ERLE STANLEY GARDNER “Lost, Strayed and Stolen.” Lester Leith #44. Novelette. Detective Fiction Weekly, 24 February 1934. Never reprinted, though I’d welcome being corrected on this.

   It might be possible to characterize Lester Leith as a private eye, except for one small detail, or maybe two. He never had a PI license, and as far as I know, his only client was himself. What he realty is is difficult to describe. What he does is scour the newspapers for details on crimes that have been committed and tries to find a way to cut himself in on the proceeds.

   He is so successful at this that there is no “tries” about it. The police do not take his activities lightly. They think he is a crook himself, although they have never been able to prove it.

   To this end, however, they have inserted one of their men, a chap named Beaver, into Lester Leith’s household in the guise of his personal man servant. Leith calls him Scuttle, and of course Leith is fully aware that Scuttle is a easily fooled spy for the equally inept Sgt. Ackley of the police department.

   Which is where half the fun of reading the Leith stories comes in. He simply delights in teasing both Scuttle and Ackley along, giving them just enough information to get them going in one direction while off he goes in the other. The other half of the fun is watching Leith do exactly that, which in this case involves setting up a totally bogus Citizens’ Committee on Civics Efficiency, complete with stationery, buttons and badges, although Leith himself is the only member.

   Goal: to obtain a valuable diamond necklace that the husband of a well-known society woman claims was stolen from him. With the use of an exact but worthless replica and the hiring of a young woman living down the hall from him who is low on funds, Leith manages to get both the police and the couple whose necklace was stolen both totally confused and bamboozled, and badly, to the total delight of the reader.

   I thoroughly enjoyed this one, from beginning to end.

BLACK RAINBOW. Miramax, 1989. Rosanna Arquette, Jason Robards, Tom Hulce. Screenwriter-director: Mike Hodges.

   A father and daughter pair make a meager living traveling from town to town setting up shows in local churches as clairvoyants and preying on their audiences’ desires to make contact with loved ones on the other side. Martha Travis (Rosanna Arquette) is very effective at this. Dressed all n white, she is able to assure everyone who has lost someone close to them that they are happy where they are now and that all is well with them.

   It is all a fraud, of course.

   Until, that is, the spirits she is in contact with begin not to be dead yet. Even more, in her visions, she can even see (and can describe in detail) the manner of their passing, including as it turns out, the murder of a would-be whistle blower at a nearby chemical plant. Even more, she claims she saw who the hitman is.

   When a local reporter (Tom Hulce) gets wind of this, skeptical as he is, the story gets into the newspaper, and thinking there just might be something to it, the owner of the plant puts his hitman back to work again.

   The story of Martha, the reporter, and her alcoholic father (Jason Robards) is all that’s of interest here. The outside criminal element that Martha accidentally eavesdrops upon, that’s pretty much by the numbers. Martha, a lovely young woman in her early 20s (I’m guessing) is not the virginal gateway to the other end of the rainbow as her role is in church. Far from it, as the reporter soon learns. And besides these new abilities, she is now also beginning to realize how much her father stole her life from her.

   Forget the hit man, and keep your eyes on Rosanna Arquette’s performance. I found it mesmerizing, especially toward the end when she chastises her audience for being relying on their belief in the happiness that awaits them once they’re gone. If we knew for sure that life is lived only once, she suggests, perhaps we’d try to be better people while we’re here. The ending is quite remarkable, too, as the film verges even further into the supernatural and the unknown.

   Is this film a diamond in the rough? No, not really, but you may find it parts of it as fascinating to watch as I did.

IRWIN SHAW – Nightwork. Delacorte Press, hardcover, 1975. Dell, paperback, 1976. Further reprint editions exist.

   Doug Grimes is a pilot with a stutter and not much of a future when he discovers he has a rare eye disease that won’t blind him, but certainly grounds him. Now he works as night man at the St. Augustine hotel, a dangerous enough job, but at thirty-three, though fit and smart, Doug Grimes is headed nowhere fast.

