Something unusual happened to me on Thanksgiving morning and I’m thankful that it did. Browsing the Web for something entirely different (and apparently nowhere to be found), I stumbled upon a truly excellent website devoted to that unjustly forgotten Fifties hardboiled author William Ard, who managed to write something like three dozen novels before dying of cancer at age 37. With permission from website proprietor Dennis Miller, I hereby offer a link.

   Decades ago, when I was writing the essays about Ard for The Armchair Detective that earlier this year I reorganized into a chapter for my book Cornucopia of Crime, I had had some correspondence and phone conversations with his widow and son.

   Mrs. Ard, nee Eileen Kovara, was tremendously helpful, even loaning me her copy of one Ard novel I had never been able to locate on my own and have never seen since.

   I learned from Dennis Miller’s website that both had died since I was last in touch with them, but he and I began emailing and I soon had the cyber-address of Ard’s daughter and got in touch with her.

   Her father died destitute, she told me, and her mother had a hard time of it for many years, trying to support herself and two children on a secretary’s salary.

   I now know a lot more about the Ard estate than I knew before Thanksgiving, and I’m hoping to persuade a publisher I know who loves hardboiled and noir novels from the Fifties to reissue a few of Ard’s, especially Hell Is a City (1955) and Club 17 (1957, as by Ben Kerr). As they say in the news biz, more details later.

   In my last column I described how Fred Dannay, reprinting Dashiell Hammett’s first Continental Op story in EQMM decades after its first publication in 1922, tried to make it seem less like a period piece by inflating all the cash amounts and substituting common or garden variety bonds for the original version’s Liberty bonds, which the U.S. had sold to finance its entry into World War I.

   This seems to have been a recurring editorial habit of Fred’s, and not even Ellery Queen stories were exempt from its reach. In EQMM for March 1959 he reprinted “Long Shot,” a Queen short story first published twenty years earlier, but changed the names of most of the movie stars who attend the big horse race.

   Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo are fused into Sophia Loren, Al Jolson is replaced by Bob Hope, Bob Burns by Rock Hudson, Joan Crawford the second time by Marilyn Monroe, and Carole Lombard by Jayne Mansfield.

   The only star who appears in both versions of the story is Clark Gable.

   If I hang onto life and health long enough, one of the books I’d love to do is a volume of The Wit and Wisdom of Anthony Boucher.

   Here’s a prime candidate for inclusion, from a letter of his to Manfred B. Lee of the Ellery Queen partnership, dated February 9, 1951.

   As the Forties segued into the Fifties and network radio fell before the juggernaut of television, Boucher tried for months and perhaps years to establish a foothold in the new medium comparable to what he’d enjoyed in the middle and late Forties when he made hundreds of dollars a week (huge money in those days) providing plot synopses for Manny to expand into Queen radio scripts.

   He got nowhere, but his frustration led to a memorable one-liner. “TV is to radio as radio is to films as films are to theater as theater is to publishing as publishing is to rational behavior.”

   Boucher once remarked that readers either love Gladys Mitchell or can’t stand her. I haven’t read enough of her dozens of novels to identify myself with either camp, but recently I tackled her second, The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (1930).

   Perhaps a better title would have been one Harry Stephen Keeler used a few years later, The Riddle of the Traveling Skull (1934), since much of the plot concerns a dead man’s sconce that keeps disappearing and reappearing in different places.

   Mitchell’s sleuth, the spectacularly ugly Mrs. Lestrange Bradley, is a professional psychoanalyst who, like her forerunner Philo Vance, eschews physical clues and favors those stemming from the psychology of the murderer.

   For some unaccountable reason the excellent sketch of the crime scene isn’t printed until page 305, so that no reader could know it was there when it might have been helpful. At the center of events is an old Druid sacrificial altar surrounded by a perfect circle of tall pine trees. “There it crouched, a loathsome toad-like thing, larger than ever in the semi-darkness.”

   Add Mitchell to the toad-haters of the world! I wonder why Mrs. Bradley, who’s often described as looking like a crocodile or a pterodactyl, is never compared to that sweet-singing and useful amphibian known to biology as bufo bufo.

   Therapists do not like to hear us use the term “crazy,” but for the most part mental health professionals do often see such collecting activities as being a mental disorder. Maybe I should have titled the subject “Is Collecting a Mental Disorder?”

   But if I and some of the other collectors I know are insane, then we probably would use the term “crazy.” In fact I just came across an online article titled “11 Craziest Mental Disorders,” and “Bibliomania: The Collecting of Too Many Books”, was one of the 11 disorders.

   What brings all this up is that a long time collecting friend of mine recently called me and said that his wife and a therapist had just blindsided him with an intervention type meeting after dinner. He was still stunned at their treachery and quite upset.

   Their attitude was that his book and pulp collection was all junk, clutter, and a waste of money. In fact the therapist said that my friend should be under the care of a professional and under heavy medication due to depression. He evidently saw the collection as a sign of depression and even complained about the collector reading too much.

   Now this is funny because I don’t think my friend reads much at all. He’s in his sixties, still working and certainly does not spend his leisure time reading like I do. I read at least a couple hours or more each day and often my friend does not read at all during the day.

   I think this “reading too much” theme is the typical non-collecting spouse complaint. For the most part, and there are exceptions, I have found that many women resent it when their husbands or boyfriends read a book.

   Reading is a solitary activity and they feel left out or perhaps they feel that the husband is ignoring them or not paying attention to them. I have heard this complaint many times over the years from other readers, and even my wife gripes about me always “with my nose in a book.”

   But my friend certainly came to the right guy for a sympathetic ear. Those of you have been reading these memoirs so far might imagine the advice I gave him. I told him in my opinion, as a veteran reader and collector, his wife and the therapist are the ones with a mental disorder.

   Too many people just concentrate on their jobs and family. Hell, we all have jobs and family, but what makes life even more interesting is reading and collecting. Many of our friends and relatives go through life really not interested in much at all. At least reading and collecting shows that you have some interest and passion in some subject, other than the routine of working and family matters.

   The above is a true story and actually happened. By the way, I am not talking about myself, but such scenes have happened to me over the years. A serious reader/collector will not get sympathy from the non-reader/collector. And these people make up the majority of our friends and relatives.

   If you talk to me during Windy City or PulpFest, I’ll be glad to discuss this in more detail including the name of the collector. In fact, he will probably be in attendance.

   So as Shakespeare once said, if you are a collector, “get thee to a nuthouse.” Or come to think of it maybe he was talking about a nunnery.

Previously on Mystery*File:   Part Five — Remembering Mike Avallone.

   While commenting on “Fifty Funny Felonies” by David Vineyard this past week, several readers started to talk about Mike Avallone. Sometimes the comments take over the original subject and go off in a different direction. I started to think about my friendship with Mike and how he was such a larger than life person. Is he really gone? Here are some of my memories.

   Stephen Mertz mentions how Mike would start talking and telling jokes “full tilt,” and how his wife Fran would yell at him to shut up and listen, but Mike would carry on. There was no stopping him.

   In 1995 Mike was Guest of Honor at the Pulpcon convention along with Hugh Cave. Everett Kinstler, the famous portrait painter and Shadow illustrator, also was a guest but to tell you the truth I was so busy buying and selling pulps that I don’t even remember Kinstler being there. But I sure remember Mike Avallone.

   He had been a regular at previous Pulpcons, and though he couldn’t afford to buy any, he loved being around the old magazines and talking about them. I was part of a group of East Coast collectors who included Mike in their meetings and since he didn’t drive we would drive him to our homes for pulp get-togethers and conventions like Pulpcon. In fact one of our friends to this day still has “Ed Noon” as part of his email address and for many years he had stenciled on his car window, “Ed Noon Associates.”

   Mike was so excited and hyper at this convention that he was practically out of control. Why? Because he took being Guest of Honor seriously and was so pleased at the recognition from his friends and fellow collectors. He received a beautiful plaque showing four pulps and digests that he had appeared in with stories. Mike did actually have a few tales in the pulps before they disappeared.

   The entire four day weekend, I don’t think Mike got much sleep. Every night he was up telling jokes, talking about movies and baseball, interacting with the other collectors. One of my close friends, Harry Noble who was one of the great pulp collectors, had a habit of going to bed early at 9:00 pm and getting up at 3:00 am. He got up as usual at 3:00, saw Mike and a several collectors sitting around laughing and talking, and thought we were all getting up early like him. The truth was that we had not even gone to bed yet.

   Some people did not take to Mike at all. He seemed to have the ability to annoy or make some collectors angry. I was witness to this at the Bouchercon in Philadelphia in 1989. Again Mike was over the top and greeted a fellow collector’s wife and grown daughter with hugs and smiles. But they were really uptight and dignified and acted horrified at his friendly behavior. It was comical to see the collector’s embarrassment as his wife and daughter backed away from Mike with big frowns. On the other hand, my wife and daughter loved Mike and his funny compliments.

   When it was time to eat dinner, we made the mistake of going into Bookbinders restaurant, which was too classy for people like us. We sat down with the help of several waiters, saw the menu and prices, and immediately realized we had blundered.

   I was prepared to stay and pay the high price of the meal rather than leave, but not Mike. He stood up and led us out past the disapproving gaze of the waiters and other diners. I felt like a fool lugging my two sack of books but Mike just laughed as usual, and we ate at a nearby pub.

