Mon 3 Jun 2019
Pulp PI Stories I’m Reading: FRANK GRUBER “The Sad Serbian.”
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[3] Comments
FRANK GRUBER “The Sad Serbian.” Short story. Sam Cragg #1. First published in Black Mask, March 1939. Reprinted as “1000-to-1 for Your Money,” Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1950. Also reprinted in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, edited by Otto Penzler (Vintage Crime, softcover, November 2007).
I’d say that a skip-tracer definitely falls into the same category as a private eye, wouldn’t you? This was Sam Cragg’s only solo adventure. The very next year found him teamed up with Johnny Fletcher in The French Key (Farrar, hardcover, 1940) in the first of 14 novels they appeared in together.
To tell to you the truth, though, I’m not at all sure the Sam Cragg in this story is the same Sam Cragg who teamed up with Johnny Fletcher in all those books. In this one he tells the story himself, and he’s both observant and articulate, while the Sam Cragg in the Fletcher books is little more than a second banana or even a musclebound stooge, if you will. Fletcher is the brains of the pair, Cragg is the brawn.
And here’s another “to tell you the truth.” While always having an old pupwriter’s gift for words, Frank Gruber’s choice of stories to tell and I are often not entirely on the same wavelength, and “The Sad Serbian” is no exception. It has something to to with a Serbian prince and a scam of some kind he’s pulling on Chicago’s Serbian community, somehow in conjunction (or competition) with a giant 300-pound Amazon of a woman.
The story’s both too complicated and worse, uninteresting, to me at least, a deadly combination in a story if ever there was one. One saving grace, though, is the interplay between Cragg and Betty, the secretary of the outfit he works for. There should have been more of it. Maybe in a followup story of Sam on his own there would have been.
[ADDED LATER.] My review of The Limping Goose (Rinehart, hardcover,1954), including a list of all 14 Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg books can be found here.
June 3rd, 2019 at 11:24 am
Has there ever been a generic writer who made a name in their time, they have a prolific output, they were “cover names” in the pulps & their novels got reviewed & were reprinted widely–& yet when you read them, well, you just don’t get it? Everything you read by them is about as compelling as watching paint dry. And yet they were everywhere, including TV! That’s me & Frank Gruber, God bless him for the ultimate professional he was. The one book of his I’ve held onto is The Pulp Jungle, his memoir, which is packed with absolutely fascinating material (his range of friends & acquaintances ranged from everyone from Max Brand to L. Ron Hubbard!), but it’s all related in a dry, flat, lackluster style. (I appreciate that my due reward will be someone someday writing those words about me–hopefully long after I’ve joined Frank.)
June 3rd, 2019 at 6:27 pm
It’s good to know that I’m not alone!
June 4th, 2019 at 8:31 pm
Gruber did do a few good mystery novels in the late forties through the early sixties, notably The Last Doorbell, Bridge of Sand, and The Brothers of Silence, the first a police procedural and the other two in the Eric Ambler/Victor Canning vein.
On the whole though I think his Westerns were probably superior to most of his mystery output. I was never a fan of Johnny Fletcher, though I did like his Encyclopedia Salesman sleuth Oliver Quade.