Tue 5 Mar 2024
Reviewed by Tony Baer: GEORGE HARMON COXE – Murder with Pictures.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
GEORGE HARMON COXE – Murder with Pictures. Kent Murdock #1. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1935. Dell #101, paperback, 1945. Dell #441, paperback, 1950 [cover art by Robert Stanley]. Perennial Library, paperback, 1981. Film: Paramount Pictures, 1935, with Lew Ayres as Kent Murdock.
Kent Murdock is a crime scene photographer. But in this one, he’s got an ulterior motive. His wife, who he’d like to be rid of, wants $10,000 to give him a divorce. Meanwhile, a prominent lawyer has been murdered. The reward for solving it and selling the story? $10,000. So Murdock decides not to play it straight with the cops, and tries to solve the thing on his own. Which he does. But not in the way you’d expect.
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A very screwball 30’s crime-comedy. The repartee between Murdock and his wanna-be fiancé is quite Tracy-Hepburn-ish. And you may cast them as such in your mind.
If you go in expecting an B+ screwball comedy, you’ll come away happy. Closer to Cukor than Cain.
March 6th, 2024 at 8:37 am
Don’t know about the book, but I LOVED the review!!
March 6th, 2024 at 12:50 pm
A forerunner of sorts to Kent Murdock was Flashgun Casey, whose adventures were first recorded in BLACK MASK. Casey was of course also a crime photographer.
It’s probably too simplistic to say this, but I’ve always thought that when it came to writing up his book-length cases, Murdock was Coxe’s way of “softening” up the far more hardboiled Casey.
But after a while Coxe started writing books with Casey as the leading character again. And of course there was also the radio show.
March 8th, 2024 at 5:16 pm
This B movie was delightful!
I’d never seen it.
Thank you for telling us about it.
Lew Ayres was not the Murdock of the books.
But he was terrific, on his own terms.
Wish the film had found room for private eye Fenner, the Murdock friend.
March 8th, 2024 at 10:35 pm
Murdock was Casey with an eye toward the the slicks and the big screen, and in this case it certainly worked.
Murdock is at times near as tough as Casey, and most his adventures are fast and well written mystery fiction as always could be expected of Coxe.
While Lew Ayres wasn’t my idea of Murdock, you can’t argue with the results here.
April 3rd, 2024 at 11:12 am
Murdock’s wife is a weird situation. Romance in the first book; honeymoon (implied) in the second; elevated in several after (one reference to being a strong physical match); she even got her own mystery. Then in the books she just disappeared, no reference whatsoever to why until many years later when mentioned the marriage ended. Kent had virtually no female social companionship for the rest of the multi-decade series. I wonder if the film had an impact on her disappearing (which makes sense).