FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins
I believe I saw him once, in a New York bar. It must have been in the bar of whatever hotel the Mystery Writers of America annual dinner was being held that year, back in the early 1970s. I had read a number of his novels and recognized him from the photographs I’d seen. He would have been near eighty by then. He had been named a Grand Master by MWA and I was a shy newbie in the genre. I didn’t have the chutzpah to introduce myself to him. My loss. He died a few years later.
Philadelphia-born Baynard Kendrick (1894-1977) might have made it into the history books as a footnote if he’d never written a word. In 1914, within an hour after England entered World War I, he had enlisted in the Canadian army, the first American to sign up for the war his country entered three years later.
It was during the war that he met a blinded English soldier who, after fingering Kendrick’s uniform and decorations, was able to tell him his entire service history. This incident apparently triggered his lifelong interest in the abilities and challenges of the blind. After the war he worked in management at a New York hotel but was fired in the grim Depression year of 1931, a week before Christmas, and swore never again to be subject to a boss. That was the beginning of his long life as a professional writer.
What if anything he sold at the start of his new career remains unknown. The invaluable FictionMags Index website lists his earliest published short story as appearing in Liberty magazine in 1934. The same year saw publication of his debut novel, BLOOD ON LAKE LOUISA, which was set in rural Florida. His first novels with a continuing character were THE IRON SPIDERS and THE ELEVEN OF DIAMONDS, both published in 1936 and featuring Florida deputy sheriff Miles Standish Rice, who between 1937 and 1940 also appeared in more than a dozen stories Kendrick sold to Black Mask. Early in his career Florida was already a second home to him.
In THE LAST EXPRESS (1937), his fourth novel and his first for Doubleday Crime Clu, he changed settings and made his mark in the history of his genre by creating the first American blind detective. After losing his sight in World War I, Captain Duncan Maclain set out to develop his other senses so as to more than compensate for his inability to see.
With the help of his partner Spud Savage and Spud’s wife Rena and the German shepherd Seeing Eye dogs Schnucke and Dreist, he’d become New York’s leading private investigator, working out of a lavish air-conditioned penthouse at the corner of 72nd Street and Riverside Drive, a residence equipped with all sorts of devices, including a meticulously detailed Braille map of the city, without which he couldn’t function.
In this book he’s consulted by lovely Evelyn Zarinka, who’s worried about the strange recent behavior of her brother Paul, an Assistant District Attorney. And well may she worry: on the night she talks with Maclain, Paul is blown up in his car, along with two caged white mice he was unaccountably carrying in the back seat, leaving the sort of Dying Message we tend to associate with Ellery Queen.
As transcribed and heard by Maclain and printed by Kendrick, the message is: “Sea Beach Subway—the last express!†Paul’s major project at the time of his death was a murder he was trying to pin on nightclub owner Benny Hoefle, a sinister character who never appears onstage in this novel.
The second murder takes place about 24 hours after the first. The scene is Hoefle’s club in Greenwich Village, which Maclain and District Attorney Claude Dearborn visit after receiving an anonymous tip that club singer Amy Arden has information about the bombing. Arden takes a seat at the investigators’ table and accuses a city engineer whose wife was having an affair with Paul but quickly passes out from the effects of (as Kendrick spells it) marihuana.
The DA leaves the club in search of a doctor. While the club is in near darkness during a wild dance routine, Arden is stabbed to death within a couple of feet of our blind sleuth whose so carefully trained other senses fail to alert him to what has happened. The engineer Arden accused happens to be in the club at the time, as are Evelyn Zarinka and her fiancé, wealthy Charles Hartshorn, who happens to come over to Maclain’s table and discovers the murder. When several other club patrons claim they saw Hartshorn wielding the knife, the poor schnook is hauled off to the Tombs.
