Fri 12 Jan 2024
OCTAVUS ROY COHEN – Midnight. Dodd Mead & Co., hardcover, 1922.
Spike Walters drives a cab. He’s waiting on a train. It’s midnight. A frigid winter.
A woman comes out, fancy in a fur coat, hails him thru the hail.
She gives him an address way out in the boonies. But when he gets to the address, she’s gone and a dead man is lying in her place. Shot thru the heart. A bursted vein. She gives love a bad name.
Spike calls the cops. It is laid upon Detective David Carroll to solve the crime.
Carroll calls himself a “psychological” detective. But he’s not, really. He’s just a really good conversationalist. He inspires trust, and people talk to him.
The story proceeds as a pleasant procedural, as Carroll interviews and re-interviews various suspects. Nary a sign of the “scientific methods” of other detectives. Carroll says he doesn’t care what people say to him. He just wants them to speak freely so he can watch them as they speak. The way folks tell their stories, a lie may contain as much as the truth.
Carroll is very likeable, and convinces the Chief of Police to hold off on any 3rd degree methods. So no rough stuff. Just soft shoe conversation with upper crust suspects until they crack as the accumulation of facts and the natural contradictions of false alibis crumble under their own weight.
Speaking of weight, this thing is so light it could fly away with a soft wind. But it’s a pleasant way to fritter the time away.
Previously reviewed here: https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=958
January 12th, 2024 at 10:06 pm
Seems to share a basic plot premise similar to ‘I Was Jack Mortimer’ by Alexander Lernet-Holenia, which I’ve just read.
January 12th, 2024 at 10:15 pm
Pretty much my experience with Cohen, not unpleasant, certainly not badly done, but a bit generic to comfort food in quality. Notably he was very popular in the slicks (Sat. Evening Post and others) and his series character Jim Hanvey a folksy private detective (somehow cast as Sir C. Aubrey Smith in one film and Guy Kibbee in another) well loved.
The less said about his Florian Slappy stories written in what used to be embarrassingly called “Negro dialect” the better, other than they were once among the most popular humorous mystery stories.
Cohen is one of those writers, almost completely forgotten today, who was once, in terms of sales and popularity, a major name in the genre.
January 13th, 2024 at 8:46 am
Tony, you’ve hit upon a writer I haven’t read at all, though, like any other collector of EQMMs from the Frederic Dannay editorship, I’ve had opportunity to read them…just haven’t taken it up yet…seems from the assembled testimony I’ve missed only a mildly good time so far (which is as I’ve suspected).
Thanks for coming a little out of your usual sphere of interest…Dannay, unsurprisingly, dug Cohen stories as certainly in his wheelhouse, and clearly a big name for covers atop that.
January 13th, 2024 at 9:35 am
Todd,
You caught me—it is outside my wheelhouse. At the same time, I was lured by this line in kbs’s thrilling detective entry on 3 gun Terry re ‘who was the 1st hardboiled detective writer’:
“A case could certainly be made for Octavius Roy Cohen’s private eye Jim Hanvey, the slick hick gumshoe who was already detecting in The Saturday Evening Post at least a year earlier, although Cohen’s style tended to run more to con men and their rich victims.â€
Unfortunately couldn’t find Hanvey in the public domain—so I got this off of Gutenberg. I tested the first few lines and they were hardboiled enough to catch me in its lure. Sadly for this hardboiled aficionado, the first few pages focus on a hardboiled taxi driver who never appears again after chapter 1. Wonder if Hanvey has a similar voice.
January 14th, 2024 at 10:54 am
Enjoyed the review. Thank you.
Jim Hanvey is folksy and colorful. And often comic. He tends to outfox swindlers. He’s fun. But not hardboiled.
I liked a David Carroll novel
Six Seconds of Darkness.