   Many times Mike visited my house with other collectors and often stayed for dinner. He liked my wife’s Italian cooking. But he liked my pulp and paperback collection even more. I happened to have the original cover painting to the Ace novel by Mike titled The Case of the Bouncing Betty.

   He loved looking at the painting and gave me a photo of the painting that he owned to The Tall Dolores, another Ed Noon novel. I tried many times to buy the painting from him and though I had the impression that he needed money, he just couldn’t sell it.

   For many years Al Tonik held meetings at his house which we called Tonikcons. There were around 20 or these, most of which Mike attended. We would eat and drink, meanwhile talking books and pulps. One meeting he bought a video tape showing when he was a guest on the TV show To Tell the Truth. I believe he appeared in 1981.

   When he would visit me he often headed to my paperback room which had a couple of stacks of Avallone paperbacks. The first couple times he pulled out his pen and offered to sign them all. But every time I said “no, don’t sign, they are worth more without the signature.” Many authors would have been angry at such a joke, but not Mike.

   One disaster was just barely avoided the night Mike walked out of the paperback room and almost took a header down the staircase. We grabbed him in time and he joked about the headline in local papers that might have read, “Fastest Typewriter in the East Falls to Death in Pulp Collector’s House.”

   He said that would be the way he would want to die if he had to go. Mike said he wrote a short story about almost falling down the stairs, but I’ve never seen it.

   But the thing he liked even more than the paperbacks, was my Spider pulp collection. He said it was his favorite magazine as a boy and he loved looking at the issues. In the late nineties he sold his house in New Brunswick, NJ and he moved to the west coast.

   His friends back east worried about him not having his support system of pals, and I guess we were right. He died soon after moving within a year or two in 1999. Soon after his death I sold my Spider set, and so ended a period of my life that I’ve still not come to terms with.

   A Partial Bibliography. This list of titles that follows, taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, consists only of Mike Avallone’s mystery and detective fiction published under his own name. It does not include crime fiction written under the pseudonyms Priscilla Dalton, Mark Dane, Jean-Anne de Pre, Dora Highland, Steve Michaels, Dorothea Nile, Edwina Noone & Sidney Stuart, not does it attempt to list any of his non-criminous work.

       AVALLONE, MICHAEL (Angelo, Jr.) 1924-1999.

* The Tall Dolores (n.) Holt 1953 [Ed Noon]
* The Spitting Image (n.) Holt 1953 [Ed Noon]

* Dead Game (n.) Holt 1954 [Ed Noon]
* Violence in Velvet (n.) Signet 1956 [Ed Noon]
* The Case of the Bouncing Betty (n.) Ace 1957 [Ed Noon]
* The Case of the Violent Virgin (n.) Ace 1957 [Ed Noon]
* The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse (n.) Gold Medal 1957 [Ed Noon]
* The Voodoo Murders (n.) Gold Medal 1957 [Ed Noon]

* Meanwhile Back at the Morgue (n.) Gold Medal 1960 [Ed Noon]
* The Little Black Book (n.) Midwood 1961
* The Bedroom Bolero (n.) Belmont 1963 [Ed Noon]
* Shock Corridor (n.) Belmont 1963
* Tales of the Frightened (co) Belmont 1963
* There Is Something About a Dame (n.) Belmont 1963 [Ed Noon]
* Lust Is No Lady (n.) Belmont 1964 [Ed Noon]
* Run, Spy, Run [with Valerie Moolman** ] (n.) Award 1964 [Nick Carter]
* The China Doll [with Valerie Moolman** ] (n.) Award 1964 [Nick Carter]
* Saigon [with Valerie Moolman] (n.) Award 1964 [Nick Carter]
* The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (The Thousand Coffins Affair) (n.) Ace 1965 [Napoleon Solo]
* The Birds of a Feather Affair (n.) Signet 1966 [April Dancer; Girl from U.N.C.L.E.]
* The Blazing Affair (n.) Signet 1966 [April Dancer; Girl from U.N.C.L.E.]
* Kaleidoscope (n.) Popular Library 1966
* Madame X (n.) Popular Library 1966
* The February Doll Murders (n.) Signet 1967 [Ed Noon]

* The Felony Squad (n.) Popular Library 1967
* The Man from AVON (n.) Avon 1967
* Assassins Don’t Die in Bed (n.) Signet 1968 [Ed Noon]
* The Coffin Things (n.) Lancer 1968
* Hawaii Five-O (n.) Signet 1968
* The Incident (n.) Popular Library 1968
* Mannix (n.) Popular Library 1968
* The Doomsday Bag (n.) Signet 1969 [Ed Noon]
* The Killing Star (n.) Hale 1969
* Missing! (n.) Signet 1969
* Terror in the Sun (n.) Signet 1969 [Hawaii Five-O]
* A Bullet for Pretty Boy (n.) Curtis 1970
* One More Time (n.) Popular Library 1970
* The Partridge Family #2: The Haunted Hall. Curtis 1970
* Death Dives Deep (n.) Signet 1971 [Ed Noon]
* The Fat Death (n.) Curtis 1971 [Ed Noon]
* Little Miss Murder (n.) Signet 1971 [Ed Noon]
* The Flower-Covered Corpse (n.) Curtis 1972 [Ed Noon]

* The Girl in the Cockpit (n.) Curtis 1972 [Ed Noon]
* The Horrible Man (n.) Curtis 1972 [Ed Noon]
* The Living Bomb (n.) Curtis 1972 [Ed Noon]
* London, Bloody London (n.) Curtis 1972 [Ed Noon]
* Shoot It Again, Sam (n.) Curtis 1972 [Ed Noon]
* The Alarming Clock (n.) Curtis 1973 [Ed Noon]
* The Hot Body (n.) Curtis 1973 [Ed Noon]
* Kill Her — You’ll Like It! (n.) Curtis 1973 [Ed Noon]
* Killer on the Keys (n.) Curtis 1973 [Ed Noon]
* The X-Rated Corpse (n.) Curtis 1973 [Ed Noon]

* Fallen Angel (n.) Warner 1974 [Satan Sleuth: Philip St. George]
* The Werewolf Walks Tonight (n.) Warner 1974 [Satan Sleuth: Philip St. George]
* Devil, Devil (n.) Warner 1975 [Satan Sleuth: Philip St. George]
* The Big Stiffs (n.) Hale 1977 [Ed Noon]
* -Carquake (n.) Star 1977
* CB Logbook of the White Knight (co) Scholastic 1977
* Dark on Monday (n.) Hale 1978 [Ed Noon]
* 5 Minute Mysteries (co) Scholastic 1978 [Ed Noon]
* Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (n.) Pinnacle 1981
* High Noon at Midnight (n.) PaperJacks 1988 [Ed Noon]

* Open Season on Cops, and The Arabella Nude (co) Gryphon Books 1992 [Ed Noon]
* Mitzi (n.) Gryphon Books 1997

Previously on Mystery*File:   Part Four — Collecting Detective Story Magazine.
Coming next:   Part Six — Collecting the other Popular Publications pulps.

Editorial Comments:   Thanks to Scott Hartshorn for providing the two photos you see above. The first was taken outside Nick Certo’s house, circa 1992. The black and white photo, taken in the early 50s, is that of Mike standing beside the cover painting for The Tall Dolores. The cover itself you can see in color just above the photo and to the left.

   Note that Mike can be seen in the cover of The X-Rated Corpse. He’s the fellow on the right.   Coming tomorrow: Bill Pronzini’s 1001 Midnights review of The Case of the Violent Virgin.

   My recent experience with the first Continental Op story (related here ) took me on a sort of Hammett binge which brought me to the collection of his Lost Stories (Vince Emery Productions, 2005).

   There are 21 tales in this book, but most of them don’t qualify as crime fiction, and those that do are familiar to many of us in the somewhat shorter versions published by Fred Dannay, first in various issues of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and then in the Hammett paperback collections he edited.

   Seventeen of the 21 date from Hammett’s earliest years as a writer, 1922-25, when he hadn’t yet developed his distinctive style. Only in “Night Shade” and the non-criminous but fascinating Hollywood tale “This Little Pig” (Collier’s, March 24, 1934) do we find the Hammett we know from his five superb novels.

   â€œNight Shade” first appeared in the debut issue (October 1933) of Mystery League, which was founded and edited by Fred Dannay and Manny Lee and folded after four months. But there are other links to Queen in these pages. The 21st and last of the Lost Stories is “The Thin Man and the Flack” (Click, December 1941), which almost certainly was not written by Hammett.

   This throwaway is not so much a story as a stunt to promote the “Thin Man” radio series, with photographs of various actors pretending to re-enact key scenes. One suspect was played by a little-known actress named Kaye Brinker. A few months later, while appearing in an episode of the Ellery Queen radio series, she met and began dating Manny Lee. They married in July 1942 and the marriage lasted until Manny’s death in 1970.

   A special plus of Lost Stories for Queenians is that we get to see her as she looked around the time she joined the Queen family. In 1948, during the Queen program’s last few months on the air, Brinker took over as Ellery’s secretary Nikki Porter, which makes her the last actress to play that role in any medium.

   Not that many readers of this column are likely to read Chinese, but a small publisher from that country recently contracted with me to issue a modest-sized book called Ellery and Queen containing a number of my essays on EQ.

   This volume will include a few paragraphs I’ve written directly for translation into Chinese, discussing the 11-book series of mysteries that was aimed at a juvenile audience and published as by “Ellery Queen, Jr.” All except the ninth and tenth featured Djuna, the houseboy character from the early Queen novels, and share a title pattern — The (Color) (Animal) Mystery — derived from the pattern Fred and Manny had used from The Roman Hat Mystery (1929) through The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935). All eleven were ghost-written. Fred had nothing to do with them but Manny seems to have edited and supervised them.

