Fri 29 Apr 2022
Pulp Stories I’m Reading: JOHN K. BUTLER “The Saint in Silver.â€
Posted by Steve under Stories I'm Reading[4] Comments
JOHN K. BUTLER “The Saint in Silver.†Steve Midnight #4. Novelette. First published in Dime Detective Magazine, January 1941. Reprinted in The Hardboiled Dicks (Sherbourne Press, 1965). Collected in The Complete Cases of Steve Midnight, Volume 1 (Steeger Books, 2016).
I’ve said it many times, and a couple of times in print as well, that of all the stories in The Hardboiled Dicks, Ron Goulart’s highly seminal pulp detective anthology from 1965, “The Saint in Silver†was the one that I remembered most.
Well, “ha†on me. Now, over 50 years later, last night I finally read it for a second time, and guess what? It was like reading it for the first time.
Nothing I thought I knew about the story was true. I even had the object in the title wrong. I remembered it as a statue. What the saint in silver really is, I won’t tell you (although there’s no reason why I shouldn’t), but nothing could be further from the truth.
Maybe the only thing I remembered correctly is that Steve Midnight (Steve Middleton Knight) is a taxi cab driver, and he usually has an overnight shift. He’s not a PI, but there were nine stories in the early 40s in which he was the leading character, all for Dime Detective. I assume that he was generally his own client, but I could be wrong about that.
In “The Saint in Silver,†for example, he’s out a fare of $18 if he doesn’t find the blonde and the drunken guy who smashed up their own car while in the midst of a treasure hunt. After hiring him to continue their hunt, they disappear on him when the next clue takes them to a cemetery in the rain, with Midnight ending up clocked over the head in a tomb.
Butler was a very good writer, nothing fancy, but the first half of the story simply flows and catches the reader along with it. The second half, the tracking down of the cab’s occupants, devolves into a case that involves both a narcotics ring and a rich pseudo-evangelist, is not as compelling, but it’s still a very good yarn. (Maybe at 48 pages, it’s just a little long for its own good.)
And yes, by the way, one of the Steve Midnight stories is titled “Death and Taxis,” in the January 1942 issue of Dime Detective.
Note: I first wrote a review of this story in 1967, and I posted it on this blog a few weeks ago. Follow the link and you can read it here.
April 29th, 2022 at 8:50 pm
Like you this was my first exposure to Butler, and he proved the hardest of the writers in DICKS to track down later, though always worth it when I did.
It’s a shame Butler didn’t write more pulp fiction (he was prolific enough), but his career as a screenwriter, particularly at Republic, kept him busy.
The hallmarks of a Butler screenplay were often a good crime plot, even in a Western, and a sometimes surprisingly hardboiled attitude even when writing for Roy Rogers.
April 29th, 2022 at 11:01 pm
The nine Steve Midnight stories were also reprinted in THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT by John K. Butler, Adventure House, 1998. Many copies are available on abebooks.com.
I love the Steve Midnight series and give this story a “5”.
May 2nd, 2022 at 9:23 am
Just finished reading this one (trying to play along at home). I started out liking it–but then at the end Butler pulls out one of my pet peeves and waves it around in my face for 5 pages: the post-mortem soliloquy. It’s where, at the end of a very complicated story, the detective gives a long monologue explaining away all of the mystery. To me, it’s lazy. If a writer is good enough (and Butler seems quite good enough), they should be able to just show the action. There might’ve even been a novel here if Butler had shown us the solution rather than told us the solution.
And then to make matters worse, we find out on the last page that the ‘saint in silver’ and the missing blonde are an item. It’s a really big revelation. How long has this been going on? Maybe the saint in silver orchestrated the whole thing. It could undercut the entire soliloquy. But, meh, Steve Midnight lets it go and goes back to work as a taxi driver. Good lord, man. It makes Jeffrey Lebowski look like a diligent investigator!
May 2nd, 2022 at 9:30 am
I can’t agree more, Tony. Thanks foe explaining in more detail and better words why I thought the story went downhill rather badly after the great beginning.
And as for expanding it into a novel, you’re right. There are plenty of characters and the premise is certainly solid enough. You could make quite a nifty story out of it.