Sat 14 May 2022
Pulp Stories I’m Reading: RICHARD SALE “A Nose for News.â€
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[4] Comments
RICHARD SALE “A Nose for News.†Daffy Dill #2. First published in Detective Fiction Weekly, December 1, 1934. Reprinted in The Hardboiled Dicks, edited by Ron Goulart (Sherbourne Press, 1965).
In this early entry in Richard Sale’s long-running series about newspaper reporter Daffy Dill, he loses his job at the Chronicle because of a revival reporter’s malfeasance: he managed to change the word “cook†in one of Daffy’s by-lined stories to ‘crook,†and the cook in question is boiling mad. Daffy’s editor at the paper has to let him go, but with promise that if he comes up with a story big enough, he’ll hire him back.
Top stories are hard to come by, of course, but after doing a favor for a young lady whose brother has gotten into trouble with gambling debts, she returns the favor by telling Daffy she’s going to falsely arrange a kidnapping story for herself in which Daffy will be required to be the go-between.
And of course you as the reader will immediately know that she will somehow end up being kidnapped for real. I don’t imagine that any such scenario would ever happen in real life, but I also think that any reader who has gotten this far into the story will go along with the gag and continue on anyway, sitting back and see just how Richard Sale gets Daffy Dill out of this particular jam.
Sale went on to wrote several dozen stories about Daffy Dill, mostly for Detective Fiction Weekly, but more than that he went on to become big name as a both a screenwriter and director. You can check out his Wikipedia page here.
Note: I first wrote a review of this story in 1967, and I posted it on this blog a few weeks ago. Follow the link and you can read it here.
May 14th, 2022 at 6:54 pm
Steve, 55 years later, are you sticking with the 2 out of 5 from your original review? I just read it myself, trying to keep up. My feeling is that regardless of the incredulity the narrative may inspire, the prose is clipped and hard and the patter is snappy. Maybe guilty of a bit of Runyon/Bellam artifice in the dialogue—but I dunno. I just envy the 30’s/40’s American speech patterns. They’re just so distinctive and, well, American. It just really seemed like people instinctively spoke with a style, a rhythm, and a wit that’s pretty much dying in the parlance of our time. I go back to this stuff and aside from entertainment, it gives me a sense of American life in an era where folks were part of a zeitgeist, and knew what they were thinking and saying and how to say it. My own foggy and ambiguous brain is jealous.
May 14th, 2022 at 6:56 pm
Tony, I think your review is better than mine.
May 14th, 2022 at 7:10 pm
And as for rating the story, I’m considering maybe a seven out of ten. The story is still a bit silly, but Sale’s dialogue and sheer storytelling ability really is, as you say, what makes this one work.
May 15th, 2022 at 12:36 am
Sale was one of the better practitioners of the screwball school of mystery writers, and the Daffy Dill stories were among his better efforts there. After a long pulp career that included a stint in the Spicy line and Weird Mystery as well as a few about a pulp adventurer known as the Cobra he moved on to the slicks and into hardcovers and eventually Hollywood.
He went on to write the screwball classic LAZARUS #7 and BENEFIT PERFORMANCE as well as several bestsellers including the offbeat parable NOT TOO NARROW NOT TOO DEEP (filmed as STRANGE CARGO with Clark Gable and Joan Crawford), THE OSCAR, WHITE BUFFALO, and FOR THE PRESIDENT’s EYES ONLY.
As a director his best-known films are the under-appreciated ABANDON SHIP, TICKET TO TOMAHAWK, GENTLEMEN MARRY BRUNETTES, and SEVEN DAYS FROM NOW, BRUNETTES also produced by him and Hollywood royalty wife Mary Loos (as in niece of Anita Loos) herself a bestselling novelist, and eventually produced YANCY DERRINGER for television.
As a screenwriter he wrote among others the cult classic SUDDENLY, I’LL GET BY, WOMAN’S WORLD, MOTHER IS A FRESHMAN, and MR.BELVEDERE GOES TO COLLEGE.
All in all, quite a career for a pulp writer.