Friday, December 20, 2024

"You Mean, Mister, That a Man Oughter Be Able To Do a Murder an' Not Be Found Out?"

JUST AS SOME WRITERS seem to be born to make us laugh while others have a flair for drama, there is a subset of authors who are adept at producing crime fiction. Not detective fiction writers, mind you—that requires its own specialized skill set—but authors who are capable of delivering the goods when it comes to the impulses for crime. One such is today's author. We've dealt with him before and found his crime fiction . . . adequate. While he is justifiably famous for one of the most successful fantasies in book publishing and movie history, we've noticed that he did dabble in crime fiction; Ellery Queen (the editor) noticed, too, and took pains to reprint three of his stories, the first one of which is . . .

"The Mallet."
By James Hilton (1900-54; Wikipedia HERE; FadedPage HERE; the IMDb HERE; and Roy Glashan's Library HERE).
First appearance: Hutchinson's Story-Magazine, July 1929.
Reprinted in:
  A Century of Horror, 1935
  Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1942 (this version)
  Best Stories from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, 1944
  To the Queen’s Taste, 1946
  Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (Australia) #1, July 1947
  Shafts of Fear, 1964
  The Best Crime Stories, 1984
  Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, April 1988
  The Best Crime Stories, 1990.
Long short story (17 pages).
Online at Roy Glashan's Library (RGL) (HERE).

   "Then, by God, ain't it eashy—eashy as kishin' a pretty woman like yo' wife—throw mallet on shlag-heap—an' in a minute—two minitsh—all burned to shinder!"

FOR THOUSANDS of years men have repeatedly proven the validity of the saying "In vino veritas." It's too bad for a conceited snake oil huckster that on this one occasion he chooses to ignore centuries of experience . . .

Principal characters:
~ Doctor Parker Potterson ("Now Potterson was extremely susceptible to pretty young women, and to exercise his charm over them was the keenest of all his vanities. Wherefore, with a deliberation and a confidence born of long practice, he smiled at her"), Bert ("A little under-sized hollow-chested man, pale and careworn, shabbily dressed—the sort that is born to say 'Sir' to everybody"), and Bert's wife ("She found him irresistible, of course, as all women did").

References and resources:
- "a lounge-lizard":
  "A lounge lizard is a man who frequents social establishments with the intention of seducing a woman with his flattery and deceptive charm. The term is reported to have 
arisen around 1915 in New York." (Wikipedia HERE.)
- "a Berserker fierceness hammered at his temples":
  "In the Old Norse written corpus, berserkers (Old Norse: berserkir) were those who were said to have fought in a trance-like fury, a characteristic which later gave rise to the modern English word berserk, meaning 'furiously violent or out of control'." (Wikipedia HERE.)
  Fearsome Berserkers have even worked their way into modern science fiction, which in turn has shaped a hazy theory:
  "The Berserker hypothesis, also known as the deadly probes scenario, is the idea that humans have not yet detected intelligent alien life in the universe because it has been systematically destroyed by a series of lethal Von Neumann probes. The hypothesis is 
named after the Berserker series of novels (1963–2005) written by Fred Saberhagen." (Wikipedia HERE.)
- "a slag-heap":
  "A spoil tip (also called a boney pile, culm bank, gob pile, waste tip or bing) is a pile built of accumulated spoil – waste material removed during mining. Spoil tips are not formed of slag, but in some areas, such as England and Wales, they are referred to as slag heaps. In Scotland the word bing is used. In North American English the term is mine dump or mine waste dump." (Wikipedia HERE.)
- We previously perused Hilton's crime story, "The Perfect Plan" (HERE).

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.
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