The next day Maclain starts investigating the Sea Beach subway, apparently a genuine line in Brooklyn. Learning of a long sealed-up tunnel under that borough’s Atlantic Avenue, he speculates that Paul Zarinka might have hid something there and determines to find a way in. He and his entourage are followed to Brooklyn by Madonna, a Wilmer Cook type who starts a fire designed to kill Maclain and the DA and the municipal engineer while they’re hunting for a secret entrance.
This not-bad thriller sequence turns out to be a red herring since Maclain has chosen the wrong tunnel, and it isn’t until he reinterprets the dying message that the truth begins to emerge. The penthouse climax pits Maclain and his trained police dog Dreist against Madonna and the real murderer, a minor character to say the least.
As I’ve unsubtly suggested, there are a few problems with THE LAST EXPRESS. The plot is rather loose, the characters (except for Maclain and, to a lesser extent, Madonna) not all that vivid, the writing no better than serviceable. And I’m not sure I trust Maclain when he says that “a marihuana smoker, under the influence, will almost unconsciously obey a suggestion….†or that a single puff of weed is enough to knock a smoker out.
Among the elements I found most rewarding are the evocation of underground New York with its labyrinth of tunnels, the historical material on the earliest abortive stabs at building a city subway system, and the portrait of the technology available in 1937 to help a blind person function like one with sight.
Someone in Hollywood seems to have been more impressed by the novel than I since Universal Pictures bought the movie rights soon after publication. But those who made THE LAST EXPRESS (1938)—primarily director Otis Garrett and screenwriter Edmund L. Hartmann—had so little regard for what Kendrick had written that they turned Maclain (Kent Taylor) into a sleuth who could see!
Also it seems that neither Paul Zarinka nor Amy Arden are killed, the name of the Wilmer Cook avatar morphs from Madonna to Pinky—can’t offend the Legion of Decency, can we?—and Hoefle who was completely offstage in the novel gets a speaking part. A few sentences I’ve adapted from the summary prepared by Les Adams for the Internet Movie Database show how radically the movie’s plot diverges from Kendrick’s.
Underworld boss Frank Hoefle (Addison Richards) has evidence against him stolen by his henchman Pinky (Henry Brandon) from the DA’s office but it’s then stolen from Pinky and the thief demands $300,000 ransom for its return. Hoefle hires Maclain to put the money in a subway-station locker as the thief demanded, but pickpocket Eddie Miller (John “Skins†Miller) lifts the key.
Maclain follows Miller to an apartment house but Miller sends the key up a dumbwaiter shaft. Eventually Maclain finds a 1914 newspaper story that explains the plot to him. Adams mentions that much of the film’s subway footage was recycled in Universal’s 1942 serial GANG BUSTERS, which as chance would have it also starred Kent Taylor.
Later in 1937 Kendrick returned Maclain to action. Most of THE WHISTLING HANGMAN takes place in Doncaster House, “a collection of beautiful homes housed in a single building†or, more prosaically, a luxurious 480-room apartment hotel on Manhattan’s East 54th Street. Dryden Winslow, an American entrepreneur who’s spent the past twenty years in Australia amassing a fortune but has come home to reunite with the family he abandoned and die, reserves several apartments in Doncaster House—for himself, his son, his daughter, the two maiden aunts who have raised his children, and a niece and nephew from England—at a total cost of, I am not making this up, $130 a day.
His own suite consists of “a 40-foot living room encompassed on three sides by a balcony,†opening from which are “two bedrooms, a dining-room, and a kitchenette.†Outside the French windows is a huge flagstone terrace. Residing across the corridor from this suite are a weirdo psychoanalyst and Winslow’s soon to be son-in-law. (Whoever drew the sketch of the 15th floor for the Dell mapback edition carelessly flipflopped these characters’ abodes.)
On the evening of his arrival, Winslow orders a Gideon Bible delivered to his apartment. A few hours later, while talking with the daughter he hadn’t seen since she was a baby, he unaccountably steps out onto the terrace and the daughter hears a strange whistling sound. A few seconds later Winslow is found on a terrace nine floors below with his neck broken. At the request of his friend the hotel manager, with whom he was playing chess at the time of Winslow’s death, Maclain takes a hand in the investigation and, examining the body, quickly concludes that Winslow was hanged.
