Friday, April 3, 2020

"What Made You Suspicious?"

OUR AUTHOR'S REPUTATION rests on his adeptness with wild and woolly science fiction-fantasy-Tarzanesque adventure narratives, so we weren't expecting to find a 
mundane detective story by him, but Roy Glashan did . . .

"An Eye for an Eye."
By Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946).

First appearance: Presumed to be The Australian Worker, 
29 September 1937.
Short short story (8 pages as a PDF).
Online at Roy Glashan's Library (RGL) (HERE; HTML).


     "Might have got away with it, but he was a leetle too clever."

Not a whodunit but an efficient five-minute how-we-catch-em in the Dr. Thorndyke/Columbo tradition . . .

Principal characters:
~ Charlie Whiteshirt:

  ". . . was bent on murder."
~ Rance Gordon:
  "Bareheaded, and clad in white polo shirt, and shorts, Gordon was walking straight towards the spot where Charley's boat was hidden, presenting an easy target."
~ Sheriff Abner Peters:
  "I'm going to cut me a ten-foot pole and poke around in the muck."
~ Jack Williams:
  "Why, he had no reason to take his own life! He was forging ahead in his profession, win-

ning a name for himself. Had plenty of money and plenty of leisure."

Resources:
- "Seminole Indian": A tribe that was never conquered by Europeans. "The word 'Seminole' is derived from the Muscogee word simanó-li, which may itself be derived from the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning 'runaway' or 'wild one'." (Wikipedia HERE).

- All of the reference material about Otis Adelbert Kline focuses on his SFF: Wikipedia (HERE), the SFE (HERE), and the ISFDb (HERE); Fadedpage has a collection of his works (HERE), as does Roy Glashan (HERE).
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