digest period in the 1940’s.

   In 1943 Street & Smith changed the format of their entire pulp line of magazines from the standard pulp size of 7×10 inches to the smaller digest size. The paper shortages during WW II probably drove this decision. Then the publishers saw that the future looked bleak for pulps and killed every digest title except for Astounding.

   But to get back to Daisy Bacon, she was the guiding force behind Love Story for two decades and then she took over Detective Story and actually introduced a more hardboiled story to the sedate magazine.

   Detective Story had started in 1915 and for most of the next 25 years steered clear of the hardboiled type of story. But Daisy managed to get some of the Black Mask writers to write for her, for instance Roger Torrey and William Campbell Gault. Fred Brown also. I cover the history and many of the authors of Detective Story in an article which can be seen here on the Mystery*File blog.

   When I say Love Story was the best of the love pulps, I’m speaking compared to each other. Since I try to collect every fiction magazine under the sun, I made an attempt, more than once, to read Love Story and some of the competition.

   I would not advise anyone to try this experiment. Despite being the best sellers among all the pulps, the love genre was very restrictive to say the least. The young ladies and teenage girls of the 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s, only wanted to read the same formula over and over, and the love pulps gave it to them, over and over.

   I’m speaking of the girl meets boy, they have some problems, and everything is resolved at the end. Ranch Romances was different from the others, but I see it as mainly a western title with some romance elements.

   The love genre may have been the big sellers among pulps (and even slicks since the readership was mostly women), but nowadays collectors mainly ignore them and copies can be had very cheaply. I can count very few people who collect them.

   When I bid on some copies at a recent pulp convention, several of my collector friends burst out laughing or were just stunned speechless. I could only explain my seemingly insane actions as an attempt to collect something new, since I’ve collected everything else.

Previously in this series:   The FRANK M. ROBINSON Collection Auction.

   When the present loses its savor, turn to the past. I recently reread a suspense novel first published in my childhood and first encountered something like 45 years ago. I remembered very little about it except that it hadn’t impressed me much back in the Sixties. It still doesn’t, but some aspects of it merit space here.

   The byline on the first edition of Fallen Angel (Little Brown, 1952) was Walter Ericson but the author was Howard Fast (1914-2003), who is best known for mainstream novels like Spartacus and for his Communist affiliation, which sent him to prison for three months during the McCarthy-HUAC era.

   According to his memoir Being Red (1990), he decided to present his first crime novel under a pseudonym because in those years of Red Menace paranoia he was afraid publishers would soon be boycotting all books by openly Marxist writers like himself.

   Then some patriotic munchkin at Little Brown tipped off the FBI, and J. Edgar Hoover himself called the CEO with the message that it was okay for the book to appear under Fast’s own name but that the house would be in trouble if it came out under a pseudonym. With the book already printed and bound, the dust jacket copy was hastily revised to announce that Ericson was Fast’s newly minted byline for mystery fiction.

   Critical reaction ran the gamut. Anthony Boucher in the New York Times Book Review called the book “something short of sensational… [It] has a few adroitly contrived pursuit scenes in the Hitchcock manner, but a limp, tired plot, an equally tired set of stock characters, rather heavy prose and unlikely dialogue, and a general air of never quite making sense.”

   At the other end of the spectrum, the reviewer for the Boston Herald found the novel “surprisingly absorbing and masterfully created…,” evoking a “mood that is often savage with a skein of madness.”

   The Michigan City News-Dispatch described it as “full of chills and thrills, ripe with suspense and psychological undertones.” The Cincinnati Enquirer praised the “good creepy atmosphere and excellent fast writing.” (Pun intended?)

   These and other raves were reprinted in two pages of front matter when Fallen Angel appeared in paperback, retitled The Darkness Within. This early Ace Double (#D-17, 1953) was bound together with the softcover original Shakedown by Roney Scott, who turned out to be PI novelist William Campbell Gault.

   Apparently no one tipped off J. Edgar this time: the byline on the Ace edition is Walter Ericson and there’s no hint anywhere that Fast was the author.

   The springboard situation here is as purely noir as in any Woolrich novel. The narrator, David Stillman, is in a Lower Manhattan skyscraper late one March afternoon when the lights suddenly go out and the building loses all power.

