C. P. DONNEL, JR. “The Fourth Degree.” Duc Rennie #2, First appeared in Black Mask, February 1941. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1953.

   I don’t know very much about C, P. Donnel, Jr., the teller of this tale, nor his hero Doc Rennie. I believe in fact that this is my first time reading anything by the author. In a post on his Pulpflakes blog, Sai Shankar tells us that Donnel (1906-1977) was “a crime reporter on the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot for a decade before switching to writing fiction.” He wrote several dozen stories for the better detective pulp magazines in the 40s, of which 14 or 15 were Doc Rennie yarns.

   We don’t learn much about Rennie in “The Fourth Degree,” but elsewhere on the Internet, I discovered a short squib (since lost) describing him as a psychiatrist, perhaps retired or perhaps working for the government. He lives now is a small rural town where he helps he local sheriff solve the cases he comes across. (It is the latter who tells the stories.)

   In this story the two protagonists are convinced they know who one of the culprits in a local kidnapping case is. The problem is that they can’t get him to talk. Not a word out of him, no matter how hard they try, and as always, time has a way of running out. It may have been a new idea in 40s, but the scheme they come up with is that of “continuous catastrophic noise” (my phrasing), and it saves the day.

   The plot is minor, and keeping one of the players off the page for much of story was not the best idea, either. Donnel is a good writer, though, based on this story, but if his name was on the cover of the issue he next appeared in, it wouldn’t induce me to come up with the fifteen cents to obtain it, not even a small notch in the right direction.