#9. THE PATENT LEATHER KID, by Erle Stanley Gardner.

   The Patent Leather Kid is another leading character created by Erle Stanley Gardner. Someone with that identity first appeared in “The Gems of Tai Lee,” a story in the March 25, 1930, issue of Clues, but when the Kid showed up again, in the May 28, 1932, issue of Detective Fiction Weekly, he was a new character, the star of the first of a series of adventures that ended two years later.

   He had a dual identity in the DFW stories – normally rich Dan Seller most of the time, and The Patent Leather Kid when he is ready for one of his somewhat illegal adventures. The patent leather in the name comes from his wearing not only patent leather shoes but also a patent leather face mask to hide his identity.

   The Patent Leather Kid “was always on the lookout for adventure, and anything sufficiently out of the usual called him with an irresistible attraction.” (The Kid Stacks a Deck)

   There is a cast of regular characters for each of his identities. The stories usually start out with a scene of Dan Seller and his fellows at their club, discussing the latest criminal event or activity. The other club members are firstly Police Inspector Phil Brame, then Renfroe the bank president, and Bill Pope the explorer.

   Brame usually brings up a criminal event, which causes disagreement among the others and ends with Seller or Bill Pope often betting on the outcome with him. Brame always loses these bets, but that does not keep him from trying again. Renfroe agrees with the Inspector much of the time, but also tries to avoid antagonizing Seller because he is a large depositor in his bank. It is not revealed how well off Dan Seller is, or where his money comes from.

   In his identity of the Patent Leather Kid, he has another group of people. There is Bill Brakey, The Kid’s bodyguard and assistant. He is also called “A walking encyclopedia of the underworld,” and this comes in handy for The Kid’s adventures. Brakey usually knows the answer to any question about the underworld, or can get the information easily.

   Another person in this group is Gertie, the telephone operator in his apartment house. She keeps track of his messages and also keeps an eye on The Kid’s special elevator which was constructed for his own use. She also knows his identity as Dan Seller. Interestingly, Gertie is also the name of Perry Mason’s telephone operator.

   There are only three people in the apartment house hotel who know Dan Seller’s dual identity: Bill Brakey, Gertie, and the desk clerk who is never named.

   The Patent Leather Kid lived in an apartment house hotel penthouse, with his special security extras such as a steel door and alarms systems. According to one story (The Kid Clips a Coupon), with these security arrangements: “no one could get through the roof without a warning coming over the telephone, without an automatic alarm shrilling a strident warning should the only elevator which communicated with the penthouse start on its way without The Kid’s having first unlocked an electrical contact.”

   The stories involve various kinds of adventures. In “The Kid Clears a Crook,” a reformed criminal trying to go straight is framed and taken advantage of by underworld crooks, and the police don’t care. The Kid sets out to clear the ex-crook and set the blame where it belongs, thereby infuriating both the underworld and the police.

   Neither group likes interference from The Kid in their affairs, and try repeatedly to eliminate him. The police even (according to Inspector Brame) give the underworld the green light to eliminate The Kid, but this never happens. Brame even states that if they catch the Kid, they will frame criminal charges on him in order to keep him in jail for a long time.

   The Kid enjoys this, in his words: “In this game of matching wits with the law, The Patent Leather Kid found his most fascinating recreation. He gambled with life and liberty, and enjoyed the game.” (The Kid Stacks a Deck) So the acquisition of money or property gained illegally is definitely not the goal of The Kid.

   The first story to appear in DFW, “The Kid Stacks a Deck,” is a bit different than the others in the series. Bill Brakey does not appear in this story, and Gertie is present but not named. Inspector Brame is given the title of Commissioner, which he loses in later stories. Possibly the author thought the stories more effective with a lower ranking policeman.

   In the story, The Kid finds out that a criminal gang is out to kill him, so he sets a trap for them. He breaks into a jewelry store, steals a few items and mails them to Brame and his family. The gang is waiting outside to shoot and rob him as he leaves. However, The Kid alerts the police who attack and wipe out the gang as The Kid escapes.

