Monday, September 17, 2018

"It Was Simply Unthinkable That He Should Make a Slip Anywhere"

(Hurricane Florence Edition)

"Without Finger-Prints."
By Charles Lee Bryson (1868-1949).
First appearance: Munsey's Magazine, June 1927.
Short short story (5 pages).

Online at UNZ (HERE).
     "When the president of the Parkville Bank came to grips with trouble, he worked out a clever scheme, but even a clever schemer may be outwitted."

Clever murder schemes, it hardly needs to be said, are guaranteed to unravel—and 
the clever schemers along with them . . .

Comment: You know what's coming; the fun is in how it gets resolved. A nice little howcatchem from the '20s.

Characters:
~ Philander Parks:

  "But now that trouble had assumed a dangerously menacing air, and stared him brutally 
and mockingly in the face instead of sitting passively at his side. Philander was determined to do something. He would play the part of a man. He would meet and fight trouble on its 
own ground, and defeat it."
~ Fred Wemby:
  ". . . was the cashier, but he was a colorless, unimportant plodder. He should not stand in the way of Philander's success."
~ The coroner:
  "Cushman and I must go over everything very carefully and collect all the evidence. Nothing must be handled by any one else."
~ Cushman:
  "That guy's too keen to make it out a suicide!"


- FictionMags about Charles Lee Bryson: "Author. Born in Dade County, Missouri; lived in Glen Ellyn, Illinois." The preponderance of his known short fiction was in the form of crime stories, most of them appearing in Flynn's Detective Fiction Magazine in 1927.
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