Mon 22 Nov 2010
Reviewed by William F. Deeck: Two by GEORGE MALCOLM-SMITH.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Crime Fiction IV , Reviews[7] Comments
William F. Deeck
GEORGE MALCOLM-SMITH —
â— The Trouble with Fidelity. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1957. Paperback reprint: Dell #999, 1959.
â— The Lady Finger. Doubleday Crime Club, hardcover, 1962. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition, November 1962.
The Nutmeg Indemnity Company employs Lenny Painter to apprehend defalcators unfortunately bonded by that insurance company and to retrieve whatever monies they might have left. In The Trouble with Fidelity, this is going to be a bit difficult, since Homer W. Gillespie has made off with over $500,000 from the Fordyce Management Company and has killed himself.
Nonetheless, Painter begins backtracking, with the aid of Gumbus, the C.P.A. from the district attorney’s office, and O’Brien, an investigator for the D.A., who never thinks, just turns up stones.
Gillespie turns out to have been a much more interesting man than appeared on the surface. His embezzlement is a work of art, though his method of concealing it is a bit less so. Following down the money, Painter goes to Newark, Buffalo, Detroit, Boston, and Maine, and discovers some surprising information about Gillespie.
While the ending is implausible, what leads up to it is excellent. Not a great mind, Painter’s, but he’s very good at what he does.
When in The Lady Finger the Massasoit National Bank & Trust Company of Boston is robbed of $200,000 during a well-planned heist, claims investigator Otis Minton is sent to that city to pursue the investigation in the hope that at least some of the funds that the Nutmeg Indemnity Company has had to payout can be recovered.
Although usually one or more steps behind the FBI in their pursuit of the bank robbers, Minton does have one advantage — the lady finger of the title. It seems the robbers, for reasons uncertain, had doused her boyfriend, a hairdresser, with peroxide and placed him under the hair dryer, which did him no good at all. She is miffed, and the reward offered by Indemnity is an added attraction.
Again Malcolm-Smith has produced an amusing and lively novel.
Bio-Bibliographic Data:
GEORGE MALCOLM-SMITH, GEORGE, 1901-1984. Living in Connecticut in 1950s; editor of an insurance company periodical. [Taken from the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.]
The Square Peg (n.) Doubleday 1952. Reprinted as Mugs, Molls and Dr. Harvey, Graphic #104, pb, 1955.
The Trouble with Fidelity (n.) Doubleday 1957.
If a Body Meet a Body (n.) Doubleday 1959.
The Lady Finger (n.) Doubleday 1962.
Come Out, Come Out (n.) Doubleday 1965.
Malcolm-Smith also has a short page on Wikipedia, where it is said that “George Malcolm-Smith was an American novelist and jazz musicologist. A 1925 graduate of Trinity College, he hosted a jazz radio program on WTIC-FM in Hartford, Connecticut for many years.”
November 22nd, 2010 at 8:32 pm
Since we moved to the Hartford area in 1969, it would be interested to know if I ever listened to Malcolm-Smith’s jazz program on the radio. I didn’t really start collecting jazz albums until CDs came along, so perhaps not.
It’s not surprising, though, to learn that as his day job he worked for the insurance industry. Hartford may no longer be the insurance capitol of the US, but it was for many years.
It’s also interesting that the detectives in both of the book that Bill reviewed worked for the same company. That’s not quite good enough to qualify for Series Character status in CFIV, but it’s close.
Reading Bill’s review just now, I was reminded of a trivia question I once asked, and no one (as I recall) ever came up with the answer. Who was the only fictional private eye who worked out of Hartford?
(You might have to stretch the definition of Private Eye a little, but not much.)
November 22nd, 2010 at 10:40 pm
Nick Carter, Master Detective.
November 22nd, 2010 at 11:25 pm
Which version of Nick Carter, Walker? Not the dime novel, which took place in New York City, surely?
The radio show? Do you know, for as many as I’ve listened to, then and now, though not recently, I couldn’t tell you where they took place. I suppose I’ve always assumed New York.
In any case, as you may have deduced already, Nick’s not my answer.
November 23rd, 2010 at 4:37 am
Having a normal sized ego, I was proud of the success I was having casting around the internet pulling in fresh facts on George Malcolm-Smith when suddenly, drat! someone beat me to the punch. In 2000, a writer for The Hartford Courant, Jane Bronfman, had written a complete profile of him. Here is the link: http://articles.courant.com/2000-04-16/news/0008253002_1_hartford-courant-magazine-broadway-novel .