   Men at crisis, any sort of crisis, middle age, ennui, marriage, family, divorce, business, are the stuff of many books and stories by Irwin Shaw, the bestselling story teller whose fiction from The Young Lions to Rich Man Poor Man chronicled life in the latter half of the 20th Century, primarily for the male half of the population in novels like Two Weeks In Another Town, Evening in Byzantium, Top of the Hill, and gem perfect stories like “Tip on a Dead Jockey” — and those are just some of the ones made into movies.

   Few writers did it half as well as Shaw, with half the grace or style, and because his stories covered the whole of life, once in a while crime played into that. In Nightwork he chose to do something a bit lighter and more playful, and it should come as no surprise that he did so with panache.

   It begins, not surprisingly, with a woman. A woman who shows up at Doug’s desk in the St. Augustine on a cold January night to inform him there is the body of a naked old man upstairs. Beside him is a cardboard tube Doug decides to hide from the police, and inside the cardboard tube is $100,000 dollars in ones.

   And being at sixes and sevens, Doug does what almost anyone in a Shaw novel might do, he quits his job, leaves town, gets a passport in a hurry with a help of friend he used to ski with, and gets the hell out of Dodge headed for Switzerland and the skiing, but not until he discovers the manager of the St. Augustine is in the hospital after two men roughed him up for no reason.

   And it is there, in St. Moritz, he meets Miles Fabian, and the game is on.

   Nightwork, I should mention, is a novel and not a thriller or caper. However much it flirts with the conventions of the genre, it is not about plot half so much as character, about a sort of late coming of age for the hero, and the magic brought into his life by the fabulous and not entirely scrupulous, Miles Fabian. Shaw is a much different writer, but this may remind you of some of the lighter novels of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler.

   Nightwork is a delight, smart, playful, real, human, and yet bubbly as good champagne with the kick of a Rye chaser. It is a heartfelt novel, one to read if you are in a sour mood or down on the world, Shaw’s idea of an old fashioned good read, and frankly mine too. As Shaw has his hero comment near the end of the book; “There’s nothing like a good deed for shining in a naughty world.”

    Nightwork is a good deed in a naughty world.

  LESTER del REY, Editor – Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Second Annual Edition. E. P. Dutton, hardcover. 1973. Ace, paperback, December 1975.

   #2. ROBERT SILVERBERG “When We Went to See the End of the World.” First published in Universe 2, edited by Terry Carr (Ace, paperback, 1972). First collected in Unfamiliar Territory (Scribner, hardcover, 1973). Reprinted many times. Nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, 1973.

   Picture a cocktail party taking place in 1972, or perhaps in the near future from that time, for time travel on a commercial basis exists and is just becoming affordable for the kinds of swinging couples who attend such parties as this. Marijuana, free love, and the discussion of various current disasters around the world are all part of the scene, as well as a little not-so-subtle one-upmanship are all going on.

   In the latter regard, as it turns out, everyone who’s signed up for and has taken a trip to see the apocalypse — the end of the world — has a totally different tale to tell. This is very puzzling, and it helps mitigate the sense of loss each couple feels when they discover that they weren’t the first kids on the block to have taken the trip after all.

   I can’t say that the explanation they come up with is on solid ground. What kind of scientific basis could there be for it? For the reader, though, the interesting part of the evening is how they all manage to ignore the fact that the world is already falling apart around them — with all kinds of scenarios as to which particular disaster may befall them. And for sure, that’s the point.

   What I generally find in Robert Silverberg’s stories, and this one’s no different, is that there is something hidden in each of then that’s never spoken aloud or so stated in the story itself. An undercurrent that you sense that’s not really there, but it is. Or maybe I just imagined it, but this time around I don’t think I did.

   Have I mentioned that this is a funny story, well told? If I haven’t, then I just did.

       —

Previously from the del Rey anthology: LARRY NIVEN “Cloak of Anarchy.”

Q & A. TriStar, 1990. Nick Nolte, Timothy Hutton, Armand Assante, Patrick O’Neal, Jenny Lumet. Based on th ebook by Edwin Torres. Screenplay and director: Sidney Lumet.

