"A Big Black One, Right into the Brain"

"Death in the Air."
By Cornell Woolrich (1903-68).
First appearance: Detective Fiction Weekly, October 10, 1936.
Short story (15 pages).
Online HERE.

"Inspector Lively Walked Slowly and Talked Slowly—but He Thought Fast, and That's What Pays Dividends on a Fiend's Murder-Trail!"

Inspector Stephen Lively (nicknamed "Step") is making his long, weary way home on the Ninth Avenue "El" after a hard day at the office when, like Mrs. McGillicuddy in a different story, he witnesses a murder—actually two of them—not consciously realizing at the time what he has seen. It's only when the train has stopped that Step discovers he's been riding with a dead man.

Lively, slow but determined, at great personal risk manages to gain access to another crime scene directly related to the first one on the train but blocks away, finding a second victim, this one a woman:

. . . Step didn't bother playing detective, snooping around, even examining the remaining rooms of the tawdry little flat. His technique would have astounded a layman, horrified a rookie, probably only have made his superior sigh resigned-ly and shrug. "Well, that's Step for you." What he did about getting after the culprit, in a murder that had been committed so recently it was still smoking, was to pull over a warped rocking-chair, sit down, and begin rolling a cigarette. His attitude implied that it had tired him plenty to walk the tracks all the way back-here, and everything could wait until he'd rested up a little. An occasional flickering of the eyelids, however, betokened that all was not as quiet on the inside of his head as on the outside.

What he does with the meager evidence that he discovers and the rapid deductions he makes from it would make Sherlock proud: the victim's well-polished fingernails, implying she didn't live in this run-down place, and a cigarette butt without any lipstick, implying it belonged not to her but to the killer.

Several times in the story Lively's natural inertia nearly gets him killed, but it's made worse when he whiffs a drugged cigarette while he's trapped in a burning building:

. . . Hundreds of men in hundreds of fires have hung back to drag somebody living out with them. But very few have lingered to haul out somebody already dead. That, however, was precisely what Step had gone back for. The lady was his corpus delicti and he wasn't leaving her there to be cremated.

Step Lively is in the phlegmatic but nonetheless effective detective tradition of, for examples, Cohen's Jim Hanvey, Doyle's Mycroft Holmes, and Fforde's Thursday Next; it's doubtful, however, that Woolrich ever considered making him a continuing character.

Resources:
- Wikipedia HERE, the GAD Wiki HERE, FictionMags HERE, and, yes, the ISFDb HERE.
- Mike Grost examines Cornell Woolrich's fiction (including this story) HERE, while just about everything you'll ever need to know about Woolrich can be found HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.
- One Woolrich story ("It Had to Be Murder," 1942) served as the basis for Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954, PDF script HERE) and is located HERE (PDF).
- We last touched base with this personally troubled author HERE.

The bottom line: "They stumble that run fast."
  — Shakespeare