   The first eight titles in the series were The Black Dog Mystery (1941), The Golden Eagle Mystery (1942), The Green Turtle Mystery(1944), The Red Chipmunk Mystery (1946), The Brown Fox Mystery (1948), The White Elephant Mystery (1950), The Yellow Cat Mystery (1952) and The Blue Herring Mystery (1954).

   All of these except Golden Eagle and Green Turtle were written by Samuel Duff McCoy (1882-1964), a well-known journalist of the early 20th century whose papers are archived at his alma mater, Princeton University, and include many documents related to his work as “Ellery Queen, Jr.”

   As Samuel Duff he was the author of “The Bow-Street Runner” (EQMM, November 1942), a historical whodunit—narrated in first person by a Cockney — which was one of the earliest original stories to appear in the magazine Fred had founded in 1941.

   The author of Golden Eagle and Green Turtle was Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994), a specialist in pulp horror fiction, whose correspondence with fellow horror maven August Derleth includes statements that he wrote two of the series, although he doesn’t mention the titles.

   After an eight-year hiatus in “Ellery Queen, Jr.” titles, Golden Press issued The Mystery of the Merry Magician (1961) and The Mystery of the Vanished Victim (1962), both featuring Ellery’s nephew Gulliver Queen as youthful sleuth.

   These and the eleventh and final entry, The Purple Bird Mystery (1966), were apparently written by James Holding (1907-1997), an advertising executive who turned to writing mystery novels for juveniles after the tragic death of his son. But on at least one occasion Holding seems to have employed a second-order ghost to do the work for him, and Manny Lee went livid when he found out.

   Among adult readers Holding is best known for two series of short stories in EQMM, one (1962-70) featuring professional assassin Manuel Andradas, known as The Photographer, the other (1960-72) following two mystery writers, the creators of fictional sleuth Leroy King, as they solve “real” crimes while on a world tour. The titles of these tales, from “The Norwegian Apple Mystery” to “The Borneo Snapshot Mystery,” employ the familiar pattern of the early Ellery Queen novels.

   By the time The Purple Bird Mystery came out, Pocket Books was publishing the last of the 15 original paperback novels signed as by Ellery Queen but, as has long been known, ghosted by others under Manny Lee’s supervision.

   During those years Pocket was also using another Dannay-Lee byline, Barnaby Ross, for six historical novels beginning with Quintin Chivas (1961) and ending with The Passionate Queen (1966).

   All six were written by Don Tracy (1905-1976), the author of a number of thrillers and historicals under his own name, including several published by Pocket Books. Whether Manny Lee supervised these as he had all the ghosted Queen books is uncertain. He and Fred must have received some money under this arrangement.

   But why did the publisher bother to pay them anything? It can’t be coincidence that, during the same years Pocket was issuing ghosted paperbacks as by Ellery Queen, it was also putting out another line of softcovers under another Dannay-Lee byline.

   As far as I can tell, Pocket never made the slightest attempt to lure potential readers into identifying the byline on these six historicals with the byline on the four Drury Lane detective novels of 1932-33. What would have been the point?

   If there was no point, why not just publish all six as historical adventures by Don Tracy, without the Barnaby Ross byline and without having to pay Fred and Manny for its use? Perhaps someday the business correspondence dealing with these books will be unearthed and allow us to understand a sequence of events which on its face makes no sense.

   Many years ago I made myself read one of those historicals. One was quite enough. Never again!

   We have so far discussed and covered the so called Big Three: Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly. However there was a fourth magazine that has not received the proper attention that is due especially when you consider influence and the number of issues published. Detective Story Magazine with the October 5, 1915 issue became the very first pulp magazine to be devoted entirely to detective, mystery and crime fiction.

   In fact it just about started the trend for pulps to be devoted to one genre. Earlier examples are Railroad Man’s Magazine in October 1906 and The Ocean in March 1907. But with Detective Story the publisher, Street & Smith, got the idea to develop a line of magazines such as Western Story, Sport Story, Sea Stories, Outdoor Stories, and Love Story. The title showed the reader exactly what type of story he could expect to read.

   Not only was this the first of many detective and crime magazines, but it lasted longer than any other detective pulp magazine, 1057 issues during 1915 through 1949. The 1057 issues are even more than 929 issues of Detective Fiction Weekly.

   Not too many collectors bother with Detective Story and it certainly is not on the same level as Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly, but it did publish a lot of interesting stories. In fact if you read and collect hero pulp fiction then Detective Story should be of interest to you because the magazine dealt with heroes and villains, some of which wore costumes and fought crime figures before the first hero pulp titles started in the early 1930’s.

   The early issues still showed the dime novel origins (Nick Carter), but soon the fiction moved away from the teenage boy market and started to appeal to the adult mystery and detective fan. Even in 1916 it was possible to read such writers as Johnston McCulley, Sax Rohmer, Caroline Wells and H. Bedford-Jones.

   With the February 20, 1917 issue the crude covers improved, showing more color, the price was increased to 15 cents, and 30 extra pages were added for a total of 160. Frank Blackwell was editor, though Nick Carter was first credited, and he remained editor for at least 20 years. Since he also would edit Western Story starting in 1919, he must of had a staff of assistant editors to help with these weekly magazines.

   Another man who also lasted 20 years was the cover artist, John A. Coughlin. I know it is hard to believe but he did every cover each week for around 20 years, 1915-1935. As I was recently looking through my set I was watching for some other artist but I never noticed anyone else but Coughlin.

   That’s 52 cover paintings each year or over 1,000 for the 20 years. Plus he was doing covers off and on for just about all the other Street & Smith pulps.

   During the years I’ve owned several of his cover paintings from Detective Story and at present I still have two. It’s very interesting to see the development of Coughlin as an artist, from the crude early paintings in 1915 and 1916 to his excellent symbolic later work.

   I don’t know of any other pulp cover artist who dominated one magazine so thoroughly for a thousand issues. I guess the closest would be Nick Eggenhofer but his work was mainly interior drawings in Western Story and other pulps.

   From just about the very beginning the magazine specialized in series characters and in fact there were so many series that I sometimes mistakenly refer to the pulp as Detective Series Magazine. There are perhaps close to a hundred different series, too many to list in this article but I’d like to point out a few of the more interesting ones.

   Johnston McCulley was the leader by far and was an expert at developing all types of series. In fact he is responsible for one of the most well known and recognized figures in literature and film, the series character Zorro.

   The first series he developed for Detective Story was Black Star, followed by such characters as Terry Trimble, The Spider (no relation to the Norvell Page Spider), Thubway Tham, The Thunderbolt, The Man in Purple, The Avenging Twins, and the Crimson Clown. There may be others that I missed.

   Probably the most outrageous character was the Crimson Clown who appeared in around 20 stories in the 1920’s. He’s a crime fighter but for some strange reason he dresses up as a clown in the full clown costume and makeup. I would think this would make him very noticable to the police and criminals.

   The Spider appeared in about a dozen long novelettes in the teens and starred John Warwick as the gentleman crook who works for the criminal mastermind, The Spider. Thubway Tham appeared in over a hundred short stories mainly in the twenties and was a lisping pickpocket who worked the subways. The stories have a comedy element but I find them almost unreadable due to the lisping dialog whenever Thubway Tham opens his mouth. However the readers loved his adventures.

   A favorite of mine stars John Flatchley, alias The Thunderbolt and his stupid sidekick, Saggs. It is the usual theme of the bored, rich young man robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, etc. He robs from six rich men who legally ripped off investors and he returns the money to the original owners. All this is done without bloodshed.

   Erle Stanley Gardner’s Lester Leith was patterned after this type of character as were so many others. The hero wears a hood with a thunderbolt on it and is such a nice, good guy that he carries a gun, but it is empty with no bullets.

   Street & Smith had a hardcover line called Chelsea House and many of the stories in these series were eventually published as books. All six stories about The Thunderbolt were collected into two Chelsea House hardcovers.

   But there were plenty of other writers also dealing with series characters. Herman Landon, for instance, wrote about The Philanthropist who eventually developed into The Picaroon. Both heroes are gentlemen crooks but they are very strange indeed because after stealing money or jewels, they leave cards stating that the stolen items will be returned if the victim gives 10% of the value to charity.

   The charity of choice is usually the Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). I find these novelettes absurd, but I love the insane character! Landon had another long running series starring a crime fighter and crook named The Gray Phantom.

   One of the most fascinating series was by Arthur Hankins and starred an ex-cop and museum guard named Israel Pocket. The series appeared in 1918 and the hero works undercover in the stomach of a fake whale on exhibit. There he can spy on the museum visitors and prevent crime. His co-workers call him “Jonah.” Even as early as 1918 these six stories show that it was possible for quality fiction to exist in the pulps.

   Another interesting series that ran for a long time in the 1920’s was by Roy Hinds and dealt with an elderly Jewish pawnbroker who aids criminals. The Simon Trapp series was humorous, and he was not your typical pulp hero. There is no redeeming Robin Hood morality in many of the stories, and often I finished a story thinking that Simon was crook and that was that.

   The Doctor Bentiron stories written by Ernest Poate was another long-running series. Poate has been unjustly forgotten. Dr Bentiron is an interesting and strange character who lies around in his bathrobe, dribbling ashes and chain smoking. He is often bored but manages to solve crimes and has the habit of often grunting for some reason.