   The story presents the image of The Kid as a master burglar without peer in the underworld and with a high reputation for those talents. However, he seems to have gained nothing from his burglary of the jewelry store. In fact, a point is made throughout the series that “The police had never been able to brand him specifically as a crook. He was a big shot, and his ways were the ways of the underworld, but they had never as yet pinned any definite crime upon him.” (The Kid Wins a Wager)

   Inspector Brame’s chief complaint about The Patent Leather Kid was that his activities damaged the dignity of the police and made them look bad and caused people (and The Kid) to laugh at them. That was a terrible offense to Brame. He seems to have cared more about the dignity of the police department than anything else.

   In “The Kid Throws a Stone,” The Kid is involved in a case where someone is impersonating him. The impersonator has already pulled one robbery before the real Patent Leather Kid starts his complex counter-offensive.

   In another case of impersonation told in “The Kid Wins a Wager”, a criminal burglarizes a jewelry story and leave a note supposedly signed by The Patent Leather Kid. Fortunately, The Kid catches him in the act and clears that up.

   One of The Kid’s favorite tactics was to get criminals, who are after him, into confrontations with the police, where they invariably wind up shot. Rarely does The Kid have to use a gun on the criminals themselves, but this does occur in the story “The Kid Cooks a Goose,” where he and Bill Brakey are trying to protect a woman from a gang of killers. They shoot it out with the three killers and wipe out the gang.

   This is a fun series, and Gardner is obviously enjoying himself writing these improbable situations. On a “Writer’s Almanac” episode on NPR (National Public Radio), Garrison Keillor quotes Gardner as saying about his pulp work: “I write to make money, and I write to give the reader sheer fun.”

      The Patent Leather Kid series by Erle Stanley Gardner:

The Gems of Tai Lee     Clues, 25 March 25 1930     [This story features a different “Patent Leather Kid,” as it turns out. See comment #12.]

   The Patent Leather Kid discussed above appeared as a character only in Detective Fiction Weekly:

The Kid Stacks a Deck     May 28, 1932
The Kid Passes the Sugar     July 16, 1932
The Kid Wins a Wager     September 10, 1932
The Kid Throws a Stone     October 22, 1932
The Kid Makes a Bid     February 18, 1933
The Kid Muscles In     April 15, 1933
The Kid Takes a Cut     May 20, 1933
The Kid Beats the Gun     August 5, 1933
The Kid Covers a Kill     November 4, 1933
The Kid Clears a Crook     February 3, 1934
The Kid Clips a Coupon     April 21, 1934
The Kid Cooks a Goose     July 14, 1934
The Kid Steals a Star     November 17, 1934

NOTE: The 13 stories that appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly have been collected in The Exploits of the Patent Leather Kid, edited by Bill Pronzini (Crippen & Landru, 2011).

    Previously in this series:

1. SHAMUS MAGUIRE, by Stanley Day.
2. HAPPY McGONIGLE, by Paul Allenby.
3. ARTY BEELE, by Ruth & Alexander Wilson.
4. COLIN HAIG, by H. Bedford-Jones.
5. SECRET AGENT GEORGE DEVRITE, by Tom Curry.
6. BATTLE McKIM, by Edward Parrish Ware.
7. TUG NORTON by Edward Parrish Ware.
8. CANDID JONES by Richard Sale.

Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961, by Curt Evans

Publisher: McFarland

Print ISBN: 978-0-7864-7024-2
EBook ISBN: 978-0-7864-9089-9
ca. 35 photos, appendices, notes, bibliography, index
softcover (7 x 10) 2012

Price: $49.95

Not Yet Published, Available Spring/Summer 2012

About the Book:

In 1972, in an attempt to elevate the stature of the “crime novel,” influential crime writer and critic Julian Symons cast numerous Golden Age detective fiction writers into literary perdition as “Humdrums,” condemning their focus on puzzle plots over stylish writing and explorations of character, setting and theme. This volume explores the works of three prominent British “Humdrums” — Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, and Alfred Walter Stewart — revealing their work to be more complex, as puzzles and as social documents, than Symonds allowed. By championing the intrinsic merit of these mystery writers, the study demonstrates that reintegrating the “Humdrums” into mystery genre studies provides a fuller understanding of the Golden Age of detective fiction and its aftermath.