   Descending 22 stories by the fire stairs, he encounters a lovely woman who seems to know him well but whom he doesn’t know at all. He follows her into the bowels of the building but loses her. Out on the night street he finds that a renowned public figure who kept an office in the building has fallen 22 stories to his death.

   Arriving home, he discovers a gunman in his apartment who presents him with a forged passport and orders him to leave for Europe at once. All this in the first four chapters!

   Stillman soon becomes convinced that he’s been suffering from amnesia for the last three years, but in Chapter Five he visits an obese and grotesque psychiatrist who calls him a liar to his face:

   Whether Fast is right or not I have no idea but this passage seems to be a clear reference to Woolrich’s The Black Curtain (1941; filmed the following year as Street of Chance), which begins with the restoration of the protagonist’s identity after an amnesia lasting precisely three years.

   Fast devised a storyline squarely in the Woolrich vein, and left as much unexplained at the end as Woolrich ever did, but he simply didn’t have Woolrich’s awesome skill at making us live inside the skins of the hunted and the doomed, feeling their terror as they run headlong through the night and the city.

   David Stillman’s first-person narration constantly seeks to evoke a sort of existential dread — perhaps the threat of World War III and the fear of nuclear holocaust — but the style is absurdly pretentious and didactic:

   That last quartet of nouns illustrates another problem with the style: endless repetition. I’ll limit myself to two exchanges of dialogue, both from the climactic scene:

   And then:

   Multiply by hundreds and you’ll get it. The picture that is.

   Speaking of pictures, The Black Curtain was filmed the year after its publication but Fast’s novel didn’t make it to the big screen until after his post-imprisonment break with the Party.

   Mirage (1965) was directed by Edward Dmytryk, another member of the creative Left (although he avoided prison and salvaged his career by “naming names” before HUAC), and starred Gregory Peck and Diane Baker, with the performance of a lifetime by Walter Matthau as the hapless PI Peck consults.

   Dispensing with first-person narration, Dmytryk and screenwriter Peter Stone eliminate the novel’s stylistic faults, but the film never generates the powerful mood of the finest noirs of the Sixties, like Cape Fear and Point Blank.

   As a tie-in with the movie there came a paperback edition of the novel (Crest #d808, 1965), for obvious reasons retitled Mirage but now credited to Fast.

   The back cover is graced by an amusing six-word condensation of Tony Boucher’s Times review: “Pursuit scenes in the Hitchcock manner.”

   Just a few years later Mirage was loosely remade as Jigsaw (1968), directed by James Goldstone in a hallucinogenic visual style, with Bradford Dillman and Harry Guardino replacing Peck and Matthau.

   When Fast was in his early eighties I had a brief exchange of letters with him about his World War II court-martial novel The Winston Affair (1959) and the very different film version Man in the Middle (1964), which starred Robert Mitchum as a sort of Philip Marlowe in khaki. (Google my name and the movie title and you’ll find my University of San Francisco Law Review essay on that subject.)

   If only I had reread Fallen Angel back then and asked him about that book too!

   Recently I was disturbed to notice that a pulp discussion group that I contribute to seemed to be ignoring or unaware of the fact that a major pulp collecting event had just occurred. In fact, I call it The Pulp Auction of the Century.

   I am of course referring to the auction of the collection of Frank M. Robinson, science fiction author, Hollywood screen writer, movie actor (he appears in Milk), and world class collector of high condition pulp magazines. I stress the “high condition” part of the last statement. Frank has been written up many times because of his famous “wall of pulps,” all in fine or very fine condition.

   First, what qualifies me to be making such a claim that this was The Pulp Auction of the Century? I’ve been a collector of magazines since February 1956, when as a child, I bought my first issue of Galaxy, a science fiction digest magazine.

   I still have that very same issue that seemed to be on every newsstand and in every drugstore in the Trenton, NJ area. Not only does Galaxy no longer exist but most newsstands and drugstores no longer carry SF or crime fiction magazines. There are only five digest fiction magazines left and they all have decreasing circulations in this era of the electronic gadget and the e-book. We might soon live to see the end of an era, the death of the digest fiction magazines.

   As the years progressed, I started to collect not only back issues of the SF and crime digests, but I also started to collect the pulp magazines, which ruled the newsstands during the 1900-1955 period.