   Amos Clackworthy by Christopher Booth was a major character whose adventures were reprinted in the Chelsea House hardcovers. Clackworthy is a sophisticated conman who with his sidekick, The Early Bird, gyps suckers and steals their money. Possibly this character had an influence on Erle Stanley Gardner’s Lester Leith character.

   Ruth Aughiltree had one of the stranger characters called “Old Windmills”, who was a busy body, senile, old man who solved crimes. A strange detective who I found enjoyable and unintentionally funny.

   Mother Hansen, like many of the series characters mentioned above, ran for many stories — another odd series. Written by Paul Ellsworth Triem, she was an old lady who by day sat behind a cash register in a seedy restaurant but in the night she helped reform criminals. The one I just read had a burglar breaking into her house but by the end of the story she has saved the crook from the police and helped him escape.

   Edgar Wallace was one of the biggest stars of Detective Story in the twenties and in addition to the interesting “Ringer” series, he had over 20 serials. Only his early death silenced him.

   There were many other series, too many to discuss in detail. One of the best of the early writers was Hugh Kahler, who has been just about completely forgotten today. For four years, 1918-1921, he wrote around 35 long novelettes all 40 to 50 pages in length. Just about all of them are well done, some starring series characters named The White Rook, The Joker, The Justice Syndicate.

   The stories had elements in them that you usually do not see in pulp fiction from around 1918: love interest handled in an adult manner, well done characterization, a private detective acting in a believable way, and plots that are slowly and carefully developed, leading to a surprise ending.

   There is not a lot of violence in these stories, and sometimes the crimes do not even involve murder. One of the more impressive villains is named “The Wiremaster,” who has killed 10 men by some means of electric shock. The ten were unconvicted murderers who had beat the system and the law.

   The Wiremaster acts as a vigilante and like many of the heroes and villains likes to send weird letters and threats signed The Wiremaster, The Third Hand, The Picaroon, The Gray Phantom, or The Scarlet Scourge. One story even has a letter signed by “The Green Pansy”.

   Kahler eventually graduated to The Saturday Evening Post in 1920 and wrote slick fiction for 20 years. He became a close friend of George Lorimer, The Post’s editor, and was part of the antique collecting circle.

   Other writers of note were Agatha Christie with short stories, Dorothy Sayers with a serial, Raymond Chandler with one novelette in 1941, and Carroll John Daly. The format for each issue usually consisted of one or two serial installments, a long novelette, short stories, a true crime article, and several departments.

   The following departments ran for most of the magazine’s life: “What Handwriting Reveals,” “Expert Legal Advice,” “The How, When, and Where of Success.” There was also “Under the Lamp,” which dealt with ciphers and puzzles, “Missing,” which listed friends and relatives who had disappeared, and “Headquarters’ Chat,” which printed letters from the readers and announced coming attractions.

   On occasion “Popular Detective Story Writers,” written by D.C. Hubbard, gave informal and perhaps incorrect biographical details about the writers. It printed over two dozen bios during 1928 to 1932.

   Sometimes collectors have wondered how I managed to amass over 1,000 issues. It’s mainly because of what probably is the biggest windfall and deal during my 50 years of pulp collecting.

   In the 1970’s there was one collector who also was collecting Detective Story and we were always bumping heads at the the annual Pulpcons. In fact, he managed to compile a bigger set of the magazine and ended up with 800 issues compared to my 500 issues. But in the early 1980’s the video revolution killed his interest in pulp collecting and instead of attending Pulpcon, he started to collect video tapes. At one point he told me he had several Betamax recorders taping movies.

   I then started a campaign of calling and writing him letters every few months and this continued for a few years. The subject was always about him selling me his Detective Story collection.

   Finally in 1985, during a telephone call, he told me if I would stop harassing him he would ship me the 800 issues absolutely free. All I would have to pay would be the freight charge on delivery. Sure enough a couple weeks later, a big truck dumped 500 pounds of Detective Story Magazines’s on my porch.

   Of the 800 issues, I needed 239 and many others for upgrades. For several years after, I had so many duplicates, that I was willing to trade four Detective Story’s to get one of my pulp wants. Many collectors found the four to one ratio to be irresistible.

   However, at one Pulpcon I was reminded that not many people cared about Detective Story. Since I had so many duplicates, I took 200 of the issues in the best condition to a show in the late 1980’s. I priced them all low at $5.00 each, except for the Crimson Clown and Mr Chang issues which I priced at $10.00.

   Not a single issue priced at $5 sold. All the Clown and Chang issues sold because they were listed as hero characters in a pulp index. Even today there probably is not much interest in collecting the magazine.

   While I was collecting Detective Story, I carried on a 25 year correspondence with Bob Sampson, from 1969 to his death in the early 1990’s. All our letters dealt with pulp matters, especially the Detective Story series.

   You can read the results of many of our letters in Sampson’s excellent six volume survey of the pulps, Yesterday’s Faces. This is a set of books that every reader and collector of the pulps should own.

   Starting in 1932 a series of changes occurred that indicated the magazine might be having problems. They dropped the price to 10 cents, then announced a monthly schedule which lasted for one issue, and then decided on twice a month.

   The price eventually went back to 15 and 20 cents and the schedule to monthly. The cover was redesigned, serials were dropped, and in 1935 the departments were gone. The pages varied between 128, 144 and 160.

   Long time veteran and Love Story editor, Daisy Bacon became the new editor in the early forties. In 1943 the entire Street & Smith line of pulps either went digest or discontinued publication, like Wild West Weekly and Unknown Worlds.

   Daisy Bacon attempted to improve matters by encouraging some of the Black Mask and Dime Detective authors to write for her. Norbert Davis, John K. Butler, Fred Brown, all had good stories. She published over a dozen excellent stories by Roger Torrey, all novelettes starring detectives with Irish names. Only an early death because of alcoholism silenced him around 1945. William Campbell Gault was another fine writer who had around a dozen novelettes.

   But there were still some bad signs. The digest covers were really poorly done and unattractive. Circulation must have been dropping because in 1949 they even tried going back to pulp size for three issues.

   Nothing worked, however, and the pulp era was ending. Daisy Bacon would soon be out of a job and by the middle fifties the pulps were dead except for a couple holdouts. Street & Smith killed all their pulps except for Astounding. The digest boom was around the corner and there would be many new SF and mystery digests. Ironically Detective Story, the longest surviving detective pulp, would not be one of them.

Previously on Mystery*File:   Part Three — Collecting Detective Fiction Weekly.
Coming next:   Part Five — Collecting the other Popular Publications pulps.

   On Sunday, September 12, at age 80, Claude Chabrol died. He was one of the most creative French film directors, and one of the most deeply committed to the crime-suspense genre, and the only one I ever met.

   It was in the summer of 1986, at an international festival on Italy’s Adriatic coast where he and I and countless others were guests. We were introduced by another mystery writer, the late Stuart Kaminsky, and over the next several days we were on some tours together — including one to the castle of Cagliostro — and had a number of conversations.

   I can’t claim to have seen all or even most of the dozens of films Chabrol directed in his career of more than half a century behind the cameras, not even all the crime-suspense-noir pictures with which his filmography is studded.

   But among those I knew well were 1969’s Que la bête meure (The Beast Must Die) and, from 1971, La décade prodigieuse (Ten Days’ Wonder), the former very freely based on a classic Nicholas Blake novel and the latter on a classic by Ellery Queen.

   His then most recent film, which was premiered at the festival, was Inspecteur Lavardin. After seeing Lavardin, and connecting what I took to be dots between it and the other two, I saw all three as sharing a common theme: the meaning of being a father.

   Remembering that Ten Days’ Wonder in both novel and film form climaxed with a death-of-God sequence, I ventured to suggest to him that all three films tell us: “There is no God the father, therefore we must be good fathers.” His reply: “Yes, yes, yes!”

   We talked about Cornell Woolrich, a few of whose stories he had adapted and directed for French TV, and after returning to the States I sent him, at his request, a few Woolrich tales that might be adapted into Chabrol features.

   Nothing came of this, but among the many films he made in the quarter century after our meeting was Merci pour le chocolat (2000), based on Charlotte Armstrong’s The Chocolate Cobweb, which is also centrally about fatherhood. Among the other world-class crime novelists whose work he translated to film are Stanley Ellin, Patricia Highsmith and Georges Simenon. Adieu, cher maître.

   In my student years I read just about every one of Frances and Richard Lockridge’s Mr. & Mrs. North mysteries, but I hadn’t revisited any of them in decades. Recently I reread The Norths Meet Murder (1940), first in the long-running series, and found it as charming and enjoyable as I had long ago.

   It’s also a lovely piece of evidence in support of Anthony Boucher’s contention that one of the valuable functions of mysteries is that they show later generations what life was like “back then.”

   The Norths Meet Murder takes place in late October and early November 1939. On September 1 Hitler had launched World War II, and in New York there’s an organized boycott against buying “Nazi goods,” which impacts at least one of the murder suspects.

   The latest consumer novelty is the electric razor. Walking New York’s night streets, you see men working on the new subway line under floodlights. Those who read this novel back in 1940 probably took these verbal snapshots for granted, just as those of us who as kids watched the early TV private-eye series Man Against Crime took for granted the chases all over the New York landmarks of the early 1950s.

