Class of '24

WHAT characters were hot in detective fiction 101 years ago? Today's author tells us while offering his own thumbnail descriptions:

Laurence Mack, "Most Famous Detectives in Fiction," T.P.'s and Cassell's Weekly, April 19, 1924. Also online (HERE).

While we're visiting 1924, here are a few other reviews of books that were released the same year:

Book online (HERE).

Book online (HERE).

Book online (HERE).

.

Wikipedia (HERE). Book online (HERE).

Wikipedia (HERE). Wikipedia book summary (Warning! Spoilers! HERE). Book online (HERE).

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UPDATE: Richard Marsten's "End As a Robot"

Added an illo and a hotlink to SFFAudio (HERE).

"It Would Have Been a Wow of a Practical Joke, If There Hadn't Been Three Corpses Cluttering Up the Scenery"

"The Jabberwocky Murders."

By Fredric Brown (1906-72; Wikipedia HERE; the ISFDb HERE; the SFE HERE; the IMDb HERE; and Michael Grost's megasite HERE).

First appearance: Thrilling Mystery, Summer 1944.

Reprints (FictionMags data):

  Thrilling Mystery (Canada), January 1945

  Triangle Quarterly, Fall 1945

  5 Detective Novels Magazine, Winter 1951

  A Treasury of American Mystery Stories, 1989

  Miss Darkness, 2012.

Reprints page (ISFDb HERE).

Novelette (19 pages).

Online at The Luminist Archives (HERE; go to text page 11).

   "I turned around and looked out the window, and a car with two dead men in it went by. But I didn't know that . . ."

Segments:

ORDINARILY, Thursday nights in small-town America are relatively peaceful, but not this one. The inebriated editor of a weekly newspaper finds himself smack in the middle of a criminal conspiracy involving grand theft and murder, but it's not your garden-variety conspiracy. This one is replete with weirdness: a haunted house, a self-driving car, a problematic key, a little man who wasn't there, a teleporting revolver, a bottle that says "DRINK ME"—more than enough, the police believe, to put our editor firmly in the "prime suspect" category. He knows he'll have to solve this thing tout suite or they'll be coming for his head, "snicker-snack!" . . .

Main characters:

~ Doc Bagden ("Like all cynics who don't believe in haunted houses, I have a good deal of respect for them"), Jerry Klosterman ("rarely poked a wrong key"), Miles Harrison ("I could almost see his mind work"), Big Smiley Wessen ("But there ain't no bullets"), Alvin Carey ("I think he's a sneak"), Barnaby Jones ("He's a stuffed shirt and a miser and a prig"), Yehudi Smith ("The dim light from the street lamp back on the corner showed me a strange, pudgy little man"), Pete Lane ("pulled his hand out slowly with a revolver in it"), Harry Bates ("His shoes weren't tied"), and Walter Hanswert ("I went through it fast, from attic to cellar").

Typos: "a [should be as] phoney as that calling card"; "don by his knees".

References:

- "in Jabberwocky" (HERE).

- "the channels of the linotype" (HERE).

- "The Carmel City Courier is a weekly" (HERE).

- "Bing Crosby" (HERE) - "Dorothy Lamour" (HERE) "at the Alhambra".

- "Yehudi Menuhim, the violinist" (HERE and HERE).

- "To Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, known as Lewis Carroll" (HERE) "when in Wonderland" (HERE).

- "possibly even a lion or panther, escaped from a circus". (You mean like HERE?)

- "Freud" (HERE) "and James Joyce" (HERE).

- "in Curiosa Mathematica" (online HERE; some pages missing).

- "Liebnitz and Winton" (No idea.)

- "nested Chinese boxes" (HERE).

- "sounded like Einstein on a binge" (HERE).

- "a blur of sines and cosines" (HERE).

- "We are not clairvoyant" (HERE).

- "You are old, Father William" (HERE).

- "the John Tenniel illustrations of Alice in Wonderland" (HERE).

- "find the March Hare" (HERE) "or the Mock Turtle" (HERE).

- "ten-point Garamond" (HERE).

- "the handle of the rumble seat" (HERE).

- "the Queen wouldn't order their heads chopped off" (HERE).

- "a pinochle game" (HERE).

- "a bughouse" (HERE) "or a hoosegow" (HERE).

- "the Red Queen" (HERE).

- "carbozol" (We're thinking Brown might have made this up.)

Resources:

- Fredric Brown worked today's story into novel length a few years later as Night of the Jabberwock (1950), online (HERE; borrow only) and reviewed (HERE).

- One of ONTOS's earliest encounters with Brown's fiction was "Beware of the Dog" (HERE).

  And our latest is "See No Murder" (HERE; 2nd story).

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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The Guilty Kiss

HERE is another attempt at a perfect crime, this one in real life, that failed because of just one little thing:

  Shortly after five o'clock on Friday afternoon, July 1, 1938, Charles F. Butte entered his Seattle apartment and found his wife dead in bed, murdered.