   First I collected complete runs of the SF and fantasy pulps and then I went on to collect all the major detective and adventure titles. Some of my articles concerning these activities have appeared on Mystery*File under the headings of “Memoirs of a Pulp Collector” and “Adventures in Collecting.” I am frankly a lover of old magazines and my collection includes not only pulp and digest, but also slick, men’s adventure, literary magazines and film journals.

   So though I live in a house full of thousands of magazines and books, I never really became a “condition collector” like Frank Robinson. I wanted to compile complete runs of magazines and read them but this would be very difficult if I limited myself to only fine condition copies, not to mention the fact that readers are often very reluctant to read high quality magazines for fear of downgrading the nice condition.

   This is not to say that I never obtained magazines in beautiful shape; I just did not limit myself to collecting them.

   During this 55 year period of collecting I was witness to many pulp sales and auctions. I attended just about every Pulpcon since the first one in 1972. I bought pulps by the thousands and consider myself a serious collector.

   So when the rumors started to circulate that Frank Robinson was going to sell his collection of 10,000 magazines, most of which were in beautiful condition, this was major news. No one had a collection of such fine condition magazines that could compare to the Robinson collection. Recently John Gunnison, who runs Adventure House, published a full color, 500 page book showing the complete collection in all its glory.

   I first became aware of Frank Robinson when I was a kid and read one of his early stories in a 1951 back issue of Galaxy. Several years later I read his novel, The Power and then saw the movie that supplied him with the funds to amass such an astounding collection, The Towering Inferno.

   In the 1980’s Frank and I started trading pulps back and forth and I noticed he was extremely fussy about condition. Later in the 1980’s, he started to attend Pulpcon on a regular basis and I got to actually meet and talk to Frank. He would actually sit at his table in the dealer’s room with two stacks of pulps, carefully comparing copies and choosing the better condition.

   Condition was everything and like most such collectors, I don’t believe Frank actually read the magazines. At one time in his younger days he did read them, but now they were like beautiful works of art, to be admired and looked at. I know many collectors who love the covers and the condition but they don’t read the magazines.

   Frank has a long article in the 500 page book titled “On Collecting”, where he explains his love of SF and how he got started collecting.

   You might wonder why he decided to sell his collection. He says, “The collecting bug waned…” but I’ve seen many collectors who when they reach a certain age decide to find a younger home for their collection. Also, I think he reached the point that all collectors fear, the time when they realize that they have achieved all their major wants and goals.

   So on February 25, 2012, at 7:00 pm began the first of 12 scheduled auctions which Adventure House will run the next few months. This first one I considered the most important because it would put complete sets of pulps and digest up for bids. Some major pulp titles were sold and I’ll list some of the results, though these figures may not be final since the dust has not settled yet.

   I watched the entire auction online, minute by minute, and lot by lot. I also bid on some items but most of the sets I either have or at one time had and then disposed of after reading all that I wanted:

       Doc Savage (complete set) — $50,000

       Astounding SF (these are the pulps, bedsheets, and digests) — $30,000

       Startling Stories (complete set in fine condition) — almost $5,000

       Adventure Magazine (complete set of over 700 issues)— $40,000

       Blue Book (not complete but an extensive run) — $48,000

       Weird Tales (the crown jewel of Frank’s collection and the best condition set in existence) — $250,000

       Planet Stories (all 71 issues in very fine condition, also probably the best set in the world) — $14,000

   Also up for bids were such sets as Wu Fang, Thrilling Wonder, Golden Fleece, Magic Carpet, Oriental Stories, etc. In addition to the above prices there was also a 10% buyer’s premium.

   According to John Gunnison who ran the auction, sales almost hit the $500,000 mark and he considers this to be the most successful sale he has ever been involved in.

   Now looking at the above prices you might consider them high. But you have to remember, these are not your usual good condition pulps with the usual browned paper, spine and cover flaws. These mainly are fine to very fine condition and thus bring much higher prices than the standard condition magazine.

   Think of it this way, most of us have bought cars, sometimes paying over $25,000 and ten years later we have nothing to show for our hard earned money. To a collector, it is just as important to have a nice collection, so the prices may not be as out of line as you think.

   In addition, where else are you going to find such important and significant titles as Adventure and Blue Book? During the period of around 1910-1950 these magazine carried the best adventure fiction written by the best authors.

