Tue 14 Aug 2018
Mystery Review: FRANK GRUBER – The Limping Goose.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[8] Comments
FRANK GRUBER – The Limping Goose. Johnny Fletcher & Sam Cragg #12. Rinehart, hardcover, September 1954. Detective Book Club, hardcover 3-in-1 edition, December 1954. Bantam 1488, paperback, August 1956.
It is not easy to write a detective novel that’s truly funny and at the same time populate it with all of the clues, alibis and red herrings that make a true detective novel, much less a entire series of them, all with the same characters. One time pulp writer Frank Gruber doesn’t always succeed in this series, but he comes as close as anybody.
The comedy in the Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg books comes primarily from the pair themselves, and to a lesser extent, the situations they find themselves in. From the cover of the Bantam paperback, illustrated above:
“The little guy is Johnny Fletcher — he can talk his way out of anything. The big lug is Sam Cragg, ‘strangest man in the world,’ with a muscle-bound brain.” The disparity between the brain power of the two is the basis for most of the humor in their adventures.
Johnny Fletcher is close enough to being a private eye that he might as well be one, but the true profession of both he and Sam Cragg is that of traveling book salesmen, even though they are so broke at the beginning of The Limping Goose, they have no money to even buy books for sale — usually encyclopedias, as I recall.
Eating being a very habitual habit of theirs, especially Sam’s, Johnny decides to hire himself out as a skip-tracer. Soon enough, though, he gets himself mixed up in a case of murder, and the story is off and running. The limping goose of the title is a “piggy bank” in the form of a goose with one leg longer than the other, and even though it is filled only with old coins with no particular value, there are plenty of people who seem to want it.
The explanation of who they are who want it, and why, is, unfortunately, less interesting than the byplay not only between Johnny and Cragg, but also between the pair and the rest of the world. If they ever made any money on the successful outcome of any of their adventures, I’d be surprised to know about it.
On balance, I’d rate this one as a “C plus” for the detective work, and an “A minus” for the funny stuff, which continues on throughout the book. I need to read more of these.
The Johnny Fletcher & Sam Cragg series —
The French Key (1940)
The Hungry Dog Murders (1941)
The Navy Colt (1941)
The Gift Horse (1942)
The Laughing Fox (1943)
The Talking Clock (1944)
The Mighty Blockhead (1945)
The Honest Dealer (1947)
The Scarlet Feather (1948)
The Silver Tombstone Mystery (1948)
The Leather Duke (1950)
The Limping Goose (1954)
The Whispering Master (1956)
The Corpse Moved Upstairs (1964)
Swing Low, Swing Dead (1964)
August 15th, 2018 at 6:15 am
I remember enjoying THE FRENCH KEY, the first in the series, for the same reasons you gave. The banter between the two of them was amusing and it all moved quickly.
August 15th, 2018 at 10:48 am
It’s possible that the formula would wear thin if I were to try to read a lot of these very close to each other, but it’s a formula that served Gruber well for a long time.
August 15th, 2018 at 7:55 am
I have to be in the right mood for Gruber. His westerns are readable, but that’s all. I should try him in a lighter vein.
August 15th, 2018 at 10:51 am
I’ve had problems reading Gruber’s westerns too, but it’s been a long time since I tried one, and I don’t remember why.
August 15th, 2018 at 12:20 pm
I think it was Gruber’s Oliver Quade who sold encyclopedias (The Compendium of Human Knowledge); Johnny and Sam sold Every Man a Samson, using the latter’s demonstrations of physical strength to sell the suckers — sorry, customers. Quade and Fletcher are old favorites of mine and always worth reading for the reasons you cite.
August 15th, 2018 at 12:41 pm
Right you are, Jim. Oliver Quade it was!
August 15th, 2018 at 1:01 pm
BRASS KNUCKLES was the collection of Oliver Quade stories, and very entertaining it is.
August 15th, 2018 at 7:19 pm
Gruber literally invented the formula, an eleven point formula for writing successful pulp fiction which boiled down comes out basically as get the hero in trouble as near to the first line on the first page and don’t get him out of it until as late as the last line of the last page if possible.
In some ways Johnny and Sam are just Oliver Quade divided into two people, one smart and one strong.
Most of Gruber’s pulp short fiction goes unreprinted, which is sad, because while much of it is formula it is also often great fun to read. Numerous issues of Doc Savage have Gruber as the author of everything in the issue but the Savage novel.
Writing about his formula he admitted he would find something he liked or had an interest in and write whatever story he needed around it, so that one of his shorts is a spy story where the hero’s skill as a pole vaulter proves vital to his success. It’s still a pretty good model for writing popular fiction.