Bronfman has me beat hands down.
She even has this dandy tale from Malcolm-Smith’s daughter: “Mary Malcolm-Smith remembers her father telling her that after one interview, he and Louis Armstrong went to a restaurant on Front Street called Pippie’s. They were turned away. Malcolm-Smith was livid, and refused to ever set foot in the restaurant again.†She also talks with people from the jazz world, academia and the media who knew him.
Bronfman points out that the radio announcer Longfellow Steele in The Grass is Always Greener (1947) is based on WTIC radio personality Bob Steele. Steele was one of my grandmother’s favorite announcers. One item that I dug up on my own was that Malcolm-Smith around the late 1960s hosted on WTIC radio “Great Records of Jazz†with Floyd Richards (Wethersfield Post, 15 February 1973). Richards who also hosted a WTIC television the kid program “The Hap Richards Showâ€, which was a favorite program of mine at the age when I still clung to my mother’s skirt and we had a big glass-tube t.v. at home.
Before I move on to the items I found on my own, there is a couple more points that Bronfman scooped me on that I want to mention. First, she reports that Malcolm-Smith never owned a car and was an avid walker. This takes on added significance when considered with this passage from Malcolm-Smith’s Slightly Perfect (1941), “It is precisely 917 paces from the southern curb of Farmington Avenue, opposite the Hartford railway station, through the Horace Bushnell Park, to the bottom step of the front entrance to the home office of the Nutmeg Insurance Company. this fact could have been of no possible interest or value to anybody on earth, except Milton Northey Haskins. To him, however, it constituted a minor vexation, for had it been 136 paces more, it would have been exactly a half mile – a neat, orderly satisfactory figure.†Besides the Nutmeg Company being used in The Trouble with Fidelity (1957) and The Lady Finger (1962) albeit now called the Nutmeg Indemnity Company, the importance of this passage is that one can easily imagine Malcolm-Smith counting off the paces in the same way.
The second point that Bronfman uncovered for me was that Malcolm-Smith’s book Square Peg (1952) was dramatized the same year featuring Orson Bean as an episode of the television series “Westinghouse Presents Studio One“. According to ctva.biz, it aired 29 Sept 1952, written by Alvin Sapinsley and directed by Paul Nickell. It is available on a Studio One dvd through Goldhil Entertainment, along with a Jackie Gleason and Art Carney drama, “The Laughmakerâ€.
Malcolm-Smith made a bigger splash with the first dramatization of his work, Slightly Perfect, which became the Broadway play, “Are You With It?†Life Magazine, 26 November 1945, wrote about it: “The theater is no respecter of the great. In the past two weeks Playwriter Robert E. Sherwood, Director George S. Kaufman and Producer Gilbert Miller brought in plays on which Broadway critics heaped insults of varying causticity. Finally came a musical with an undistinguished score but plenty of pretty girls, extravagantly garish costumes and low comedy. The first-night critics beamed on it, pronounced it the best thing yet in the new season.†Life followed with four pages of photographs from the play, mostly of pretty girls.
The play ran first at the New Century and then at the Shubert from 10 November 1945 to 29 June 1946 (Internet Broadway Database). It was produced by Richard Kollmar and James W. Gardiner, directed by Edward Reveaux, music by Harry Revel; lyrics by Arnold B. Horwitt and adapted for stage by Sam Perrin and George Balzer. In the role of Wilbur Haskins, it starred Johnny Downs, who started out on Broadway as a young man in 1933. Lew Parker had role of Goldie, which he also played in the 1948 movie version.
Released 20 March by Universal, the movie starred Donald O’Conner and was directed by Jack Hively (Internet Movie Database). The New York Times 15 April 1948 summed the movie up thus: “‘Are You With It?’ is a collection of specialty numbers, loosely strung together by a frivolous plot … (t)he picture ambles along good naturedly enough, but its lines and situations are for the most part thin inducement to laughter.†For those who play attention to character actors whose characters overshadow them, noteworthy actors in the film would be Noel Neill, the future Lois Lane, and George O’Hanlon, the future George Jetson.
Malcolm-Smith graduated from Trinity College, Hartford, in 1925. He received college The Alumni Medal for Excellence in 1975. His jazz collection and papers went to the college upon his death in 1984.
In 1924, Malcolm-Smith had a novelette “Satan’s Fiddle†published in the August issue of Weird Tales. Collectors wishing to get a complete collection of Malcolm-Smith’s work will be disappointed to learn that the same issue also had a story by H.P. Lovecraft and the price is bound to be inflated.