   Long after you’ve forgotten the labyrinthian plot of Q & A, you will remember Nick Nolte. In Sidney Lumet’s gritty film, Nolte’s character isn’t so much an actor as he is a force of nature. Brutal, strong, domineering, and aggressive are just several words to describe NYPD Lieutenant Mike Brennan. A man so devoted to his career that he seems to have no identity beyond it, Brennan is not just a blatant racist and homophobe.

   He’s a dangerous killer, a man who has been so thoroughly corrupted that, at some level, he no longer knows who exactly he is supposed to answer to. Is it the corrupt lawyer in the DA’s office who has dirt on him? Is it the Mafia boss whose dirty work he is willing to do, if it means murdering a Puerto Rican drug dealer, a man no one in respectable society is going to miss anyway?

   When Brennan starts feeling the heat from Assistant DA Reilly (Timothy Hutton), he becomes unhinged with rage. Willing to do next to anything for the sake of self-preservation, Brennan embarks upon a brutal murder spree that takes him from the mean streets of Harlem to sunny San Juan. In his sights is drug lord Bobby Texador (Armand Assante), a stereotypical bad guy with a conscience, who is now living with Reilly’s former flame (Jenny Lumet).

   While the first half of the movie is quite compelling, the latter hour ends up getting bogged down in multiple plot threads that become somewhat difficult to follow. Everything eventually ties up together, but in such a manner that makes one realize that certain scenes either weren’t absolutely necessary to make the film work (think: the love triangle between Hutton, Assante, and Lumet) or went on too long.

   It is after all the scenes with Nolte that makes this lesser known Lumet feature worth watching. Apparently, he gained forty pounds for the role, believing that his character needed to be a physically imposing presence. It was a good decision. Nolte’s Mike Brennan belongs in the pantheon of cinematic corrupt cops. He’s that memorable a character. Loud, vulgar, and brash, he’s terrifying to the two detectives tasked with investigating him. For good reason.

FACE OF A FUGITIVE. Columbia, 1959. Fred MacMurray, Lin McCarthy, Dorothy Green, Alan Baxter and James Coburn. Screenplay by David T Chantler and Daniel B Ullman, based on the short story “Long Gone” by Peter Dawson (Zane Grey’s Western Magazine, March 1950). Directed by Paul Wendkos.

   In a decade supposedly marked by conformity, and in a genre supposedly bound up in cliché, I’m surprised sometimes by how many off-beat, idiosyncratic and just plain weird westerns came out of the 1950s: Terror in a Small Town, 40 Guns, A Day of Fury, Ride Lonesome…. I could go on and on, but then I’d be going on and on.

   Face of a Fugitive may not as bizarre as some of the others, but it’s sufficiently off-beat and well-made to stay in the memory. Or this memory, anyway.

   Face opens with Fred MacMurray as an affable outlaw being escorted to jail by a Deputy unequal to the task. In the first few minutes Fred overpowers him and is making his escape when his younger brother (Ron Hayes) shows up, kills the deputy, and is himself mortally wounded in the shoot-out.

   Now wanted for murder, Fred buries his brother by sewing him in a mail sack and dumping the body in a river. Then he insinuates himself into the closest town, passing as a traveling businessman, feigning acquaintance with the locals, and looking for some way to split the scene before Wanted Posters show up with his picture on them — in 24 hours.

   MacMurray is in fine form here. In the years before Disney and “My Three Sons” his persona was bluff and likeable bit not always trustworthy. Check him out in The Texas Rangers, Double Indemnity, The Apartment and others to see what I mean. Here he uses both sides of his acting face as the outlaw on the run masquerading as a respectable citizen, and he does it quite well, befriending the local barber, horse trader, store clerk, and sheriff, but always with an eye out for the main chance.

   Of course it’s not that simple. Nor is the Sheriff, whose deputies have the town bottled up pending the arrival of the posters. Always the smoothie, Fred wangles himself a job as a Deputy — only to find himself embroiled with the Sheriff in a range was against local cattle baron Alan Baxter, and his henchman James Coburn.

   The writers handle all this quite capably, setting up the situation, ratcheting up the tension, and pausing for some truly affecting moments when Fred sees them fish his brother’s body from the river and later watches him lowered into an unmarked grave. They also flesh out the minor characters, particularly Coburn: lithe and lethal, but essentially a cowboy, not a killer.