About the Author:

Curt Evans, an independent scholar and book dealer, is the author of one book and numerous articles and essays on detective fiction.

OFFBEAT. British Lion Film Corp., 1963. Also released as The Devil Inside. William Sylvester, Mai Zetterling, John Meillon, Anthony Dawson, Neil McCarthy, Harry Baird, John Phillips. Director: Cliff Owen.

   When Scotland Yard finds themselves up against a brick wall in tracking down a vicious gang of thieves and bank robbers, they call in Layton, a loner from MI5 (William Silvester) to work his way into the gang and help bring them down.

   Taking the new name of Steve Ross, Layton finds the gang organized like a business, a well-oiled machine, with salaries, fringe benefits, and best of all, a comradery that Layton has never known before. Well, perhaps, not quite best of all. One of the of the members of his new group of friends is Ruth Lombard (Mai Zetterling), with whom he finds an instant (and mutual) attraction.

   Much of the middle of the film is a caper drama, as the men drill their way into a underground vault filled with jewels – in plain sight, yet. If you thought being a crook meant not having to do manual labor, you would be wrong.

   Does Layton renege on his day job for the Yard, or can he find himself able to turn the gang in when the robbery is done? That’s the question, the key one, and after a slow beginning, I’d have to say that halfway into the film if not earlier, I was hooked to the screen, waiting for the answer. A minor film, to be sure, but recommended, definitely so.

K. K. BECK – The Body in the Volvo. Walker, hardcover, 1987. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, 3-in-1 edition. Ivy Books, paperback reprint, 1989.

       — Peril Under the Palms. Walker, hardcover, 1989. Ivy Books, paperback reprint, 1990.

   Two novels, Body set in contemporary times, while Perils is the third of Beck’s period novels set in the ’20s, featuring “flapper” detective Iris Cooper and her erstwhile boyfriend, newshound Jack Clancey.

   The Body in the Volvo — which may be the first “academic” whodunit set in an Auto Repair Shop — centers on Charles Garstairs, a young professor at the University of Washington who has just been denied Tenure by a committee headed by Dr. Bateman, who thought Carstairs was fooling around with his wife.

   Charles’ uncle Cosmo wins the State Lottery and signs his Auto Repair Shop over to Charles, a very mixed blessing since the Shop’s assets turn out to include an old Volvo — which turns out to contain the body of Dr. Bateman, whose wife reported him missing several days earlier.

   Naturally, this puts Charles rather high on the Suspect Scale, and, with the help of bookkeeper Sylvia Snow, he must find the real killer.

   In Perils Under the Palms, Iris and her Aunt are vacationing with friends in Hawaii when one of the friends starts seeing a ghostly apparition and another turns up murdered. Jack Clancey arrives on one of the first air flights to the Islands and the Game’s afoot.

   Both of these are lightweight, enjoyable and entertaining enough, but I get the feeling that if I read them again in a few years, I’ll have forgotten all about them.

B.L. STRYKER. Universal. Part of the rotating series in ABC Mystery Movie (with Columbo, Kojak, Gideon Oliver, Christine Cromwell) February 1989 through August 1990. Two seasons; 12 episodes, two hours each. CAST: Burt Reynolds as B.L. (Buddy Lee) Stryker, Ossie Davis as Oz Jackson, Rita Moreno as Kimberly, Michael O. Smith as Chief McGee. Created by Christopher Crowe. Executive Producer: Tom Selleck. Co-Executive Producer: Burt Reynolds. Supervising Executive Producer: William Link. Producer: Alan Barnette. Story Editor: Joe Gores.

“The Dancer’s Touch” (February 13, 1989) Guest Cast: Helen Shaver as Diane. Teleplay by Leon Piedmont and Walter Klenhard and Chriss Abbott. Story by Leon Piedmont. Directed by William Fraker.