   And of course Weird Tales is in a class by itself. Can anyone really argue that it was not the best fantasy and supernatural magazine ever published? Well maybe Unknown Worlds, but it only lasted 39 issues.

   So I would like to thank Frank Robinson and John Gunnison for providing a great and noteworthy pulp auction. After all these years, I thought I’d seen it all but this auction proved once again to me that collecting books and pulps is the grandest game in the world.

Previously in this series:   Is Completism Fatal?.

        #11. INSPECTOR FRAYNE, by Harold de Polo.

   Harold de Polo created a short-lived series about a dandy police inspector named Frayne. Frayne prides himself on being the best-dressed man in the police department and one of the best in the city.

   His personal assistant is a red-haired detective named Don Haggerty, who was known in the department as Frayne’s right-hand man. He did many of the basic detective chores required in investigations, such as looking over the crime scene for any interesting signs or clues. He was also known as “a bulldog on the trail, too.” (The Small Glass Eye, DFW, 14 Sept 1929)

   Haggerty was indispensable to Inspector Frayne in his cases. Frayne considered him a man-hunter in training, and his personal protégé. However, Frayne noted that Haggerty was “still young enough to have likes and dislikes. Inspector Frayne called them intolerances, stumbling blocks in the path of efficient police duty.” (The Small Glass Eye)

   This view of Frayne gives a clue to his personality, showing that he believed that efficiency and unemotional attitudes were the key to better detective work. In the previously mentioned case he had an innocent person arrested for a murder so that the real murderer would believe he was free of suspicion.

   Frayne often used psychological tricks to get suspects and witnesses to respond in the way he wished. Haggerty knew that the “manhunter never assumed an attitude, never made a gesture, never uttered a word, that didn’t mean something.” (La Linda Paloma) In this story Frayne “was simply getting his suspects more on edge.”

   One problem with some of the stories is that Frayne seems to operate as an intuitive detective, with not much in the way of clues to show his line of thinking. “La Linda Paloma” actually is much better than the usual stories in the series; he has definite clues and details how they affected his thinking.

   In the earliest of the stories in the series, “The Small Glass Eye,” Frayne investigates a crime out of his jurisdiction at a lake in the Adirondacks. The cause of his investigating this murder illustrates a facet of Frayne’s personality. His one interest, aside from his clothes, was in investigating murders. It was a hobby with him, and “He could sniff it a mile off, a thousand miles off, … ” After reading a couple of newspaper articles about the death of millionaire Gideon Whipple, Frayne was certain that it was not an accidental death but a purposeful murder.

   One of Frayne’s regular habits was his reading of all the morning newspapers in New York, as well as many papers from other cities including some foreign ones. He was noted as a speed reader, which was an advantage considering how many newspapers he read. He also had “a reading knowledge of seven or eight languages.” (La Linda Paloma) His greatest trait was that he had a photographic memory for all of the newspaper pieces he read, and could recite lines and paragraphs going back years.

   Frayne had seven telephones, some of them private and others for business. Six of his telephones were in his apartment in the East Fifties of New York City, and the seventh in his basement shooting gallery. One of his private lines was directly connected to Don Haggerty’s office at police headquarters. When he wanted to summon Haggerty, Frayne picked up the telephone and clicked his message by moving the receiver up and down. Haggerty responded similarly.

   Frayne lived close to police headquarters, because as noted in the stories it took Haggerty only twelve minutes to make the trip to Frayne’s residence. Frayne’s multistory home is well suited for him. Special closets for his clothes, for example. The basement has a special shooting range so that Frayne can keep in practice with his specially made and altered blunt-nose automatic. He has one his topcoats specially altered so he can draw his gun faster.

   Frayne also had several automobiles, all well powered. One is a roadster. Frayne does not have to worry about his expenses based upon his detective’s pay; he can afford to own all of these things because he “possessed a sufficiently substantial private fortune to enable him to do this,” (The Missing Clew).

   Haggerty’s responsibilities change somewhat over the course of the series. He gradually was given more responsibility, and became the “buffer” for Frayne. In this position, Haggerty had to weed out the homicide cases for which Frayne was suited, and “to offer his chief only such problems as appeared to be impossible to unravel.” (Pelican Plot)

   In other words, common murder cases of no difficulty were refused by Haggerty. Haggerty at this point spoke to Frayne over a special wire connection to Frayne’s apartment, using a number known only to him.

