Sat 9 Apr 2022
PI Stories I’m Reading: RICHARD S. PRATHER “The Guilty Party.â€
Posted by Steve under Stories I'm Reading[5] Comments
RICHARD S. PRATHER “The Guilty Party.†Short story. PI Shell Scott. First published in Come Seven, Come Death, edited by Henry Morrison (Pocket, paperback original, 1965). Collected in The Shell Scott Sampler (Pocket, paperback original, 1969).
Shell doesn’t have anything close to a major crime to solve in this one, and a full page of its full thirteen is taken up in describing his newest client, from the top of her head to her toes. She’s quite an eyeful, and Shell doesn’t know whether to ogle, leer, or just outright stare:
It also turns out that she is quite wealthy, in the multi-million dollar range,
So why has she come to hire Shell Scott? It turns out that a small metal device fell out from under her bed when got up that morning. Shell quickly deduces that it was a listening device of some kind. A bedbug, if you will. Who could have put it there? The only person who’s been in Lydia’s apartment recently is her fiancé.
If nothing else, Shell knows a cad when he sees him, or in this case, learns about him.
Once in Lydia’s apartment, he puts on a show for her, bouncing up and down on her bed, yelling YOWZA! (I’m paraphrasing), while she’s yelling back, STOP! and WHAT ARE YOU DOING? And he replies, DARLING!!
It’s one way to flush out a cad when you need to in a hurry.
Obviously this is a very minor effort, but it’s also exactly what devout readers of Shell Scott’s wackier adventures had come to expect, and it’s also exactly what they got.
April 10th, 2022 at 12:57 pm
I last read this more than 50 years ago, and as soon as you started describing it, I remembered the plot. Whether that says something about the story or about me, I don’t know.
April 10th, 2022 at 6:28 pm
Probably a little of both, but I’ll check back in with you 50 years from now to see if you still remember it.
April 10th, 2022 at 9:06 pm
Almost a vignette instead of a story, but it works quite well considering even allowing for the usual kind of Scott antics in the short form.
Shell Scott may have been the only tough guy private eye who could credibly been played by Jerry Lewis in terms of physical comedy. Prather’s eye for visual comedy made it a shame he never got to script Scott on film.
April 10th, 2022 at 9:30 pm
First reaction: I would have paid good money to have seen that!
Immediate afterthought: Prather is the only one who could have pulled it off. In the wrong hands, instant disaster!
April 11th, 2022 at 10:43 am
Other authors in the anthology COME SEVEN COME DEATH are Harold Q. Masur, Henry Kane, Jonathan Craig, Frank Kane, Richard Deming, and Stephen Marlowe. each with their respective most famous characters. It’s like a bonus issue pf MANHUNT that was never published in magazine form.
I plan to read and review each of the stories in it as time goes on. Plans such as this often seem to go awry for me, but (crossing my fingers) not this time!