   As a New Orleans cop, Stryker could get into the mind of the bad guy until he would know the bad guy’s next move before he did. After too many bad guys in his head, Stryker snapped and beat a rapist nearly to death. Now he tries to make it through the day living on a broken down houseboat on the “wrong side of the river” of his hometown, Palm Beach. Helping him is his best friend, a washed up boxer, Oz Jackson.

   But Stryker’s past has caught up with him as a rapist, using the exact same methods as the one from New Orleans, is attacking rich young girls on the “right side of the river” of Palm Beach.

   The chemistry between Reynolds and Davis and the relationship between their characters is special and their scenes together are the best this show has to offer. Sadly, it is not enough to overcome the weak mystery, bad melodrama, predictable twists, and a sea of cliches.

   The supporting cast features such overused types as the frustrated Police Chief who looks the other way while Stryker gets things done, the rich annoying ex-wife, the ex-wife’s maid who speaks her mind, and the comedy relief neighbor.

   The story fails at nearly every level. For example, there are several scenes with the wacko rapist alone dancing in the dark. The purpose is to make the villain creepy and menacing but instead the scenes induce laughter.

   The killer was easy to guess since there were no suspects. The victims were obvious. Every twist was predictable. That is except for Stryker, who was as clueless as the mystery, and only defeated the killer-rapist because he was suicidal.

“Carolann” (March 6, 1989) Guest Cast: Deborah Raffin as Carolann. Written by Hall Powell and Jay Huguely. Directed by Tony Wharmby.

   Carefree ex-cop Stryker gets his first case as a PI when he saves the life of a Queen of a Middle East country, whose gun running King had just been killed. By coincidence the Queen just happens to be the little sister of Stryker’s childhood best friend.

   This is a slow tedious two hours with a story featuring more padding than mystery. Why bother with suspects when the story can focus on the reminisces and romance between the just yesterday widow and her childhood crush, Stryker?

   How about a subplot with Stryker fixing up Oz with his ex-wife’s maid? You want action? Watch the Queen seduce Stryker with a cigar. Watch the two exchange long, long, long silent but meaningful looks. Detective work? How about a montage of Oz searching “the streets” for someone while Mike Post’s soundtrack screams in the background?

   This episode introduces Stryker’s screwball secretary to run his office in a beachfront condemned building. Lyynda, with a photographic memory and too cute name, will take the job only if her dog stays with her.

   Stryker hates dogs. After that Stryker takes the dog with him everywhere, including when he and his comic relief neighbor, now millionaire computer genius, sneak into the police station to illegally use the Chief’s computer.

   As for the ending, everyone involved should be in jail for theft.

   This “Best Of” DVD is a major disappointment considering William Link (Colombo) and Joe Gores (Hammett) worked on this series, and Robert B. Parker (Spenser) and his wife Joan H. Parker wrote the Edgar nominated episode “Blues For Buder.”

   The entire series is available on DVD, but suffering through these two episodes is enough for me.

WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT – The Chicano War. Walker, hardcover, 1986. No paperback edition.

   Brock Callahan, retired pro football star and private eye, takes in eleven year old Juan Chavez, who has run away from St. Mary’s foundling home. What Brock doesn’t guess is that he is also taking in a big piece of the gang/race war that is a hidden river of evil running under the peaceful streets of San Valdesto, a sun-warmed affluent “somewhat” north of Los Angeles.

   Juan has a brother named Pete who is a skilled auto mechanic and who has disappeared. Chris Andropolus, the hoodlum who is trying to make San Valdes his private turf, opens a firebombing and shooting battle against the Brotherhood, who are a group of respectable Chicanos.

   This battle culminates in the death of Andropolus and the arrest of Ricardo Cortez, a leader of the Brotherhood. The missing brother Pete is embroiled in an auto chopping operation run by one of Andropolus’s hired guns in the unincorporated and largely Chicano suburb north of San Valdesto.