   Back in the day, director Paul Wendkos made a splashy debut with The Burglar (1957) then retreated into television and the Gidget movies, until finally overtaken by obscurity. Still early in his career here, he imparts a sense of pace and humanity to the proceedings, particularly in a slam-bang run-and-jump shoot-out in a ghost town, making the most of the settings and Coburn’s athleticism vs. Fred’s stoic efficiency. And he caps it all with a line (which should have been the final line) I will remember for some time.

   This is a film to enjoy—and come back to.

  LESTER del REY, Editor – Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Second Annual Edition. E. P. Dutton, hardcover. 1973. Ace, paperback, December 1975.

   #1. LARRY NIVEN “Cloak of Anarchy.” First published in Analog SF, March 1972. First collected in Tales of Known Space: The Universe of Larry Niven (Ballantine, paperback, 1975).

   Some time in the near future, when “modern transportation systems” have made automobiles obsolete, the question is, what should be done with all of the roads in the United States that are no longer needed?

   The answer, as far as Los Angeles and the 405 (the San Diego Freeway) is concerned, is to cover it over with dirt and grass and make a people’s park of it. Anyone can do do anything there, except for one rule: no violence is allowed. This rule is monitored and enforced by a large number of basketball-sized “copseyes” floating in the air above the park.

   What happens, though, when the monitoring system breaks down? It isn’t instantaneous, but you can imagine it yourself, and it isn’t pretty. Niven’s touch is largely light-hearted, though, up to a certain point, and the story is filled with all kinds of well-defined characters, even if most of them do not have much screen time.

   The basic theme: Anarchy isn’t stable. Or, absolute freedom is highly overrated. The story itself is chock full of ideas, bouncing all over each other and all over the place, and all of them are interesting. Example: What was it the replaced the automobile? Who is the beautiful girl with the fifteen feet of flowing cloak?

        —

NOTE:   Over the next few weeks, I plan to continue working my way through this Best of the Year anthology and reporting on each of the stories in it. I think the era of the early 1970s was a good one for the kind of SF I like to read. As I go forward, let’s see how true that statement is and whether or not you agree.

EDWARD S. AARONS – Girl on the Run. Gold Medal #424, paperback original; 1st printing, August 1954. Reprinted several times, including d1772, 1967.

   My chronology may be a little bit off, bit I believe this is the book Aarons wrote just before beginning the series he’s most famous for, the Assignment series starring rugged CIA agent Sam Durell. It shows, too, since it contains much of the same style, settings and overall flavor of the series books that came next.

   Something changed for Aarons as a writer in the early to mid-50s. After a short career writing for the pulps, mixed in with a number of ordinary detective thrillers written as Edward Ronns and taking place on the US, his books shifted their focus to that of international intrigue, mostly for Gold Medal. These later books are always filled with local color and details of life abroad that only someone who’d been thee could know (or so it seems), and his heroes are always convincing.

   And although the problems his heroes run into do have far-reaching international significance — in this case either the treasure or the uranium deposit that Harry Bannnock’s French girl friend’s father has discovered will help restore France’s place in the community of nations — it is on the personal level that Aarons’s stories make their greatest impact. Aarons was no John le Carre or Len Deighton, with massive plots and counterplots that overshadow everything else in the tale, but I still read Aarons’s books, and I haven’t been reading theirs.

   When I devoted one of last year’s columns to John Roeburt’s Jigger Moran novels, I didn’t promise to do another column on Roeburt but suggested that I might. Since then I’ve decided that he deserves not one but two more. This month for space reasons I’ll limit myself to the rest of his hardcover books.

   His first two novels, JIGGER MORAN (1944) and THERE ARE DEAD MEN IN MANHATTAN (1946), I discussed before. I wish I could say more about his third, SENECA U.S.A. (Samuel Curl, 1947), but I’ve never seen a copy and it’s a hard book to find. What this stand-alone novel is about becomes fairly clear from the Kirkus review:

   â€œPortrait of a small town, almost any small town, and the postwar forces of unrest, labor union and racial, reflected in the story of Shep Ward, newspaper editor and party line follower of a rich, reactionary publisher….” Shep’s wife “leaves him thinking he has lost all decency of point of view.” Then the publisher is shot and a Jew is charged with the murder, “only because of anti-semitism. Shep, forfeiting caution for the truth, airs the whole thing in an edition of his paper.” The reviewer’s conclusion: “The intentions here are worthier than the actuality—which is only mediocre.”