   Now in the 21st century they strike me as treasures, and perhaps help explain why, given the choice between a vintage whodunit or a new one, or an episode of a vintage TV series or a new one, I tend to go for the gold in the old.

   I recently attended a convention in suburban Baltimore but arrived before my hotel room was ready. Luckily there was a bookstore with comfortable chairs in the mall across the street, and I killed some time in the mystery section with “Arson Plus,” the first of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories, originally published in Black Mask for October 1, 1923 and recently reprinted in Otto Penzler’s mammoth Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories.

   For decades this was one of the rarest of Hammett tales, revived only by Fred Dannay (in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1951, and in the Queen-edited paperback collection Woman in the Dark, 1951).

   Today it’s in the Penzler anthology and a major hardcover Hammett collection (Crime Stories and Other Writings, Library of America 2001) and can also be downloaded from the Web in a few seconds.

   The other day I felt an urge to compare the e-text with the EQMM and Library of America versions, and made a discovery that startled but didn’t really surprise me. The Web version I downloaded is identical with Fred’s except for a few changes in punctuation and italicization, but both are quite different from the Library of America text, which uses the version originally published in Black Mask.

   Fred believed that every story ever written was too long and therefore tended to trim the tales he reprinted, even those by masters like Hammett. Some of the bits and pieces he cut were perhaps redundant, but he also axed part of the Continental Op’s explanation at the end of the story.

   Reprinting “Arson Plus” in 1951, he must have felt a need to update some of the price references to reflect post-World War II inflation. At the very beginning of the original version, the Op offers a cigar to the Sacramento County sheriff, who estimates that it cost “fifteen cents straight.” The Op corrects him, giving the price as two for a quarter. Fred raised these figures to “three for a buck” and ”two bits each” respectively.

   He also added a cool ten thousand dollars to the purchase price of a house that in the 1923 version sold for $4,500. Where a Hammett character disposes of $4,000 in Liberty bonds (sold by the government to finance World War I), Fred has him sell $15,000 worth of common or garden variety bonds.

   Whenever Hammett refers to an automobile as a “machine,” Fred changes it to “car.” Where three men in a general store are “talking Hiram Johnson,” Fred has them merely “talking.” (Hiram Johnson, as we learn from a note in the Library of America volume, was governor of California between 1911 and 1917 and later served four terms as senator.)

   He also unaccountably changes the name of a major character from Handerson to Henderson. A quick check of Fred’s versions of a few other Continental Op stories with the original texts yielded similar results and a clear conclusion: to read Hammett’s tales as they were meant to be read, you have to read them in the Library of America collection. This doesn’t help, of course, with the eight Op stories not collected in that volume, but it’s a start.

   In every version of “Arson Plus” the plot is of course the same: a man insures his life for big bucks, assumes another identity, sets fire to the house he bought, and the woman named as beneficiary demands payment.

   Did these people really think any insurance company would be fooled for a minute when there were no human remains in the ashes of the destroyed house? Didn’t Hammett with his experience as a PI realize that this plot was ridiculous? Was Fred ever bothered by its silliness?

   My nonfiction collection Cornucopia of Crime, which I subtly plugged a few columns ago, is now officially available (Ramble House, 2010).

   So too is Night Forms (Perfect Crime Books), a collection of 28 of the short stories I’ve written over the last four decades including my earliest (“Open Letter to Survivors”), my latest (“The Skull of the Stuttering Gunfighter”), and a huge pile of tales that fall between that unmatched pair.

   I’ve completely forgotten where the picture of me on the back cover came from, but whoever took it deserves some kind of award for improving on reality more than any other photographer in history.

   Every now and then collectors of detective pulps mention The Big Three, which refers to the best three detective/crime magazines: Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly, in that order.

   Detective Fiction Weekly lasted over 900 issues during 1924-1951, mostly on a weekly basis. The first few years it was known as Flynn’s and Flynn’s Weekly and had the subtitle of “Detective Fiction with the Thrill of Truth.” William J. Flynn was credited as being the editor and blurbed as having been “25 years in the Secret Service of the U.S.”

   The early issues had some photo covers and printed many so-called factual or “true” articles. However they read like fiction to me and now strike me as sort of dated and not very readable. In fact, I cannot recall ever meeting a collector who really liked the early issues in the mid-twenties.

   Flynn’s was published by Munsey and was a companion magazine to Argosy. The best fiction was written by a sort of Golden Age group of writers: Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, J.S. Fletcher, Caroline Wells, Freeman Wills Crofts, H.C. Bailey, R. Austin Freeman, and Mary Roberts Rinehart.

   For example Agatha Christie in addition to several short stories, also had as a serial, Who Killed Ackroyd? Edgar Wallace published the J. G. Reeder stories as well as several serials. Arthur Reeve was present with his Craig Kennedy series. But these writers were outnumbered by quite a few mediocre and forgotten authors.

   However all this was to change starting with the June 2, 1928 issue when Flynn’s Weekly became Detective Fiction Weekly. Howard Bloomfield took over as editor somewhere around this period, and during his six years as editor he changed the magazine for the better.

   Gone were the bland covers, and by 1929 they had a bright yellow eye-catching background, showing a lot more action and violence. The contents page was redesigned and the magazine now looked more attractive and impressive. He started to publish such writers as Erle Stanley Gardner, H. Bedford-Jones, Fred MacIsaac, Fred Nebel, George Harmon Coxe, Frederick C. Davis, MacKinlay Kantor, all with their first stories for DFW.

   Instead of the more sedate and quiet crimes of the Flynn’s era, Bloomfield wanted a tougher story with more action and humor. He also started using the work of Carroll John Daly on a more frequent basis.

   Bloomfield was so successful at sprucing up DFW, that Popular Publications hired him to revive and reinvigorate Adventure magazine during 1934-1940.

   As an example of his success with DFW, the Jan 11, 1930 issue has an interesting letter column, known as “Flashes From Readers”, in which an announcement is made that DFW had 69 stories mentioned as notable in the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1929. All 69 of the stories are listed with the comment that the total from all other detective magazines combined is 79. The nearest competitor had only 21 stories. This shows quite an improvement in the quality of fiction.

   Of course the competition published far fewer issues since they were on a mostly monthly schedule. Black Mask had a total of 340 issues and Dime Detective had 273. For DFW to fill over 900 issues on a weekly basis is the sort of statistic that is hard to grasp.

   Most pulps published 12 issues a year, which must of been hard to fill with quality fiction. But DFW’s 52 issues a year would drive an editor to a nervous breakdown. If enough good fiction was not available one week you just could not publish blank pages. That explains the variable quality of some of the contents.

   But there were plenty of good writers and many series characters to keep readers amused. It’s true that Dashiell Hammett appeared only once under the name of Samuel Dashiell (Oct 19, 1929) and Raymond Chandler also once in May 30, 1936.

   However readers also loved Erle Stanley Gardner who appeared dozens of times with such series characters as Lester Leith, Sidney Zoom, Patent Leather Kid, Senor Lobo, and The Man in the Silver Mask. Richard Sale was very popular and also had many witty stories starring newpaper reporter, Daffy Dill and photographer, Candid Jones.

   Norbert Davis and John K. Butler were popular as was Fred MacIsaac. Unfortunately MacIsaac either fell out of favor with the editors in the late 1930’s or developed an enormous writer’s block because he committed suicide in 1940. Judson Phillips was very popular and had a long running series about the Park Avenue Hunt Club.

   Another popular writer was Carroll John Daly with such series characters as Satan Hall, Mr Strang, and Twist Sullivan. Daly is a very controversial figure among readers and collectors. He is often credited as being the first writer to deal with the hardboiled private detective and his name on the cover often meant a 15% percent increase in circulation.

   However many readers find that his novels have not held up well and that he is almost unreadable. Stephen Mertz wrote a defense of Daly in The MYSTERY FANcier dated May 1978. In the article he states that Daly is as good or better as Hammett, a very strong opinion not shared by many.

   Over the years I have leaned more toward the view that Daly was not a good writer simply because I found his stories to be dated and not too believable. Race Williams often annoyed me by stopping the story dead, and speaking directly to the reader.

   However, I do have to admit that on occasion I have liked Race Williams. Since Daly is not a big favorite of mine, it has been a long time since I tried one of the stories. Because I was writing this column about DFW, I recently read “Parole” in the April 6, 1935 issue.

   This is the first of three novelettes introducing Mr. Strang, a vigilante and bitter foe of the corrupt parole system. I actually enjoyed the story and found it to be more subdued and not as unbelievable as much of Daly’s work. The theme of a corrupt parole system is not dated and is still a problem today.

   In fact the editors followed Daly’s novelette with an article titled, “The Ghastly Folly of Parole”, which goes into the abuses of the parole system. One abuse that still occurs is when a murderer is sentenced to life and gets out on parole after seven years.

   Since Daly was popular in all three of The Big Three, there must be some validity to those that find his work to be enjoyable as action crime fiction.

   Another writer who did not write about series characters but was one of the top authors was Cornell Woolrich. Starting in 1934 he wrote dozens of suspenseful mysteries for DFW.

   To give you an idea of the tremendous number of series running in the magazine, here is a listing of the series I noticed in the span of a half year or 26 issues. Most of these are not by well known writers but will show the emphasis on series:

   Serials were a regular feature with at least one and sometimes two per issue.

   While thinking about this article, I looked through all 900 issues and noticed that I had obtained almost all the issues in the early 1970’s at only $1 or $2 each. I know this beyond a doubt because I penciled in the price paid on the corner of the contents page.

