Fri 2 Oct 2015
Reviewed by William F. Deeck: A. E. MARTIN – The Outsiders.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[11] Comments
William F. Deeck
A. E. MARTIN – The Outsiders. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1945. Detective Book Club, hardcover reprint, 3-in-1 edition. Mercury Mystery #116, digest-sized paperback, no date stated. First published in Australia by Consolidated, hardcover, 1944, as The Common People. Film: Hammer, 1955, as The Glass Cage; released in the US as The Glass Tomb.
This is the first of, I believe, two Pel Pelham novels. Pelham is a “spruikerâ€, or barker, for various sideshow attractions. In this novel, he is working with Henri Sapolio, the World’s Champion Faster, who is going to attempt to break his record of not eating for 65 straight days.
A young lady is murdered in the apartment house where Sapolio lives. As she is being murdered, Pelham and some of his friends, including an armless woman, a midget, a tattooed lady — well, really stenciled — and a Chinese giant, are partying at Sapolio’s the day before he is to begin his record fast.
The murdered woman is a former aerialist in the circus whose father gave Pelham his first job. She also may or may not be mixed up in blackmail, particularly of a special friend of Pelham’s who grew up with him in an orphanage.
Pelham has to get the fasting show started, deal with a cop who loathes “freaks,†and figure out who the killer is in an excellent novel that is also a very good mystery.
Bibliographic Notes: In something of a footnote, Bill added that the book takes place in Australia, probably Sydney, not England, as Al Hubin had it in error at the time. The second Pel Pelham novel that Bill referred to is The Bridal Bed Murders (Simon & Schuster, 1953).
October 2nd, 2015 at 3:18 pm
The Detective Book Club edition of this book was extremely common at one time. I think you could find it any used bookstore you went into. But both used bookstores and the shelf of DBC editions every one of them had have all but disappeared.
One reason I remember the DBC edition of this book is that it was one of the three in the first of their books I owned. I borrowed it from the parents of a boy I was friends with. I may have been twelve. I remember reading it and thinking it strange, but that’s all.
October 2nd, 2015 at 3:53 pm
A.E. Martin is a truly underrated and undeservedly forgotten writer. Anthony Boucher tried his best get Martin’s work noticed by the Edgar committee. I highly recommend all of Martin’s detective novels. His first SINNERS NEVER DIE is a tour de force of suspense fiction, a book that has as its lead character a loathsome blackmailing postmaster who uncovers a plot more villainous than his odious hobby. I also thoroughly enjoyed DEATH IN THE LIMELIGHT. Both books make good use of the Australian theater and entertainment worlds. I’ve reviewed both of those books on my blog.
October 2nd, 2015 at 4:08 pm
Here’s John’s review of SINNERS NEVER DIE:
http://prettysinister.blogspot.com/2011/03/sinners-never-die-1944-ae-martin.html
along with a comment left by me,
and of DEATH IN THE LIMELIGHT:
http://prettysinister.blogspot.com/2013/04/ffb-death-in-limelight-ae-martin.html
October 3rd, 2015 at 9:32 am
I have several stacks of Detective Book Club editions and sure enough I have the volume with THE OUTSIDERS also. I googled Detective Book Club and they have a website going over the history of the book club.
The books are so common because the cover price was only a $1.89 and you got 3 best selling or popular detective novels. They are not valuable because of the prejudice book collectors have against book club editions. In nice shape they sell for maybe 1 to 5 dollars. The club must have had high print runs and not the usual 2,000 or so print runs for detective first editions.
The copy I have has the original owner’s name in it, Betty Morgan, and it’s dated September 21, 1945. She must have bought it when it was first published.
But then I got it in the early 1970’s because the book also has the stamp of ACRES OF BOOKS, Trenton, NJ.
October 3rd, 2015 at 11:18 am
In some cases mystery titles are so scarce that the only available copy (not to mention the cheapest) is in a Detective Book Club 3-in-1 volume. I’ve bought several of them just to have one book and then ended up reading the other two. Those books are a great way to sample a writer’s work you might otherwise never read.
October 3rd, 2015 at 11:42 am
The prejudice against DBC is twofold, but for me the biggest problem was their savage expurgation of books Readers Digest style.
I had stacks of them and they were a resource for harder to find books — especially mid-list writers whose work didn’t get paperback reprinting , Brit writers less known here, or, if like me, you had limited library resources.
But they did ruthlessly condense books from their original form.
I read some later Martin. A neglected writer.
October 3rd, 2015 at 11:45 am
Didn’t Martin do a couple of spy novels later or is that the same writer?
October 3rd, 2015 at 1:34 pm
David
I did the edits you pointed out in your previous comment.
As for Martin being a spy writer, I don’t think so. Here’s his complete output, as per Hubin
MARTIN, A(rchibald) E(dward) (1885-1955)
The Common People (n.) Consolidated 1944 [Australia; Pel Pelham]
The Misplaced Corpse (n.) Bookstall 1944 [Australia]
Sinners Never Die (n.) Simon 1944 [1895; Australia]
The Outsiders (n.) Simon 1945; See: The Common People (Consolidated 1944).
The Shudder Show (co) Bookstall 1945
Death in the Limelight (n.) Simon 1946 [Theatre; Sydney, Australia]
The Curious Crime (n.) Doubleday 1952 [Australia]
The Bridal Bed Murders (n.) Simon 1953 [Australia; Pel Pelham]
The Chinese Bed Mystery (n.) Reinhardt 1955; See: The Bridal Bed Murders (Simon 1953).
I’ve gone through all of the Martin’s in Hubin, and while there are a lot of them, I don’t see any that fit the bill as a later espionage writer.
October 3rd, 2015 at 1:29 pm
David in comment #6 brings up the question of the Detective Book Club condensing the novels. I have to admit that I had not thought that they cut novels like Reader’s Digest.
So I checked online and came across one of their ads in LIFE, October 30, 1944. The ad says:
“Each is absolutely complete standard book-length-the original text has not been cut, abridged, or condensed in any way!”
October 3rd, 2015 at 3:28 pm
Walker, Comment #8
The people at DVD didn’t abridge the books the same way they did at Reader’s Digest, and they may not have in the 1940s, but I do remember that they changed some words in a later A. A. Fair book, from bitch to witch, for example. The latter word just sounded funny to me, so I checked it against the text in a Dell paperback of the same title, and sure enough, it had been changed.
Later on I noticed that whole paragraphs of a James Bond novel were omitted when they did their version. You can guess what was going on during the redaction.
October 4th, 2015 at 2:12 am
They also changed a whole scene in a Fair novel when Donald Lam is set up for rape to where you could not understand what he was arrested for.
I’ve found bits missing in books other than Bond including MacDonald and Simenon.