   Hatred grows and family ties are strained. The redneck Police Sergeant Karl Kranski’s niece is Mrs. Andropolus, and his wife is the former Lois Woolrick of local old and respectable money. By this time Callahan is playing touch-and-go with a three-sided war: the police, the gang, and the Chicanos. It’s an absolutely no-win affair.

   Callahan is his usual bluff and charming self and welcome for various reasons in each of the three war camps. He is ably aided and abetted by a lovely friend Jan, an interior decorator, his housekeeper Mrs. Casey, and an old pro football buddy Orlando Davis, who is two hundred and seventy pounds of black wit.

   The story abounds with ethnic names, ethnic slurs and vintage cars. As ever, Mr. Gault is a master of characterization by dialogue, revealing the undercurrents below the surface of a conversation. Like the eleven previous Brock Callahan books this is a highly readable caper featuring a really “laid back” all around good guy.

JOHN DICKSON CARR – The Emperor’s Snuff-Box (Carroll & Graf, paperback reprint, 1986. Harper & Brothers, hardcover, 1942. Many other editions, both hardcover & paperback. Film: That Woman Opposite (UK, 1957) aka City After Midnight (US).

   This book is best described by quoting Carr, himself, regarding the murder in it: “This is a domestic crime. A cozy, comfortable, hearth-rug murder.”

   Though not the author at his best, this is typical Carr. There is love at first sight, and the setting is France, though most of the characters are British. There is less atmosphere than usual, and the puzzle is a bit less complicated, and therefore more guessable than most Carr’s.

   None of Carr’s usual series characters are present; the murder is investigated by a French policeman and a vacationing British psychiatrist. The time is the summer of 1939 and the delight of a simpler time and an intriguing puzzle make this worthwhile, even if it is not Carr at his peak.

MICHAEL INNES – The Daffodil Affair. Penguin, paperback reprint, 1984. Several other paperback editions. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1942.

   — The Weight of the Evidence. Perennial Library, paperback reprint, 1983. Several other paperback editions. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1943.

   These books, original1y published in 1942 and 1943 respectively, come from the most imaginative period in the career of this writer who has been publishing mysteries for fifty years.

   Daffodil is probably too wild and improbable for its own good, as we are asked to believe, on the basis of flimsy evidence, that Appleby and another Scotland Yard inspector would be sent out of war-time London into the jungles of South America.

   The story begins attractively with the stolen titular horse and is heavy on human and animal psychology, accurately using the famous “Hans Legacy” about teaching horses tricks.

   Finally, there is too little action and too unlikely an ending to justify what is otherwise an unusual and sophisticated book.

   The Weight of the Evidence is relatively conventional for Innes, with its British university setting immediately before World War II, but it opens with an unpopular professor found crushed to death by a meteor.

   It’s all very clever, but sometimes the literary allusions and sheer number of eccentric characters is a bit overdone. There’s a lot of good detection, though it is weakened by too much coincidence and a fortuitous confession at the end.

   As prolific as Edward D. Hoch was — with over 900 short stories to his credit — the movie and TV media have made virtually no use of his output. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists just 9 films derived from his works (9/900 = 1 percent). No more eloquent testimony against the obtuseness of Hollywood can be adduced.

1. “Off Season.” The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, May 10, 1965. With John Gavin, Richard Jaeckel, and Tom Drake. Based on Hoch’s story “Winter Run,” this is a nice little crime drama with a nasty twist. This show was the final one of the Hitchcock series.

2. It Takes All Kinds. Film, 1969, based on the story “A Girl Like Cathy.” With Robert Lansing, Vera Miles, and Barry Sullivan. Film critic Leonard Maltin describes it this way: “Fair double cross drama about Miles’ shielding of Lansing when he accidentally kills sailor in a brawl in Australia. Nothing special.”

3. “The Ring with the Red Velvet Ropes.” Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, November 5, 1972. With Gary Lockwood, Joan Van Ark, and Chuck Connors. I’m sure I saw this one but don’t remember a thing about it.

