Sat 2 Jan 2021
Pulp PI Stories I’m Reading: Selected by David Vineyard: RAOUL WHITFIELD “A Woman Can Kill.â€
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[9] Comments
RAOUL WHITFIELD “A Woman Can Kill.†Novelette. Dion Davies #1. Published in Black Mask, September 1933. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1953.
That is one heck of a tricky plot, but there is more, because this story has more people not quite who or what you think they are than you can imagine.
First there is our hero Dion Davies, a successful private detective, part of Davies and Dancer Ltd., a private detective agency. Davies is the face of the operation and his partner Stephen Dancer, a lawyer who financed the partnership and went into business with him and his attractive secretary Julie Ryan.
Seems simple enough, but this one veers off into Remington Steele country pretty fast. There is no Stephen Dancer, and there is no Julie Ryan, instead there is Julie Hazard, who is the senior partner and created the mysterious Dancer to attract customers and posed as Julie Ryan Davies secretary to keep close. She put up the front money and is the silent partner as handy with a gun or her wits as Dion.
Tay is a crooked club owner who tricked nice old philanthropic Mrs. Greenaway into selling her non-profit theater and then set about turning it into a swank beer joint. Mrs. Greenaway has always been dead set against beer so she feels doubly upset that Tay tricked her.
Her revenge is to buy up the property across the street and open up an even bigger joint, put Tay out of business and then close down both places, so Tay sends his man McQuirter to hire Davies and Dancer to get something on Mrs. Greenaway’s wild society granddaughter Nancy Gale who is engaged to a no good society type.
When Tay tries to set Davies up with a phony Gale he quits and gets a warning from Tay not to hire on with Mrs. Greenaway if she shows up — and a speeding sedan opens up on him from the street with a machine gun to emphasize the fact.
Then Mrs. Greenaway shows up at his office to hire him — not to protect her from Tay, but from her granddaughter.
Still with me?
On top of everything else the Old Lady is lying about why she fears her granddaughter. It’s not the girl doesn’t have a motive, but killing Mrs. Greenaway would do her no good, the Old Lady fixed it so she would never inherit, so why is the Old Lady afraid of Nancy Gale?
Then they find Nancy Gale murdered, and the police think her grandmother tricked her, trapped her, and murdered her out of fear.
And the twists keep coming until the final shootout when everything gets more or less sorted out.
This isn’t prime Whitfield. The set-up is too cute, the plot too complex for its length, and there isn’t much character development. Davies and Dancer/Hazard/Ryan are interesting and the byplay between them good, but we never get enough insight into why she does what she does and why he bought into it in the first place.
Everyone else is strictly from hard-boiled Central Casting.
Of course this is Whitfield, and even minor Whitfield is well written, observed, snappy, and written with that famous word savagery the Black Mask school of writers were famed for.
Whitfield was only just below Hammett and Chandler, and light as this fare is, it also shows why. It is fast, clever, and I read it at a sitting compelled to keep going.
Reading this, it is hard not to imagine it as a slick B movie full of snappy lines and moving at a decided clip for the fade to black, and that’s a compliment and not a knock.
Bibliographic Note: There was to be only one more Dion Davies story, that being “Money Talk,” Black Mask, October 1933.
January 2nd, 2021 at 5:21 pm
David, I found this fascinating, but is it a full-length novel or a long short story?
January 2nd, 2021 at 5:48 pm
I’m going to answer that, Barry, subject to David’s correcting me. It’s 17 pages long in the BLACK MASK version, so I’m going to call it a novelette and add that to the info at the top of the review.
And then ask David another question myself: Is there an easy place to find this to read?
January 2nd, 2021 at 7:33 pm
This story appeared in one of the three 1930s issues of Black Mask I have. And i read it a month earlier. Talk about coincidence.
David covers all the key points in his excellent review – hard-boiled dialog and characters, complicated fast paced plot that i found hard to keep straight in my head.
It might have benefited from a couple more pages of character development, but the breakneck pace keeps you moving along so fast you don’t notice at the first reading. (I read it twice to make sure i understood the plot 🙂
January 2nd, 2021 at 7:57 pm
You have three 1930s issues of BLACK MASK? And you read this one just a month ago? Now that’s what I call spooky!
January 2nd, 2021 at 8:18 pm
You can read or download this issue of Black Mask on Internet Archive in multiple formats. It is fairly new so click on the recently archived button in the Pulp Archive Collection or just search for it and it will show up down the line a bit.
I’d call it a novelette, but it has enough plot for a novel and almost enough characters. If it had shown and not told a few scene it could easily have come it at 50 or 60 thousand words.
January 2nd, 2021 at 8:48 pm
How many words, David? Must be near or around ten thousand, yes?
January 3rd, 2021 at 5:47 pm
I would imagine 15 to 20 K is a good estimate. It honestly moves at such a pace that it reads like a much shorter story than it is. It was the featured story in that months BM so it was at least novelette length (under 25K).
It’s hard to get an exact count on illustrated stories in columns in a pulp or I would give a more exact number, but 17 printed pages in double columns with two half pages for illustrations should come in around 15k.
Quite a bit is told in crackling dialogue much of it in the Nick and Nora vein between Davies and Julia, and indeed the story sags a bit in the longer passages without her with Davies alone or with his chief operative Rader who features prominently in the story as the only person in the tale who is exactly who and what he seems to be other than a cop.
January 3rd, 2021 at 9:44 pm
A regular pulp page runs around 550 words so a 17 page story would run around 9000 words. A long short story and not a novelet. Looking at The FictionMag index I see the story is more like 23 pages in length, quite a bit longer than the 17 pages being thrown around, so around 11,000 words. A side note, every story in that issue of Black Mask belongs a series character. Impressive. Carrie Cashin was another woman detective to have a man front her agency.
January 3rd, 2021 at 10:18 pm
You are correct, beb. 23 pages it is. My error all the way. I don’t know where I was looking!
Black Mask [v16 #7, September 1933] (20¢, pulp, cover by J. W. Schlaikjer)
5 · Not Guilty · [The Editor] · ed
6 · A Woman Can Kill [Dion Davies] · Raoul F. Whitfield · nv
29 · Murder in Jail [Dal Prentice] · Roger Torrey · ss
46 · Whispering Justice [Ed Jenkins] · Erle Stanley Gardner · ss
65 · Guns Down [Kennedy of the Free Press; Captain Steve MacBride] · Frederick Nebel · ss
83 · A Little Different [Bill Lennox] · W. T. Ballard · nv
102 · House Dick [Cleve Corby] · Eugene Cunningham · nv
126 · Black Mask Writers Who Are Making Their Mark · Anon. · ms
127 · Black Mask Mystery No. 5 The Pastor’s Killer · William Rollins, Jr. · pz
128 · October’s Smashing Number · Anon. · ms