That's Trant, Not Trent

SINCE LAST MONTH saw the publication of Crippen & Landru's The Cases of Lieutenant Timothy Trant, a reprint collection of the shorter works by the authors known collectively as Q. Patrick, we wondered if any of those stories might be floating around in the cybersphere; as it turns out, we did manage to locate two of the twenty-two in the collection, which might whet your appetite for more Timothy Trant adventures, and one story with a supernatural slant that didn't make the cut:

   "This was the most disappointingly rapid murder investigation of his career."

"Death and Canasta."
By Q. Patrick (Richard Wilson Webb, 1901-70 & Hugh Callingham Wheeler, 1912-87).
First appearance [FictionMags]: "United Newspapers Magazine Corporation; probably from This Week" (1950).
Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1954.

Collected in The Cases of Lieutenant Timothy Trant (2019).

Short short short story (4 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

     "How were you to know that this particular jerk happened to be the police?"

A friendly card game turns into an opportunity for murder . . .

Characters:
~ Arlene Wentworth:
  "She's — dead."
~ Molly Evarts:
  ". . . must have bumped against the shelf and knocked the radio into the water, and . . ."
~ Boyd Redfield:
  "Damn fool thing to let her have a radio in the bathroom. Everyone knows it's dangerous."
~ Jim Evarts:
  ". . . all this about an obstruction behind the bathroom fuse . . . What sort of obstruction?"
~ Lieutenant Timothy Trant:
  "For several seconds now he had realized exactly how Molly Evarts had met her death."

Resource:
- Read all about the card game of canasta on Wikipedia (HERE).

~ ~ ~

   "This was a classic murder set-up, in which the wife or the playwright should obviously kill the critic before his lethal review could get into the papers."

"The Glamorous Opening."
By Q. Patrick (Richard Wilson Webb, 1901-70 & Hugh Callingham Wheeler, 1912-87).
First appearance [FictionMags]: "United Newspapers Magazine Corporation; probably from This Week" (1951).
Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1954.

Collected in The Cases of Lieutenant Timothy Trant (2019).

Short short short story (4 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

     "Trant, who doted on murder as much as Dodo doted on gossip, wished rather wistfully that Life would sometimes behave a little more like Fiction."

The reviews are in: It's murder all right . . .

Characters:
~ Dodo Mulligan:
  ". . . looked haughty as a challenged Empress."
~ Larry Race:

  ". . . [is] penniless. His whole future hangs on the play. A bad review from Hunt will 

slaughter it. And will Hunt's typewriter be dipped in venom!"

~ Hunt Brickell:

  "Hunt, doll, you shouldn't have come with that dreadful cold. Right back to bed after 

your review!"

~ Hilda Brickell:
  ". . . screamed but, unexpectedly, shied away and clung to Larry Race."
~ Lieutenant Timothy Trant:
  ". . . had his murder. But perversely he felt almost guilty, as if his irresponsible reveries 
had somehow brought it about."

Resource:
- What's the difference between theater criticism and a theatrical review? See Wikipedia (HERE).

~ ~ ~

   "You might suggest that he start chewing on the works of Charles Fort."

"The Red Balloon."
By Q. Patrick (Richard Wilson Webb, 1901-70 & Hugh Callingham Wheeler, 1912-87).
Illustration by Vincent Napoli (1907-91; HERE).
First appearance: Weird Tales, November 1953.

Short story (12 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

     "It was only two days before the great festival of love and goodwill, but I was gripping the revolver in my pocket and there was murder in my heart . . ."

The sudden and bizarre deaths of two children aren't only a gruesome affair, but they also have scientists scratching their heads—a puzzle to everyone but a highly eccentric college professor . . .

Major characters:
~ Lieutenant Timothy Trant:
  "Though a traditional terror to the malefactor, Trant was as pleasant a fellow as one could wish to meet."
~ Edgar James (narrator):
  ". . . since Trant's name was synonymous with Homicide, I presumed the Greiser children had been murdered, or at best kidnapped."
~ Professor Edgar Saltus:
  ". . . had moved noiselessly towards us and was staring at Trant over an antiquated pair of spectacles."

Typos: "so-called comet of Halley, due in 1896" [should be 1986]; "an invisible creatures"; "In twenty-eight yeras".

Resources:
- Professor Saltus makes a reference to "my late and very much lamented friend Mr. Charles Fort," the subject of a Wikipedia article (HERE); doubtless of great interest to Fort would have been the Siberian mammoths (Wikipedia; HERE) and the "lost planet" (Wikipedia; HERE) mentioned by the Professor.

....................

More resources:
- For Wikipedia's entry on Patrick Quentin go (HERE) and Hugh Wheeler (HERE); Wheeler also co-wrote the pilot movie teleplay for the short-lived The Snoop Sisters TV series (1972; HERE).
- Curtis Evans has done a thorough job of researching the Q. Patrick writing team; see one of his latest articles (HERE) and other related postings starting (HERE). His assessment of the stories in The Cases of Lieutenant Timothy Trant:

   "It's a remarkably rich collection (taking us around New York, New England, the Atlantic Ocean and Europe), from the shortest to the longest story. The way Rickie and Hugh planted clues in even the briefest stories to make them sparkling examples of fair play detection is impressive indeed."

- Steve Lewis's Mystery*File has also covered Q. Patrick's work over the years; his collection of articles begins (HERE).
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