   Critic Irving Howe covered SENECA and four other novels with similar viewpoints in an essay for Commentary (January 1, 1948), opining that all five “range from the bad to the downright ludicrous….” What he thought about Roeburt’s book specifically I can’t say because only the first page of his essay is downloadable on the Web.

   As if scared out of the mainstream by reactions to his third novel, Roeburt returned in his fourth to the tough-guy genre and a character modeled on the later Bogart. Like any respectable roman noir, TOUGH COP (Simon & Schuster, 1949) opens at night. Johnny Devereaux, 41 years old and just retired after twenty years on the NYPD — although he somehow has a month or so to use his badge any way he pleases — is about to drive off from a 52nd Street nightclub when a lovely young woman flings open the passenger door of his Buick convertible and begs for his help.

   Jennifer Phillips was raised by and lives with an obese old man, known for his scathing reviews of Broadway plays, who claims to be her father. But as she’s matured from age ten to twenty, his interest in her seems to have become, let’s say, non-paternal. Devereaux agrees to talk to the woman who raised Jennifer as a child but finds her dead in her hotel room and gets slugged by someone hiding in her closet, who turns out to be a small-time subway pickpocket recently paroled from Sing Sing after serving 14 months on a firearms charge.

   The drama critic who claims to be Jennifer’s father and supposedly “used rattlesnake venom for ink” (although the two samples of his reviews that Roeburt gives us strike me as cutesy rather than venomous) turns out to be “a sybarite, unnatural, an obscene and gilded pervert.” Homosexual, of course.

   I need hardly add that this “dandified and dissolute sensualist” talks like Sydney Greenstreet. Shadowing him and enlisting PI Sam Solowey to pursue other leads, Devereaux discovers that a number of the people he encounters — -a publisher of hate pamphlets, an ex-boxer turned nightclub owner — share with Jennifer Phillips and her alleged father the fact that nothing is known about their origins. (Could any writer get away with that premise in today’s high-tech age?)

   In due course he finds himself looking into a 20-year-old murder and payroll robbery from which the loot was never recovered. Only one of the criminals was caught and that one was “accidentally” scalded to death in the shower at Sing Sing while the hood who slugged Devereaux was serving his sentence in the same prison. Trying to trace the backgrounds of all the people he’s run into takes Devereaux to a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg district and into several chapters of investigation that show Roeburt at his best.

   At the climax he falls back on the most hackneyed “surprise” ending in the world of noir, but despite that and a few gaffes here and there — the former boxer is described as both a bantamweight and a middleweight, the dancers at Radio City Music Hall are called the Roxettes, and our old buddy the St. James Bible crops up at least twice — TOUGH COP is by far the most rewarding of the Roeburts I’ve read to date, with prose and plot kept under tight control from first page to last.

   That book was followed by the third and final Jigger Moran exploit, CORPSE ON THE TOWN (1950), which I discussed a few months ago. From that point forward, radio, movie and TV work apparently occupied Roeburt full-time for a while. In the second and final Devereaux novel, THE HOLLOW MAN (Simon & Schuster, 1954), two years have passed since Johnny’s retirement and he’s vegetating at a $1000-a-week job hosting dramatized true-crime stories on live TV when, as in TOUGH COP, a lovely woman begs him to help her.

   Five years earlier, struggling actress Nina Troy had secretly married boxing champ Rocky Star (born Rocco Starziano) and borne him a son. But Rocky vanished into thin air soon after the child’s birth, and Nina, now a huge success on radio and TV, is terrified that her marriage will be found to be invalid and her child illegitimate. (The only conceivable legal problem with the marriage is that Rocky had used a false name. New York law requires that people getting married have to prove their identities to the official or clergyman performing the ceremony, but I find it hard to believe that a detail of this sort would invalidate a marriage and turn any child of that marriage into what used to be called a bastard — the politically correct term today is nonmarital child — and Roeburt spends zero time exploring the legal issue. So much for any claim that he had a law degree!)