   I know it’s hard to believe, but I even paid as low as 15 or 25 cents per issue. Which brings up the question of why, even 40 years later, DFW is still one of the most inexpensive pulps to collect. You can still find copies for sale at the $20 or less price, even while issues of Black Mask and Dime Detective often are priced at over $100 for copies in the 1930’s.

   Because DFW was a weekly, it must have had a high circulation and therefore issues appear to be more numerous than the monthly pulps. Also the magazine did not have a lot of Hammett and Chandler, so we don’t see issues for sale at hundreds of dollars each.

   Since they were filling 52 issues a year, the quality of the magazine appears to be lower than Black Mask and Dime Detective, who only had to find good fiction for 12 issues. At any rate, DFW is a bargain nowadays and issues are a lot more numerous than some other titles.

   I’ve talked before about the influence of Ron Goulart’s book The Hardboiled Dicks. I started to hunt down copies of DFW and found my first large amount at a fellow collector’s home.

   He had stacks of most of the issues when it was known as Flynn’s Weekly. He was willing to accept less than $1 each because of condition. It seems a coal miner had read the magazines in a coal mine and stored them there, perhaps because his wife would not let him keep them in the house, a common problem with non-collecting spouses.

   The issues were covered with coal dust and no matter how you scrubbed or wiped the copies the dust would remain. After reading one these magazines, your hands would be black and your lungs clogged with the dust. I still have these copies and 40 years later the dust is still there.

   There also must have been rats in the mine because some of the issues have big chunks chewed out of the corners. Since the type is ok, the stories can still be read even though the pulp chips are falling heavily and the coal dust leaves a black mark.

   Some collectors have asked me why I accepted less than good copies like the magazines described above or reading copies lacking the front cover, etc. I was simply buying so many different titles, not to mention books and vintage paperbacks, that I could not afford to hold out for only the best.

   I was not rich and had the usual responsibilities such as wife, children, home mortgage, car payments, etc. If I was going to build up complete sets before the prices rose up above what I could afford, then I could not be too fussy about condition.

   I’ve noticed most condition collectors who look for so called “fine” condition, do not really read the books and magazines. Or if they do read them, then except for SF, it is just about impossible to put together a complete set of the different titles.

   There are a few exceptions but I’m always surprised at collectors who do not read the books or magazines that they collect. I like nice condition just like everybody else but I’m basically interested in reading, not just looking at the book in a shrink wrap.

   As usual with these memoirs, there always is a woman involved. With the exception of a half dozen or so women collectors, most ladies do not care about old magazines and see them as so much clutter and a waste of time and money. Women and pulps do not mix.

   Here is another tale of woe in the battle between pulps and females. The first DFW I ever found was in an enormous second hand bookstore in Trenton, NJ called Acres of Books. In 1970 I had a job in an office building near the store and just about every lunch hour I would walk over and spend the hour, not eating and talking about nothing like my non-collecting co-workers, but happily digging through boxes of old books.

   Since the job required that I wear a suit and a tie, I often arrived back from lunch in less than presentable shape. It took me a long time to gain the confidence of the old lady who managed Acres of Books but after seeing me at lunch for several months, she finally let me into the “Pulp Section.” This was a roped off forbidden section containing the valuable “collector’s items.”

   She let me pick out one DFW from 1930 and as we arrived at the cash register, I had visions of the price being more than I could pay. She said “that will be 25 cents.” To her, asking a quarter for a dime magazine, was a big mark up. She still remembered the 1930’s and the depression as being not that long ago.

   Needless to say, I soon talked her into letting me buy a lot more than one pulp at a time. At the time I was dating a receptionist and as I passed her desk she noticed my dusty condition and wondered what on earth happened to me during lunch.

   I used this as an opportunity to introduce her to the world of pulp magazine collecting and I took the DFW out of the dirty bag to show her. I gave my usual speech about what a pulp was and handed her the magazine. She held it as far as possible from her and with a puzzled expression said only, “It smells.”

   As my friends know, I love the smell of the different pulps; each title has its own special scent and aroma. So this reaction from a girl I was interested in was not a promising sign at all.

   DFW eventually came to a bad end, as did all the pulps, slowly fading away. In the early 1940’s they must have been having circulation problems and the magazine went from weekly, to every other week, to monthly.

   They tried covers with just the story titles and no illustrations and they tried the larger size of 8 1/2 by 11. They even tried covers showing Nazis whipping girls in their underwear. Nothing worked and they finally sold the title to Popular Publications.

   They put out 20 monthly issues in 1943 and 1944 before the paper shortage killed off the title. It was revived for 6 issues in 1951 but by then the pulps were dying and on their way out. Coming around the corner were the digest mystery magazines like Manhunt, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, The Saint, Mike Shayne, and so on, but that’s another story.

   The days of the great pulp titles were over and by 1955 nothing much remained except SF Quarterly and Ranch Romances.

   Because pulp reprints are so popular, I’m sure there will soon be collections of the series characters. Battered Silicon Dispatch Box Press already has published a collection of the Bedford-Jones Riley Dillon stories and there is an enormous two volume Park Avenue Hunt Club collection by Judson Phillips.

   But the original pulp magazines are so inexpensive, you can easily find affordable copies of DFW on eBay or at the two pulp conventions: Windy City Pulp Convention in Chicago and Pulpfest in Columbus, Ohio. One thing is for sure. There is a lot of good mystery and detective reading in 900 issues!

Previously on Mystery*File:   Part Two — Collecting Dime Detective.
Coming next:   Part Four — Collecting Detective Story Magazine.
Editorial Comment:   A fine companion piece to this chapter of Walker’s memoirs is “Those Detective Fiction Weekly Mugs,” by Terry Sanford, in which he discusses some the series characters which populated the pages of the magazine. You can find it here on the main Mystery*File website.

   In 1969 as I was in the process of writing many letters to dealers, collectors, bookstores and so on, in order to locate back issues of Black Mask, I naturally wanted to also collect the main competitor to Black Mask. Dime Detective was one of the early titles put out by the new publisher at the time, Popular Publications. It lasted for 273 issues during the period 1931 through 1953.

   At first the new magazine looked like a combination of hardboiled detective, gothic horror, and weird menace fiction. The early issues had examples of these type of stories and I was puzzled to see horror titles like “The Shadow of the Vulture,” “The Devil’s Jackpot,” “The Phantom of the Porthole,” “The Chamber of Doom,” and “Horror House.” But I was relieved to see such favorite Black Mask writers as Frederick Nebel, Erle Stanley Gardner, and even the much maligned Carroll John Daly.

   As the main competitor to Black Mask, Dime Detective paid higher than usual pulp rates, even going as high as four cents a word to tempt writers away from the other magazine.

   In fact, by 1936 Black Mask was having circulation problems and editor Joseph Shaw even left the magazine in that year over some disagreement concerning money and the direction the magazine was going.

   When Shaw left, Raymond Chandler switched to Dime Detective and its higher rates and published seven excellent novelettes during 1937 through 1939. These issues especially go for high prices, and I’ve recently seen copies sell for hundreds of dollars each.

   I personally am sure that soon we will see nice copies going for over a thousand. Raymond Chandler, like Hammett, has claim to being among the very best of the pulp writers and in fact both writers are now routinely accepted as part of the great American literary tradition.

   However, in 1969 and in the early 1970’s I had very little competition and managed to pick up just about all the issues for only $2.00 or $3.00 each. Even in those days I did not consider these prices a drain on my finances, and most other collectors continued to happily concentrate on SF and the hero pulps.

   Instead of letting these guys continue on their wayward ways, I made the mistake of praising the magazine as being an untapped lode of great detective fiction, and before I realized it I had again created my own competition. As I think back on myself 40 years ago, it was almost like I was some sort of mad doctor creating my own Frankenstein monster.

   This hideous monster turned out to be other collectors fighting me for Dime Detective and my other favorite pulp titles, that once were fairly unknown until I opened my big mouth.

   Speaking of “mad doctors,” author Ron Goulart thought pulp collectors were so strange that he put several of us in novels, including the Avenger series of paperbacks that he wrote in the 1970’s under the Kenneth Robeson name. I appeared as the mad Doctor Walker-Martin in Red Moon (1974). Other collectors to appear in Ron’s novels were Bob Briney, Jack Irwin, Jack Deveny, Bob Weinberg, Bob Sampson, Richard Minter, and even Mystery*File honcho, Steve Lewis, among others.

   Fortunately I managed to complete my set of 273 issues within a very short time thanks to Richard Minter’s mail order business and my letter writing scheme which unearthed all sorts of Dime Detective’s for little cost.

   I say “unearthed,” and this actually happened when a collector from Ohio discovered stacks of the magazine in a basement of a house about to be demolished. By now in the early 1970’s, many collectors considered me the village idiot who would buy just about any pulp, as long as no one else was interested in the title. I was happy to let them continue to think this way as I started to amass a collection of pulps numbering into the thousands.

   Other collectors who were smart enough to see that I was on to something by collecting Black Mask, Dime Detective, and other high quality pulps, began to visit me and listen to my rants and raves about how great these titles were.

   Many ignored me until prices rose too high, but a few decided to also start reading Dime Detective, an so on, and I then no longer had a free field to leisurely buy issues at super low prices. I even had to resume my greedy plan of sending dealers more money than they asked in order to get my wants.