    The TV series McMillan & Wife (1971-77) made good use of Hoch’s stories:

4. “Cop of the Year.” November 19, 1972. With Rock Hudson, Susan Saint James, John Schuck, Nancy Walker, and Edmond O’Brien. Based on “The Leopold Locked Room,” with John Schuck’s character doubling for Captain Leopold. Neat little impossible crime plot, with Schuck accused of murdering his ex-wife.

5. “Free Fall to Terror.” November 11, 1973. Guest stars: Edward Andrews, Tom Bosley, Barbara Feldon, John Fiedler, Dick Haymes, James Olson, and Barbara Rhoades. Based on one of Hoch’s best stories (“The Long Way Down”), a businessman evidently crashes through a plate glass window, disappears in mid-air, and hits the ground — three hours later.

6. “The Man without a Face.” January 6, 1974. Guest stars: Dana Wynter, Nehemiah Persoff, Stephen McNally, Donna Douglas, and Steve Forrest. Cold War espionage with a mystery slant.

    The French produced a mini-series in the mid-’70s:

7. Nick Verlaine ou Comment voler la Tour Eiffel. Five episodes, France, July-August 1976. If anybody knows anything about this production, please inform us.

   The British horror/fantasy series Tales of the Unexpected used a couple of Hoch’s stories as inspiration:

8. “The Man at the Top.” June 14, 1980. Introducer: Roald Dahl. With Peter Firth, Rachel Davies, and Dallas Cavell.

9. “The Vorpal Blade.” May 28, 1983. With Peter Cushing, Anthony Higgins, John Bailey, and Andrew Bicknell.

    — and, unless the IMDb list is woefully incomplete, that’s the extent of the film industry’s use of Edward D. Hoch’s stories.

Hi Steve,

   Some friends and I just got wind of this virtually unknown CBS-TV series a couple of months ago accidentally, via an odd old Google News result from Billboard magazine about notable composer Alex North’s jazz theme.

   There’s no mention of the 1959 series in John McAleer’s humongous Stout biography, although a pilot plus a few episodes were actually filmed and it came within an eyelash of being Nero Wolfe’s TV debut — contradicts the conventional wisdom that Stout had vetoed any further screen adaptations during his lifetime due to his disappointment with the 1930s movies.

   Here it is, complete with the lone screenshot evidence we found — Shatner’s Archie with Kurt Kasnar’s Wolfe — on Wikipedia’s entries for Nero Wolfe and Shatner:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero_Wolfe#Nero_Wolfe_.28CBS.29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shatner#Early_stage.2C_film.2C_and_television_work

   Alerting you because I remember Mystery*File and its followers expressing interest in early “NW” adaptations that were or might have been, and this one’s quite a revelation.

IAN RANKIN – Dead Souls. St. Martin’s Minotaur, hardcover, 1999; paperback, August 2000. Reprinted several times since.

   Rebus is not in good shape in this above-average entry in the Edinburgh series. He’s drinking again, his daughter is still recovering from a hit and run accident and is in a wheelchair. His friend Joe Morton has died, and the entire unit is reeling from the apparent suicide of DI Jim Margolies, bright and talented, on the fast track toward the top.

   The plot includes two missing persons, an eight-year-old boy and the 19-year-old son of childhood friends of Rebus; a surveillance of a convicted murderer, released from a US prison in the wake of an appeal of trial irregularities and returned to Edinburgh; and the relocation of a recently released pedophile that leads to Rebus’s being suspected of conducting a personal crusade against him.

   The convicted murderer has matured from an impulsive, opportunistic criminal to a calculating, clever game-player who threatens not only Rebus but everyone he cares about. Even as you tell yourself that the conjunction of difficult, challenging problems is the stuff of improbable fictions, you find yourself admiring Rankin’s ability to manage intricately connected plot lines.

   A superior, disturbing police procedural and thriller.

NOTE:   St. Martin’s has also published a section of the novel in hardcover as an $11.95 “novella” entitled Death Is Not The End. If I had read the front jacket flap material more closely, I wouldn’t have gotten suckered into buying this.