   Other than Haggerty, there are only a couple of other recurring characters in the series. One is Grady, the coroner, who is also an expert on guns and a friend of Frayne’s. He “was one coroner who didn’t hanker to be a great detective.” (Mandarin Coat)

   There is a detective named Mullins, who “was a slim stoop-shouldered man in a pepper-and-salt suit far from new. His eyes looked tired…” (Buttered Toast) Mullins has dreams of solving murders. He also is able to identify criminals based on witness descriptions. He knows a considerable amount about the local criminals and their habits and hangouts. Frayne relies on him to help in some of his cases.

   In the story “Inspector Frayne’s New Topcoat” Frayne is after the gangsters who killed a homicide detective and “one of Frayne’s favored men.” In this story, too, Frayne has an innocent man arrested as a way to get at the guilty party. Seems to be one of his methods of operation.

   â€œThe Missing Clew” involves Frayne’s investigation of the murder of an eccentric rich man. Once more he intuits what really occurred, from the evidence of muddy dog footprints. A minor story in the series.

   â€œButtered Toast” is a much better story, as Frayne unravels the mystery of what seems to be a simple robbery and murder of a jewelry wholesaler. Frayne comes across many clues and uses them to deduce an unusual crime and the motives for it. In this story, Haggerty is noted as being an improving fingerprint expert.

   â€œMandarin Coat” is an interesting story of an investigation by Frayne of a poisoning case. The puzzle is how was the poison administered to the victim, and who could have done it. The method of poisoning is a clever one. The story could have been a bit longer, to explain how Frayne learned some of the facts he disclosed late in the story.

   In “Pelican Plot” Frayne has to unravel the who and how of a murder case seemingly impossible. Mr. Kerfoot, a rich manufacturer, has a bronze figure of a pelican on his desk that is wired to follow certain instructions such as raising windows, opening a door, and pulling out chairs for guests. However, it turns out that someone has added an extra command for seemingly shooting a gun from a hidden place. Another case where Frayne seemingly intuits the solution with ease.

   In “La Linda Paloma”, the next story in the series, Frayne has to find the murderer of a personal maid to a world famous dancer named La Linda Paloma. Any of a number of people nearby could have stabbed the woman, so Frayne has to find small clues that point the way.

   The series as a whole is just an average detective series, with nothing particularly special about it. Harold de Polo had more success with his stories featuring hick country law enforcement officials. There were two series of these: Sheriff Ollie Bascomb, and another featuring Sheriff Whitcher Bemis. Both had elements of humor in them. Another outdoor series featuring Chan Buzzell was a bit more serious.

      The Inspector Frayne series, by Harold de Polo:

   In Detective Fiction Weekly:

The Small Glass Eye     September 14, 1929
Inspector Frayne’s New Topcoat     November 2, 1929
The Missing Clew     December 21, 1929
Buttered Toast     January 25, 1930
Murder in the Tower     March 1, 1930
Mandarin Coat     March 8, 1930
Pelican Plot     April 5, 1930
The Flying Corpse     July 12, 1930
The Little White Powder     July 26, 1930
La Linda Paloma     December 27, 1930
Peter Wenda, Beads     January 24, 1931

   In Complete Detective Novel Magazine:

Night Club Riddle     May, 1931

   In The Underworld Magazine:

Inspector Frayne Returns     July, 1933

    Previously in this series:

1. SHAMUS MAGUIRE, by Stanley Day.
2. HAPPY McGONIGLE, by Paul Allenby.
3. ARTY BEELE, by Ruth & Alexander Wilson.
4. COLIN HAIG, by H. Bedford-Jones.
5. SECRET AGENT GEORGE DEVRITE, by Tom Curry.
6. BATTLE McKIM, by Edward Parrish Ware.
7. TUG NORTON by Edward Parrish Ware.
8. CANDID JONES by Richard Sale.
9. THE PATENT LEATHER KID, by Erle Stanley Gardner.
10. OSCAR VAN DUYVEN & PIERRE LEMASSE, by Robert Brennan.

   It’s only January but I find it hard to believe that the remaining months of this year will produce a bio-critical book in our genre more fascinating than Blood Relations.