   Before I knew it and shortly after Pulpcon started in 1972, it became a dog-eat-dog type of existence. Now, I have several friends among pulp collectors because I eventually reached my major goals and I’m not as hyper, but back in the early days there were some major misunderstandings and hurt feelings among collectors.

      One collector was banned from attending Pulpcon and several others started to boycott the convention because of various arguments. During one so called “feeding frenzy” at some dealer’s table I even saw a minister elbow other collectors out of the way and take control of a box of pulps.

   Another time, I kidded a medical surgeon about collecting weird menace pulps and Dime Detective’s with mad doctors on the covers, and he not only stopped coming to Pulpcon, but refused to answer my letters. And I once had a friend who proposed that we commit a criminal act in order to steal some pulp paintings. Fortunately I said no, otherwise my story would be completely different, more like “My Life of Crime as a Pulp Collector.”

   By the year 2000, I had just about read all the good stories in my complete run of Dime Detective’s except for the early and mid thirties which had some lower quality fiction. So when a friend offered to buy the set I foolishly sold it to him, and within a very short time regretted my decision.

   Even though I had read all I wanted to in the 30 years that I had the set, I found I wanted to reread my favorite stories. I checked with all my friends and other collectors but no one had another set to sell. I then began a project that lasted for a few years of buying copies one by one off eBay, the online auction site. I now have over 200 of the 273 issues, and I probably won’t bother with the early issues that I find less readable. The Chandler stories I have in reprint, so again there is no need to spend a lot of money to get those issues.

   I’m making a point of mentioning all this because I want to stress and make clear that even today it is possible to collect pulps that are enjoyable to read. You don’t have to be an older collector who started way back in the 1960’s or 1970’s.

   For Dime Detective, the thirties for the most part are more expensive, often over $100 in nice shape. Lesser copies can be obtained for below a hundred. The forties and fifties I find are the most readable and still can be obtained for $25 to $50 each.

   I personally find it hard to believe but some collectors do not read and collect just for the covers. The covers are quite well done and I’ve owned six or more Dime Detective cover paintings by such excellent artists as Walter Baumhofer, Norman Saunders, and Raphael Desoto.

   I’ve always been amused by the name Dime Detective because eventually the price went up to 15 and 25 cents but the name stayed the same. I imagine many a newsdealer was almost driven mad by customers complaining “but why do you want 25 cents for a Dime Detective?”

   Despite the different names, Black Mask and Dime Detective were basically the same magazine during the 1940’s. Same publisher, same editor (Ken White), and the same policy concerning fiction. It is true, however, that Dime Detective did not publish serials and emphasized series characters even more than Black Mask.

   To give you an idea of some of the authors and series, here is a list of some of my favorite characters from Dime Detective:

       Inspector Allhoff — D. L. Champion (29 stories)
       Bail Bond Dodd — Norbert Davis (8 stories)
       Jim Bennett — Robert Martin (13)
       Bill Brent/Lorna Lorne — Frederick C. Davis (16)
       Cardigan — Frederick Nebel (44)
       John Dalmas — Raymond Chandler (5)
       The Dean — Merle Constiner (19)
       Mr Maddox — T. T. Flynn (35)
       Steve Midnight — John K. Butler (9)
       Needle Mike — William Barrett (15)
       Rambler Murphy — Fred MacIsaac (18)
       Cash Wale — Peter Paige (17)
       Jeffrey Wren — G. T. Fleming-Roberts (7)

   There were other good series but the above will give an idea of the variety.

   Many of these writers were getting very good rates, even as high as three to five cents a word. I had quite a collection of cancelled checks from Popular Publications and they showed for instance that Peter Paige (real name Morton Wolson) was receiving $500 per Cash Wale novelette. In the forties that was very good pay.

   A couple of writers did not really specialize in series characters but should be mentioned: John D. MacDonald who also used the name of Scott O’Hara (39 stories) and Cornell Woolrich (31 stories).

   Also several writers came to sad ends. Norbert Davis and Fred MacIsaac committed suicide. Max Brand and Robert Reeves were killed in WW II. Roger Torrey died an early death in his 30’s of alcoholism.

   For further reading on Dime Detective, Ron Goulart has written three valuable books dealing with the magazine:

       The Dime Detectives
       Cheap Thrills
       The Hardboiled Dicks

   I recommend all three highly and I’m also pleased to say that Matt Moring of Altus Press will eventually be publishing the Dime Detective Companion by James L. Traylor. This will be a revised and expanded edition of his book Dime Detective Index published in 1986. This new book will not only be an index but also have several articles on the magazine and writers.

   We indeed live in the Golden Age of Pulp Reprints and if you don’t have the money and time to find back issues I can recommend the following collections of stories from Dime Detective:

       Hard-Boiled Detectives, edited by Weinberg, Dziemianowicz, and Greenberg.
       Tough Guys and Dangerous Dames, edited by the above.
       The Adventures of Max Latin, by Norbert Davis
       The Adventures of Race Williams, by Carroll John Daly
       The Adventures of Mike Blair, by Hank Searls
       The Adventures of Cardigan, by Frederick Nebel
       The Adventures of Paul Pry, by Erle Stanley Gardner
       Footprints on the Brain, by D. L. Champion (Inspector Allhoff)
       At the Stroke of Midnight, by John K. Butler(Steve Midnight)
       The Compleat Adventures of the Dean, by Merle Constiner (Battered Silicon)
       The Compleat Adventures of Bill Brent, by Frederick C. Davis (Battered Silicon)

Previously on Mystery*File:   Part One — Collecting Black Mask.
Coming next:   Part Three — Collecting Detective Fiction Weekly.

   In the 1940’s an admirer of Raymond Chandler’s fiction wrote a letter asking Chandler if it was possible to obtain back issues of the magazines containing his stories. Chandler responded that it was just about impossible to find such back issues and he doubted if the correspondent would have any luck.

   Jump ahead more than 20 years to 1968 and that was my attitude also. I had been a SF fan for over 10 years collecting the pulps and digests, attending the SF conventions and reading the fanzines.

   Since I also was reading a lot of mainstream literature and mystery fiction, I was interested in back issue magazines that published fiction other than SF, but I was not finding the issues.

   I figured the SF and hero pulps survived because of teen age boys and their drive to collect things. So I reasoned that the adults must have read and thrown away their copies of the adult pulps like Black Mask, Adventure, Dime Detective, Short Stories, etc.

   However, in 1968 a life changing event occurred and I know we all laugh when we hear those words because often it is not really THAT “life changing”. But it was in my case and I never really realized the impact of simply buying one paperback until decades later when I was almost crushed by a collapsing, heavily loaded bookcase full of detective pulps.

   As I lay there too stunned to move, I began the process of thinking how had my reasonable SF collection turned into a massive amount of pulps, vintage paperbacks, books, etc.

   The event I’m talking about is the mundane task of buying a book titled The Hardboiled Dicks, edited by Ron Goulart. It was a collection of crime stories from such pulps as Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly. After reading the stories and Goulart’s editorial comments, I realized without a doubt, it was possible to collect the detective pulps and the genres such as western and adventure fiction.

   I wrote Goulart and asked him if it was possible to buy his copies of the detective magazines that he had used for his research. I’m happy to say he wrote back and sold me all the copies he had for only a couple bucks each.

   These few pulps that he sold me eventually caused me to accumulate complete sets of Black Mask and Dime Detective and an almost complete set of Detective Fiction Weekly, not to mention the other titles that I started to also collect. Almost 40 years later Ron Goulart wrote in my copy of The Hardboiled Dicks, “For Walker, whose life I ruined”.

    “Whose life I ruined” just about sums up the thoughts and feelings of many non-collectors when they see a house full of books and old magazines. I could give dozens of examples but I’ll try and control myself and just mention one early story from 1969 involving collectors, non-collectors, and romance.

   At the time I was busy writing hundreds of letters to collectors, book stores, etc. in an attempt to put together complete sets of Black Mask and the other detective magazines. This was pre-Pulpcon and the Internet did not exist, so everything was by regular slow mail.

   The Collector’s Bookstore in California sent me a package of about a dozen Black Mask’s from the thirties. Needless to say I was checking my mail every day but the day they came I was at work and the package was returned to the main post office. I showed up early the next morning before work with the postal slip saying there had been a failed attempt to deliver.

   The Trenton NJ post office was a massive structure and the postal clerk returned after a few minutes and told me he could not find the package. The next few minutes are still a blur in my memory, but let’s just say the head postal inspector was summoned and he tried to calm me down by saying there was nothing to worry about since the package was insured.

   I imagine every fellow collector reading this knows my response along the lines of “I didn’t care about the insurance, the magazines were rare collectables and irreplaceable.”

   After another long delay and search they found the stack of Black Mask’s with just some twine wrapped around them and no package left at all.

   When I arrived at work I was completely frazzled and shaken. The employees I worked with could not understand why I was so upset about some old crumbly magazines.

   After I regained control, I showed the stack to a girl I was interested in who had the desk behind me. I told her about the importance of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and even asked her if she would like to read any of the magazines.

   Her response of “no” was a deal breaker and the end of any possible romance. I never did have any luck in finding a woman who liked pulps.

   So began my lonely occupation of collecting back issues. The great number of letters I was mailing resulted in many collectors across the country selling me Black Mask’s . Richard Minter, who was the greatest mail order pulp dealer who ever lived, was especially helpful.

