Sat 20 Feb 2021
MANLY [WADE] WELLMAN – Find My Killer. Farrar Straus, hardcover, 1948. Signet #1448, paperback, 1957.
A perfectly acceptable thick-ear mystery for fans of that sort of thing, and I’m one.
Ex-cop, former MP Stonewall Jackson Yates comes to Storm City on the promise of a job and finds his prospective employer dead — an apparent suicide, and if you believe that, I have a stack of rare Harlequin Romances to sell you. He is quickly hired by attorney J. D. (“That’s all the name I’ve got. Dad wanted a boy.â€) Thatcher to throw a sleazy PI out of her office and the two team up to find out who murdered her client and his almost-boss. It seems there’s a codicil in his will offering Five Gees to anyone who can find his killer if he meets a violent end.
Nothing that follows is especially surprising, but Wellman never lets it go stale. There’s the lovely-but-lethal widow —Check; The crooked lawyer —Check; mysterious doctor —Check; brutal cops —Check; false clues, fisticuffs, tentative romance, gangsters and guns — Check, check and CHECK.
Wellman covers all the bases, adds a tricky plot, and wraps it up with a wink. There must be a hundred more like Find My Killer, but if you miss the sort of fast-moving fiction that used to sell for two bits in drugstores, you could do a lot worse than to spend a couple hours here.
February 20th, 2021 at 6:39 pm
Wellman did better work with his Holmes pastiche and his stories about Native American sleuth David Return, but I enjoyed this enough to wish he had followed up with one or two more.
Of course he is best known for his horror and fantastic work (“The Valley Was Still” famously adapted on THE TWILIGHT ZONE with Gary Merrill, the John Thunstone stories from WEIRD TALES, the Silver John folk tales, and popular SF including SHERLOCK HOLMES WAR OF THE WORLDS), as a regional writer of some note, and for being the brother of bestselling Paul I. Wellman, THE COMANCHEROS, WALLS OF JERICHO, THE IRON MISTRESS, JUBAL TROOP, MAGNIFICENT DESTINY…
February 20th, 2021 at 6:52 pm
When I did a chronological list of Native American detectives several years ago, David Return was Number Three on the list. I haven’t worked on that list since I posted it, so maybe someone has come in ahead of him in the meantime.
Here’s his entry:
“MANLY WADE WELLMAN
David Return, Tsichah (a fictional tribe combining aspects of the Cheyenne and the Pawnee), “A Star for a Warrior,†EQMM short story, April 1946. [The story won the first of the annual EQMM contests begun that year.]”
https://mysteryfile.com/NA.html