   Published by Perfect Crime Books, edited by Joseph Goodrich and with a foreword by master TV mystery series creator William Link, this labor of literary love brings together much of the correspondence between Frederic Dannay and his cousin Manfred B. Lee, the creators of Ellery Queen, between 1947 and 1950 when they lived on opposite coasts.

   What a treasure! It’s long been known that Fred and Manny had endless bitter disputes about their work, and Jon L. Breen presented a cross-section of this material in “The Queen Letters” (EQMM, February 2005). Now we have thousands of words more, letters that offer literally a blow-by-blow account of the creation of three of the strongest Queen novels — Ten Days’ Wonder (1948), Cat of Many Tails (1949) and The Origin of Evil (1951).

   Even the most knowledgeable Queen fans will be surprised by some of the revelations. With regard to EQMM, Fred (on page 61) boasts to Manny that he’s “done one hell of a lot of rewriting” on the stories he’s published, “including the best of them,” and claims to “have improved many a story, as the original authors have … conceded.”

   Any reader of the magazine who’s wondered about the number of motifs from the EQ novels and stories that are also found in many a story by EQMM contributors now knows the answer: Fred put them there. Manny in turn tells Fred (on page 64) that he has a “tremendous resistance” to the magazine, which he says has been “a vast sore spot with me for years.”

   Among the recurring subjects of their correspondence is their view of the vast differences between them. “I have a drive toward ‘realism,’” Manny writes on January 23, 1950 (page 112), defining the word as “conformity to the facts and color of life and the world as we live in it….”

   He accuses Fred of creating plots “in which vastness and boldness of conception is nearly everything — the colossal idea, planned to stagger if not bowl over the reader. Since such ideas rarely if ever exist in life, they necessarily lead you, in working out the details of the story, into fantasy… [T]he bigger the conception, the more fantastic becomes the story. I then face this plot, with my compulsion toward reality, and the trouble begins.”

   This is 100% consistent with what Manny’s son Rand Lee once heard his father say after a heated phone conversation with Fred: “He gives me the most ridiculous characters to work with and expects me to make them realistic!”

   Personally, I see Fred as spiritual kin to the great Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, who was a Queen fan (almost certainly of Fred’s side of the equation rather than Manny’s) and whose stories like “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Death and the Compass” are set in the same kind of self-contained Cloud Cuckoo Lands as so many of Fred’s plot synopses were.

   Manny’s soul brother on the other hand was the character Joel McCrea played in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941), a Hollywood director who hates the hit comedies he’s helmed and burns to create a Steinbeck-like “social consciousness” epic called O Brother, Where Art Thou?

   If ever there were a real-life Odd Couple, Fred and Manny were it, with the difference that their lacerations of each other aren’t funny. “Why am I writing to you?” Manny asks Fred on November 3, 1948 (page 81). “Why are you writing to me? We are two howling maniacs in a single cell, trying to tear each other to pieces… We ought never to write a word to each other. We ought never to speak. I ought to take what you give me in silence, and you ought to take what I give you in silence, and spit our galls out in the privacy of our cans until someday, mercifully, we both drop dead and end the agony.”

   The miracle is that they managed to stay together, and produce such excellent novels and stories, for so many years.

   Or was it a miracle? One of the most surprising aspects of these letters is that side by side with the mutual lacerations are moments when each of these highly sensitive men empathizes with the other in times of personal trouble.

   Of all the crosses that Fred was forced to bear, the heaviest was the birth of his son Stephen with brain damage. (He died in 1954, at age six.) “He has been getting insulin injections for about a month…[but] there is hardly any flesh on Steve into which the needle can be plunged,” Fred writes on February 20, 1950, adding that he and his wife “live from day to day, not daring to look ahead to the day after.” (Page 127)

   Manny’s reply is dated February 24. “I can only imagine — and that inadequately — what all this is doing to you, this unremitting worry, nervous drain, shock, etc. Keep up your strength. Don’t give up hope. Grit your teeth… This siege on top of what you went through a few years ago would be too much for even the most stable individual. From somewhere you must find the strength to fight it.” (Page 130)

   It’s passages like these that illustrate what Fred said after Manny’s death. “We were cousins, but we were closer than brothers.”

   I was privileged to know and work with Fred during the last thirteen years of his life. I would have given much to have known Manny better but he died in 1970 after we had exchanged a handful of letters and met once. What an amazing pair they were!