   At first he was surprised because all his customers were mainly SF and hero pulp collectors. He had no one interested in the detective magazines. But because of his extensive contacts among old time collectors, he started mailing me a steady stream of packages, all wrapped in brown paper with string and old stamps that someone must have paid him with.

   I know this is hard to believe but he was asking only 2 or 3 dollars per pulp. This was the average price I was paying and the set was almost completed except for a very few issues.

   My main activity during 1969,1970, and 1971 revolved around finding back issues of Black Mask. I cared nothing for my work career, it was just a means to be able to collect. By the first Pulpcon in 1972 I had a complete set of the 340 issues except I was lacking one hard to find issue, October 1921. Some of the issues were in rough shape, and for many years I continued to upgrade.

   At first, I had no real competition but as I started to rave to other collectors, my enthusiasm created the market and other people started to pick up issues. There was a fellow collector in Trenton who I kept talking to about how great the magazine was, and before I realized my stupidity, he was my main competitor.

   We both eventually ended up with complete sets and as far as I know there were only a couple other extensive runs, including one at UCLA, but nothing complete.

   At the end, in order to beat out the competition, I was sending dealers more than they asked for because I figured they would sell to me even if another collector beat me to the item. Many a time, someone would ask $5 for example and I send them double the amount, with my comment of “I feel the issue is worth more”. It always seemed to work.

   Concerning the October 1921 issue, there must have been something wrong with print run of that date or perhaps many copies were destroyed in some accident, etc.

   I say this because out of 340 issues, 1920-1951, the two collectors with almost complete sets both needed this same issue. For many years I advertised and hunted for it and finally dealer Jack Deveny, at an early eighties Pulpcon, conducted a mini auction between me and several collectors. There was no way I was not going to get the issue and my sealed bid won at over $700. Back then, this was an unheard amount to pay.

   Eventually, I tracked down three original Black Mask cover paintings, all from the 1940’s. One of them I managed to get from artist Raphael Desoto after a weekend of talking to him at an early book convention. I cried, I whined, I begged, etc. Nothing is too shameful among serious, out of control collectors.

   I also manage to find a stack of canceled checks paying Black Mask writers and artists. When I bought them back in the 1970’s no one would even pay $1.00 each. Now they bring far higher amounts.

   After Black Mask died in 1951, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine bought the title and beginning with May 1953 issue had a section in each issue reprinting two stories from the magazine. Eventually they cut back to one story and even published new stories in the Black Mask tradition.

   They soon added the subtitle “including Black Mask Magazine” on the contents page. This subtitled continued off and on through the fifties and sixties and I see it appearing even as late as the September, 1973 date.

   I’ve done extensive reading in the magazine during almost four decades. The twenties are not that readable, except for Dashiell Hammett, Frederick Nebel, Raoul Whitfield and Erle Stanley Gardner. Some readers even like Carroll John Daly.

   By the time Joe Shaw took over in late 1926, things began to improve and he encouraged the above writers. Most readers find the thirties the best and even some collectors present an argument for the 1940’s when Popular Publications took over with Ken White as the editor.

   Behind Hammett and Chandler, I think Paul Cain was the best writer even though he was not that prolific, then Nebel, Whitfield, and Norbert Davis. The 1940’s are full of excellent writers like Merle Constiner, John D. Macdonald, Robert Reeves, D. L. Champion, Cornell Woolrich, William Campbell Gault, and others.

   To collect the magazine nowadays would require a lot of money and I’m not even sure a set could be put together. Hammett and Chandler issues are expensive, going for hundreds of dollars each. I recently saw the 5 issue “Maltese Falcon” issues go for almost $4000 and I thought this price was too low.

   Even without these two authors in the issue the 20’s and 30’s go for over one or two hundred, according to condition. The forties still are affordable with plenty of readable stories and it’s possible to find issues at the $25 to $50 price.

   Fortunately for readers who want to sample the fiction there are several collections:

      The Hard-Boiled Omnibus, edited by Joseph Shaw
      The Hardboiled Dicks, edited by Ron Goulart
      The Hard-Boiled Detective: Stories from Black Mask Magazine, edited by Herbert Ruhm
      The Back Mask Boys, edited by William Nolan
      The Black Lizard Big Books of Pulps edited by Otto Penzler (most of the stories).
      The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories, edited by Otto Penzler (over 50 stories!)

   Thus ends my story of a 40 year love affair with a pulp. I can truthfully say I have only learned two things in life, “The non-collector will never understand the collector.” And “Never take the advice of a non-collector concerning your collection.”

   These two things are absolutely true and you might ask why? Because the non-collector knows absolutely nothing about your collection and just sees it as so much clutter, waste of money, and a crazy waste of time. But we know different, don’t we.

COMING SOON:   Part Two — Collecting Dime Detective.

   During World War II John Creasey wrote dozens of thrillers set in London that were never published outside the UK — until decades later when, as a superstar of the genre, he revised them for US publication, cutting out all the vivid wartime atmosphere that made them special.

   Recently I picked up The Toff Is Back — first published in 1942 and, according to the copyright page, revised in 1971, two years before Creasey’s death — and found to my surprise that all the ambiance of a largely bombed-out London survived the revision intact.

   The Hon. Richard Rollison, a.k.a. The Toff, returns from military service in North Africa to find that a well-organized gang has been looting bombed jewelry shops on a grand scale and framing innocent residents of his beloved East End for their crimes.

   Over the years I’ve read, or rather tried to read, several revised Creaseys alongside the 1940s versions, and every time found the originals infinitely better. I’ve never seen the wartime version of this one but it reads as if it hasn’t been revised at all, for which I shout Hallelujah.

   In fact, even the occasional gaffes which are inevitable when a book is written at the rate of 10,000 words a day seem to have been preserved. The racket boss is named Barte Lee while other characters live in Bartley Square, and on page 54 we read “Very slowly and deliberately Lee leaned forward,” which reminded me of the hilarious “Everywhere a Lee Lee” song from 1776.

   Gaffes and all, I highly recommend this one to any reader who wants to be taken back, like viewers of the early seasons of the Foyle’s War series, to a London being nightly pulverized by Hitler’s Luftwaffe.

   Anyone who would like to sample Creasey’s unretouched WWII thrillers without hitting used book shops has a golden opportunity in store. His first five Roger West novels, originally published between 1942 and 1946, will be reprinted a few months from now by Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, the Canada-based publishing operation owned by George Vanderburgh, as the omnibus volume Inspector West Goes to War.

   I’ve written an introduction for the book and have just finished proofreading the computer-scanned texts of those novels. It was a tedious task with two capital T’s but there’s no other way I could have learned so much about the stylistic oddities of these chronicles of London during and immediately after the war.

   Quirks and all, the early West novels are still amazingly readable today. Unlike any other Scotland Yard series I can recall, these books are packed with vivid action scenes. One might almost be reading a series of old-time Westerns except for the fact that guns are sparingly used, both by the bad guys and the bobbies.

Pounding out those ten thousand words a day, Creasey couldn’t avoid perpetrating some Avalloneisms, but far fewer than in the works of the grand master of malapropisms, Mike Avallone himself.

   One I found while proofreading is worth preserving. In Chapter 11 of Holiday for Inspector West (1946) Roger questions a female suspect and then her father, of whom Creasey says: “Like his daughter he had become a changed man.”

   As editor of this five-volume omnibus I’ve decided to substitute “person” for the last word of that sentence.

   Blatant mistakes of this sort, grammar-wise, usage-wise or otherwise, are being corrected, but I am not Americanizing any British terms: those four rubber doughnuts that are found on motor vehicles are called tyres, and when a car has engine trouble, the driver pulls into the kerb and looks under the bonnet.

   What you will read in Inspector West Goes to War is (except for those blatant slips) precisely what Creasey wrote at white heat as that war was raging and immediately afterward.

Between late June and late August 1939, during the first ten weeks that the 60-minute Adventures of Ellery Queen radio series was broadcast on CBS, each episode featured original background music composed and conducted by the soon to be famous Bernard Herrmann.

   None of those episodes survive, and the last time anyone heard what Herrmann wrote for the EQ series was 71 years ago. But today, thanks to the wonderworld of the Web, you can see some of the pages of Herrmann’s score on your computer screen:

   

   First, go to the Bernard Herrmann Society website. Click on “Talking Herrmann.” Enter the box at the bottom of the first page and, among the options given, click on “Topics for the Last Year.” Near the bottom of the fourth page is a thread entitled “Adventures of Ellery Queen 1939.” [This link, if it holds up over time, should take you there directly.]

   There lies the treasure, allowing those who can read a score and have an appropriate instrument to play some of Herrmann’s EQ music in their own homes.

   I wish I were one of that number. When I was a child my mother tried to make a pianist out of me but I resisted and today, sixty years later, I can’t read a note. Damn!

   The second and final Herrmann-Queen interface took place almost a quarter century later. Among the episodes of the second season of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour on CBS-TV was “Terror in Northfield” (October 11, 1963), based on Queen’s 1956 non-series novelette about a string of violent deaths on the exact same spot. [Hulu link.]

   Harvey Hart directed from an adaptation by Leigh Brackett that dropped most of the detection in the Queen tale and stressed suspense. The puzzled deputy sheriff, the menaced local librarian and the mad farmer were played respectively by Dick York, Jacqueline Scott and R.G. Armstrong.

   Herrmann composed the score for this and several other Hitchcock Hour segments as well. May I still be alive and the owner of a decent pair of ears on the day when his scores for that series and others of the same period, like The Richard Boone Show and The Virginian, become available on CD.