Malcolm-Smith’s novel The Grass is Always Greener (1947) seems to be another tale of the fantastic. It involves body swapping and appears to endorse coveting one’s neighbor’s wife. It was reviewed by Frederik Pohl in Super Science Stories, July 1949
In 1938, while working for the Traveler’s Insurance Company, Malcolm-Smith wrote the copy for an insurance advertisement well known during its era. Julian Lewis Watkins included it in his The 100 Greatest Advertisements: Who Wrote Them and What They Did (1949). According to Watkins, the ad, which is a lengthy piece of copy titled “The Greatest Reason in the Worldâ€, works because “somehow the public senses the ring of sincerity and truth when it appears in cold type, and is just as quick to challenge ‘emotional’ pieces that are synthetic.†When one considers the insurance company’s advertising slogan in the play “Are You With It?†is “With Nutmeg, you are better off deadâ€, one has to wonder in which one of the two did Malcolm-Smith’s sincerity lie.
Jiffynotes.com describes the Malcolm-Smith’s advertisement as:
Under the headline “The Greatest Reason in the World,” the copy began with the question “Why did you buy life insurance?” Giving a series of answers, a man described the journey through life he had taken with the woman he loved. He told how they had met, decided to marry, reached a major career decision, found their perfect house, and had a child. The words displayed the man’s devotion without mentioning love. The copy concluded, “It’s because of these memories and many others that I wouldn’t tell you and that wouldn’t interest you even if I did, that I bought life insurance. And if the premiums could be paid in blood, instead of money, pernicious anemia would be a pleasure.”
If any think that Malcolm-Smith’s working for an insurance company whose initials are T.I.C. and for a radio station whose call letters are WTIC is purely coincidence, here is the moment to let them know they are wrong. The insurance company owned the broadcaster.
According to the WTIC Alumni website, Malcolm-Smith edited the parent company’s in-house publication Traveler’s Beacon and between the years 1942 to 1951, hosted on radio “Gems of American Jazz”.
In 1964, he produced the insurance company’s official history, The Travelers 100 Years.
To close out with tones of jazz, the last item involves a two-page, typewritten 30 December 1968 newsletter of Hartford Jazz Society, which included Malcolm-Smith among its members. It was a big week coming up in Hartford with performances by the Benny Powell Sextet and the McCoy Tyner Trio. The newsletter notes that Malcolm-Smith has come out from behind the microphone and is now in front of the camera as he conducts an interview with the jazz musicians of Emery Smith Trio on public television channel 24.
November 23rd, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Thanks, Daryl. Malcolm-Smith sounds as though he was quite a guy. I moved to CT and the Hartford area in 1969, so those WTIC announcers you mention are very familiar names. Victor Berch adds that Malcolm-Smith was born Dec. 8, 1901 in Vermont and died Feb 23, 1984 in Hartford, CT, though he lived in West Hartford, CT.
The West Hartford town line is a half mile to the north of me, so he and I were practically neighbors, and I never knew it.
November 24th, 2010 at 10:17 am
Just a bizarre little “brush with fame†story about Malcolm-Smith. Albeit a posthumous brush with fame. About three quarters of my life seems to be spent in used bookstores hunting down out of print books for my collection. Part of the fun of buying used books is the serendipitous discovery of something inside the book – a second treasure, as it were, within the treasure of the book itself. I have found photographs, postcards, letters, a driver’s registration renewal from the 1950s, advertisements, a string game that took the shape of Aunt Jemima’s head…but the oddest and most jarring discovery was this: in an old John Dickson Carr novel I found a photostat of a Social Security Card belonging to George Malcolm-Smith! The book must’ve been his at one time. I grew up in Connecticut and received my SSN when I was 12 in that state. The first two numbers were a dead giveaway that he lived in Connecticut at one time. What an outrageous choice for a bookmark! And that it stayed in the book all that time exchanging hands umpteen times finally ending up in a used bookstore in Chicago decades later.
November 25th, 2010 at 9:11 pm
J.F.
That’s a great story. I imagine that everyone who buys old books has stories about things found in them that were used as bookmarks, or things that were stored in them for safe-keeping and obviously forgotten about.
But I’ve never found money, only ticket stubs and laundry receipts, the occasional appointment cards for doctors’ visits, pressed flowers and the like. Nothing that connected up with an author after a long passage of years like this.
I did come across one thing that chilled me when I found it, though. I recounted the story way back here on the blog: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=436
— Steve