   But apparently someone doesn’t want the disappearance reopened: both Nina and the sportswriter she’d previously asked for help have been savagely beaten, and soon after agreeing to look into the case Devereaux too takes some lumps, although of course they don’t stop him or even slow him down. Like CITIZEN KANE, this novel is an investigation into a vanished or (in Kane’s case) recently deceased legendary figure: Was he a Saint or was he a Swine? (Anyone wondering why I capitalized those nouns will find out shortly.)

   Except for the beatings and a few shots taken at Devereaux as he and his PI friend Solowey look into Rocky’s past, there’s no crime until late in the game when one of the people closest to the missing champ is poisoned. Our tough cop, who isn’t a cop any more but unaccountably carries a badge and continues to beat up the ungodly without mercy, doesn’t crack the case until he recognizes the guy who’s been taking shots at him, after which the revelations come thick and fast.

   What makes THE HOLLOW MAN unusual is the utter weirdness of Roeburt’s style. First off, he can’t seem to tell a noun apart from an adjective or verb. “…transmuting her into something gross, and chicane, and murderous.” “…a busy quarter-century of detectiving.” “[C]ould he loom the fabric?” “…{A] wisping smile could even be read on his mouth.” At least three times in the first four chapters he twists the same noun into a verb: “You jackassed every one of them,” Devereaux tells another character.

   As if that weren’t enough, the pages are pockmarked with irrelevant religious allusions: crown of thorns, mote in his eye, consecrated, adoration, genuflection, incantation, resurrection, martyr, blasphemy, absolution, prayer, the list goes on and on, world without end Amen. To give one concrete example: “The truth, unholy or not, will pour like an almighty flood.” That makes three religion words out of eleven!

   If you thought two types of gaffe were enough, Roeburt offers a third by capitalizing nouns no one else would: Director, Youth Monitor, Host, Narrator, Scripter, Agency Men, Control Room, Account Men, Mother, the Universe, Shadow Men, a Case, a Mourner, the Law, the Sports Page — it’s as if inside the author there were an inner German (name of Scheisskopf?) clawing to get free.

   Naturally enough, wackadoodle sentences and phrases abound like warts on a — well, if you don’t know what amphibian I was about to name, you haven’t been reading these columns. Let me provide a few specimens:

   In his review for the New York Times (June 13, 1954), Anthony Boucher said that Roeburt “might well be called the Theodore Dreiser of the mystery novel, both because he tries harder than most to see the sociological meaning behind murder and because he couches his well-conceived novels in an almost willfully strained and graceless prose…. I found the novel as compelling as it is tortuous.” The reference to Dreiser, of whom H. L. Mencken once said that he “came into the world with an incurable antipathy to the mot juste,” makes a lot of sense but, even though I hate to disagree with Tony, to my taste THE HOLLOW MAN is somewhat less than compelling.

   By the mid-1950s radio was dying and apparently Roeburt didn’t get enough television work to keep him as busy as he’d been, so he returned to writing novels, although none of them featured Devereaux or Jigger Moran or any other series character. Only two appeared in hardcover. THE LUNATIC TIME (Simon & Schuster, 1956; reprinted as DID YOU KILL MONA LEEDS?, Crest pb 3213, 1956) was described by Boucher in his Times review (August 19, 1956) as “unconventional, difficult and curiously compelling. An unsuccessful journalist, a psychotic dipsomaniac, half-involuntarily turns detective for a girl whose brother is in danger of the chair. His ultimate discovery should not surprise you, but this is one of those rare cases in which anticipation of the ending makes the novel, if anything, more fascinating.”

   Tony again mentions Roeburt’s “tortuous and somewhat strained writing” but stresses his “strong individuality and a certain morbid power.” Thanks to his review, and the longer discussion by Marcia Muller in 1001 MIDNIGHTS (1986), I think I know who killed Mona Leeds already. But I have a copy of the book and have made a date with myself to read it one of these days.

