Tue 1 Nov 2022
Archived PI Mystery Review: FREDERICK C. DAVIS – The Deadly Miss Ashley.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[4] Comments
FREDERICK C. DAVIS – The Deadly Miss Ashley. Schyler Cole & Luke Speare #1. Doubleday/Crime Club, hardcover, 1950. Pocket #804, paperback, 1951.
I read and collect Davis’s books mostly because he was an extremely prolific writer for the detective pulp magazines, but if you were to pin me down I couldn’t tell you anything significant that he wrote for them. Maybe the Operator #5 pulp-hero stories?
Here the detective Agency is Scyler Cole’s, but the switch os that he plays Watson to his own legman, Luke Speare, who appears to have all the brains and energy. The problem is to discover which of the many women inn the case is the accomplice awaiting an embezzler’s return from prison, the loot still hidden.
The deductions get tedious and self-contradictory, the plot contrived and essentially unreal, but the clues are fair and the killer is deadly. The case hinges to large extent on an undecipherable method of shorthand, invented and taught by a lady in Baltimore – a touch of insanity indeed.
Rating: C
The Schyler Cole & Luke Speare series —
The Deadly Miss Ashley. Doubleday 1950.
Lilies in Her Garden Grew. Doubleday 1951.
Tread Lightly, Angel. Doubleday 1952.
Drag the Dark. Doubleday 1953.
Another Morgue Heard From. Doubleday 1954.
Night Drop. Doubleday 1955
November 1st, 2022 at 8:21 pm
Other than Operator #5 Davis was well known in the pulps for the well-received Moon Man stories.
I liked the Cole and Speare series, which I assumed was Davis attempt to break away from his primarily pulp career, but confess I never read this one. I enjoyed ANOTHER MORGUE HEARD FROM.
November 1st, 2022 at 8:39 pm
I can picture most of the covers of the rest of the series — the ones that came out in paperback — but I can’t recall ever reading any more of them. The gimmick involved with the two lead characters sounds strange to me, and now I’m really intrigued by it.
November 3rd, 2022 at 8:25 am
Frederick Davis wrote wrote a lot of series for the pulps. These include, Mark Hazzard where a man convicted of murder becomes a crusading DA, Ravenwood, about a psychic detective and the Black Bat. He wrote with the kind of intensity required of the pulps which sometimes leads to spaghetti plots (you know, convoluted) but he tied up plots well. I consider him on of the better pulp writers. Which is not to say his transition of paperbacks would go well.
November 3rd, 2022 at 11:41 am
Davis began his transition to hardcover mystery fiction around 1938 or so, a little later than some other pulp writers did, such as Erle Stanley Gardner. Over the years he wrote several dozen hardcover mysteries, most later reprinted in paperback, but without much of the success that ESG had, for example. More or less popular at the time, but entirely forgotten today.