That, together with the sound his daughter heard, gives the book its title, probably the most evocative of any Maclain novel. In due course, as usual in Kendrick, there’s a second murder: a hotel maid who saw too much is flung off the interior balcony of the suite next to Winslow’s as if by invisible hands and is found on the floor below with her neck broken as Winslow’s was.
This book I enjoyed rather more than THE LAST EXPRESS. The plot is tighter, the reader is given ample clues, the setting is vividly drawn—thanks no doubt to Kendrick’s years in hotel management—and the Bizarre Murder Method is not too outlandish. I was fascinated by the glimpses of the machinery in a top-of-the-line 1937 hotel, ranging from a building-wide vacuum cleaner system to an ultra-modern kitchen refrigerator with its motor on top—both items figuring neatly in the plot.
On the negative side, too much of the plot hinges on the seriously mistaken legal assumption that a man can write a valid will completely disinheriting his wife. Certainly no man can do this today, and I doubt he could do it in 1937 even if, as is the case here, the issue is governed not by US but by Australian law.
Over the years I’ve caught Kendrick in other legal blunders, but he’s certainly not the only well-known mystery writer of his time who made up his own law as he went along. Ever read a Cornell Woolrich story with a legal component?
Whether Kendrick was discouraged from immediately continuing with his character by that terrible Maclain movie remains unknown. In any event he returned to Miles Standish Rice and a rural Florida setting with his sixth novel, DEATH BEYOND THE GO-THRU (1938). Fred Dannay told me years ago that Kendrick followed this by writing Leslie Charteris’ THE SAINT IN MIAMI (1940), which is dedicated to its ghost.
Then he switched publishers from Doubleday to Little Brown (and later to Morrow) and brought back Maclain, who is featured in all his novels from THE ODOR OF VIOLETS (1941) to OUT OF CONTROL (1945). During the war years THE ODOR OF VIOLETS was filmed as EYES IN THE NIGHT (MGM, 1942), directed by Fred Zinnemann and starring Edward Arnold (star of the first Nero Wolfe movie back in 1936), who was a tad overweight for the part of Maclain but at least was allowed to play the character blind.
In 1945 Kendrick became a founding member of Mystery Writers of America, Inc., holding Card #1 and serving as its first president. That he published so few books during the World War II years is probably accounted for by his work rehabilitating blinded veterans of the war, the fruit of his own experience during WWI.
During the second half of the 1940s he abandoned mystery fiction for mainstream novels including one—LIGHTS OUT (1945), which was filmed as BRIGHT VICTORY (1951)—dealing with blinded vets. Then he came back to whodunits and published six more Maclain novels, from YOU DIE TODAY! (1952) to FRANKINCENSE AND MURDER (1961), but the ones I’ve read from that period struck me as cluttered and confused. He was named a Grand Master by MWA in 1967.
A few years later a much more youthful and dynamic version of Maclain came to America’s TV screens in the person of LONGSTREET (ABC, 1971-72), starring James Franciscus as a blind insurance investigator. For what reason I haven’t the foggiest, but Kendrick’s character was acknowledged as the inspiration for the series, and at least five Maclain novels were reprinted by Lancer Books as tie-in items.
If I had been casting the lead role and wanted an actor who at least to some extent resembled the Maclain of the novels, instead of Franciscus or anyone like him I would have opted for that mainstay of TV’s first few decades, John Dehner.
Brief as it was, the LONGSTREET series was Kendrick’s last interaction with the visual media. At some point in his career he had moved permanently to Florida, where he died on March 27, 1977. His papers are archived at Florida State University in Tampa. How I wish I had ordered a double chutzpah straight up, that long-ago night in that New York bar when I had a chance to talk with him and blew it!