Sun 20 Jun 2021
A 1001 Midnights Review: GEORGE HARMON COXE – Murder with Pictures.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[9] Comments
by Marcia Muller
GEORGE HARMON COXE – Murder with Pictures. Kent Murdock #1. Knopf, hardcover, 1935. Dell #101, paperback, mapback edition, 1945; Dell #441, paperback, 1950. Perennial Library, paperback, 1981. Film: Paramount, 1936, with Lew Ayres as Kent Murdock.
This is Coxe’s first novel and introduces news photographer Kent Murdock, who works for the Boston Courier-Herald and moves with seeming ease through the various strata of that city’s society — stumbling over corpses with predictable regularity. As this first adventure opens, the jury has just delivered an acquittal in the Nate Girard murder trial.
Murdock is on the job, snapping pictures; but later his concern with Girard turns personal, when he encounters his estranged wife, Hestor, with the former liquor racketeer at a celebratory party. Hestor won’t give Murdock a divorce, in spite of a year’s separation; Murdock wants out of the marriage, and he calls on Jack Fenner to help him.
But before that situation even begins to be resolved, Girard’s attorney, Mark Redfield (who is to receive a $50,000 fee for his client’s acquittal), is murdered, and Murdock finds himself sheltering a girl he has noticed at the victory party — a stranger who bursts into his apartment while he is taking a shower and jumps in with him.
Quickly Murdock is back on the job at the scene of the lawyer’s murder. And he soon uncovers a tangle of lies, infidelity, and intrigue that involves the dead man’s wife; a “man-about-town” named Howard Archer; Archer’s sister Joyce; gangster Sam Cuslik (whose brother Girard was accused of murdering); a “cheap punk” named Spike Tripp; Girard; and Hestor herself. By the time he has untangled this mess, Murdock has found the solution to more than one killing — and a unique way to resolve his marital problems.
This is a typical Coxe novel, with multiple threads that all tic together in a satisfactory manner at the end, and a love interest spiced with sex that seems oddly innocent by current standards.
Kent Murdock is also featured in, among others, The Camera Clue (1937), Mrs. Murdock Takes a Case (1941), The Fifth Key (1947), Focus on Murder (1954), and The Reluctant Heiress (1965).
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
June 20th, 2021 at 8:21 pm
I haven’t read all of Coxe, but I can honestly say I never read one I didn’t like.
Murdock was a smoother version of Flash Casey, a bit easier to write for the market Coxe chose to appeal to. Though not near as popular as either writer I associated him in my mind with Gardner and Brett Halliday as a slightly softer boiled take on the original model more interested in traditional mystery than just hard boiled action.
June 20th, 2021 at 9:09 pm
I kind of liked Casey more. As you say, Coxe smoothed the rough edges off when he started the Murdock books, but I agree with you. I never read anything by Coxe that I didn’t enjoy.
June 21st, 2021 at 8:38 am
I haven’t read anywhere near all of them, but I’ve liked all of Coxe’s books that I’ve read, too. My favorite of the Murdock novels I’ve read is THE JADE VENUS, which struck me as being a little more hardboiled than the others.
June 21st, 2021 at 9:11 am
Have heard of this author, never read him. Could you recommend a few of his stand-alones? Don’t want to start any series right now.
June 21st, 2021 at 9:45 am
Most if not all of his standalones were thrillers, not detective stories, and while they were invariably good, I never cared for them as much as I did his series books.
If you’d like to sample him at his best, I’d really suggest one of either the Murdock and Casey books. There’s very little continuity between them, and they can be read in any order.
If you’d still like to read one of the standalones, I can’t really recommend one over another. All pretty much equally good, so look for the one easiest to find!
June 21st, 2021 at 12:24 pm
I think it’s fair to say that Coxe is mostly forgotten today. He died in 1984, and I can remember a number of articles about him and his books in TAD in the ’70s.
June 21st, 2021 at 5:56 pm
You’re right, Jeff. He was never in the top tier of authors, in terms of popularity — writers such as Gardner, Stout or Christie, but he was in the second rank of writers for a long time — at the level of Mignon G. Eberhart or the Lockridges, say. But remembered now? Not by many.
June 21st, 2021 at 9:12 pm
“Wedding bells are breaking up that ‘ole gang of mine…”
June 22nd, 2021 at 8:22 am
I saw Coxe paperbacks around fairly often, but where he really did well was the library market. Every mystery section in every public library I was in during the Sixties and Seventies had a couple of shelves full of his hardbacks.