   I don’t own a copy of THE CLIMATE OF HELL (Abelard-Schuman, 1958; reprinted as THE LONG NIGHTMARE, Crest pb #246, 1958) but there’s enough information on the Web to provide a good idea of what it’s about. I’ll start by quoting the Kirkus review, unnecessary dashes and all:

   â€œLarry Stevens, a fisherman in Florida, is brainwashed into the identity of Kirk Reynolds, taken — by three men — to New York to live the life of a gilded bum, to renew his marriage with Laura, a lush, and to witness the murder of his presumed father — before his will is changed. Running away — to give himself up — -he must finally face the revelation of his own responsibility in the situation to which his sick, truant conduct has led. Up from the pulps, loud and lewd and lurid.”

   Tony Boucher’s Times review (May 25, 1958) is so much more positive it tempts me to track down a copy. He calls it “as headlong, urgent, read-in-one-desperate-sitting a narrative as has come my way in quite a while…. Roeburt’s odd, individual prose and his psychological variations on the theme give it freshness; and the perils of the impostor and the sheer evil of his criminal masters make a memorable nightmare of menace.”

   As chance would have it, while roaming the Web for more information on THE CLIMATE OF HELL I stumbled upon David Seed’s BRAINWASHING: THE FICTIONS OF MIND CONTROL: A STUDY OF NOVELS AND FILMS (Kent State University Press, 2004), which blithely gives away the surprise Roeburt was building up to. Well, I still might try to track down a copy.

  FREDERICK C. DAVIS “Death to the Witness.” Show-Me McGee #6. Novelette. First published in Detective Fiction Weekly, 24 February 1934. Advertised as “The Hand of Doom” on the front cover. Published separately in the UK in paperback by Sharman Ellis Ltd., sometime in the 1930s.

   Almost without fail a series character in the old pulp magazines had to have a gimmick — something that made him different from all of the others, something that made him stand out in the reader’s mind so that they’d recognize him when they came across the next of his adventures.

   Some of these gimmicks were awfully minor ones, though. Show-Me McGee’s was exactly that. Hailing from the “Show Me” state of Missouri, Detective Lieutenant John McGee was one of those policemen who had to see the evidence and be convinced of what it told him before he ever went into action.

   As gimmicks so, this is a mere trifle. I have an idea that by the time this one came out, the sixth in the series, even the author had gotten tired of it or he’d run out of ways to build it into the stories he was writing. There’s only one paragraph in this one that it’s really brought up.

   And speaking of the story, this one’s about a cleaning lady in a large office building who witnesses a murder, one committed by a mysterious criminal mastermind, and she is the only one who can identify him. Trouble is, she’s in a coma in a hospital bed, and the killer has ordered all the members of his gang to get in and bump her off.

   The title on the cover, “The Hand of Doom,” is actually the more appropriate one, and in a way, in 1934, it may have been science fictional. Show Me McGee manages to save the day by the judicious use of liquid oxygen, freezing the killer’s hand so that it breaks off just before he is able to detonate several sticks of dynamite.

   Well, howdy. As perhaps you can tell, this is a story that’s filled with action from beginning to end. Even if this happens to be a mug of your favorite brew, it’s deeply flawed, though. Why, you might ask, even at the time, didn’t the killer knock off the cleaning lady as soon as he saw that she had seen him? He slugs her on the head instead, and dumps her into a nearby closet. To his regret later on — for the rest of the story, in fact.

       The Show-Me McGee series —

Hell on Wheels (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Sep 30 1933
Murder Without Motive (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Oct 7 1933 (*)
The Killer in the Tower (ss) Detective Fiction Weekly Nov 18 1933
The Devil’s Dozen (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Dec 2 1933 (*)
The Three Doctor Jekylls (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Dec 30 1933
Death to the Witness (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Feb 24 1934 (*)
Stone Dead (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Jun 9 1934
The Eye in the Wall (nv) Detective Fiction Weekly Jul 21 1934

   (*) Reprinted by Sharman Ellis Ltd. in the UK, probably all as 64 page paperbacks. Fellow blogger Morgan Wallace has recently posted a long review of The Devil’s Dozen, which also includes a photo image of the cover. Follow the link.