  Within a few minutes detectives were at the scene. A bloodstained sheet covered the face of the woman. A rigid leg, protruding from the covering, indicated that rigor mortis had already set in. The apartment had been ransacked.

  “I didn't touch anything,” Butte informed the officials. “The only thing I did was to cover her with a sheet to hide her poor face.” He shuddered.

  Hardened detectives recoiled when they turned back the sheet. Mrs. Butte was not a pretty sight. Her head had been battered.

  Butte could offer little information. He had left the apartment early that morning while his wife was still in bed. They had planned to leave that afternoon on a holiday trip and she was to meet him at four o’clock at the bus terminal. Butte waited there for over an hour. He made several calls to his home but received no answer, and finally he returned to the apartment to see what was causing the delay. He told the officers that he and his wife had just become reconciled after an estrangement. The trip had been planned as a second honeymoon.

  Detectives were able to reconstruct the crime from the physical appearance of the apartment. The killer had entered after Butte left, surprised Mrs. Butte in bed and killed her to prevent any outcry. 

After the murder he ransacked the place.

  Butte’s story was checked as a matter of routine, and attendants at the terminal told how they had seen him waiting impatiently.

  The body was turned over to Dr. Gale W. Wilson, medical examiner for the coroner’s office. The physician glanced at the body and at the bloodstained sheet. He asked for Butte and was told the husband was at headquarters.

  “Good,” the M. E. replied.

  “Then you have the killer.”

  The startled sleuths smiled grimly at his explanation and left for the stationhouse. There, Butte was indignant. “What makes you think 

that I killed my wife?” he demanded, white-faced.

  “Because you told us,” was the unexpected reply. “You said that when you came home from the bus terminal and found your wife dead you covered her face with a sheet. She had been dead for hours by that time, yet we found the sheet bloodstained. You covered her all right, but at the time you killed her—a sheet does not absorb clotted blood.”

  Stunned by the sudden collapse of his perfect murder plot, Butte admitted killing his wife early that morning. He said that just before his wife died she looked up at him and asked him to kiss her. He leaned down and kissed her and, in that moment of twisted tenderness, pulled the sheet up over her face. For Butte it was a kiss of guilt, and he was sentenced to life imprison-ment.

 Edward D. Radin, "Kiss of Guilt," Cosmopolitan, June 1948 (online HERE).

"I Consider Him Sane"

HE doesn't really mean it, does he? And what about the self-confessed murderer?

      Ernest M. Poate, "Expert Testimony," Detective Story Magazine, September 16, 1919

      (also online HERE).

About the author:

- FictionMags thumbnails our author, Ernest Marsh Poate, this way: "Born on a ship in the Indian Ocean; died in Southern Pines, North Carolina; psychiatrist, attorney and author."

  The man was a writing machine, churning out dozens of stories for the pulps, primarily 

(but not exclusively to) Detective Story Magazine, creating three series characters: Doctor Bentiron (32 stories) writing under his own name, as well as Doctor Grimes (3 stories) and Doctor Krook (4 stories) writing as "Arthur Mallory"; see the Mystery*File article about that (HERE). 

  Other info: Wikipedia (HERE) and the ISFDb (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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"You'd Say I've Just Discovered the Real Secret of Ductility"

"Death Trail."

By Ray Cummings (1887-1957; Wikipedia HERE; the ISFDb HERE; and the SFE HERE).

First appearance: Crack Detective Stories, May 1949.

Short short story (5 pages).

Online at Comic Book Plus (HERE; go to text pages 76-80 and 98).

   "Crooked, like all your thinking, like everything you do as a matter of fact."

IT was a lucky thing for Theseus that Ariadne just happened to have that ball of string lying around to get him out of a jam, but for the killer in today's story Ariadne's rescue aid, or something very like it, will prove to be anything but lucky . . .

Principal characters:

~ George Barrington ("A gossamer metallic thread, yet so strong you couldn't snap it with your fingers"), Bruce Arton ("You told her everything was fixed, I suppose? And when she found it wasn't—"), and Johnson ("There's the end of it!").

Typo: "stength".

References:

- "ductility" (HERE).

- "in burlesque" (HERE).

- "to angel a show" (HERE).

- "E. H. Southern" (sic) (HERE) "or like Maurice Evans" (HERE).

- "a heavy retort" (HERE).

Resources:

- Our last meeting with Ray Cummings was "The Clue Outside" (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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You Want Obscure? How About These?

Fergus Hume, The Rainbow Feather (1898):

A story of the detective order is The Rainbow Feather, and unusually interesting for such as are weary of the name of Sherlock Holmes and Anna Katherine Green. The murder of a young girl beloved of all men and disliked by most women was a mystery. Five persons were openly accused and circumstances could have convicted each; two women were suspected with justifying reasons and not one was guilty. It is an ingenious plot and cleverly wrought out. Between drunkenness and epilepsy there is much uncomfortable picturesqueness. - The Delineator, January 1899 (online HERE).

J. Mclaren Cobban, Pursued by the Law (1899):

Pursued by the Law sets forth the journeyings to and fro of one James Graham, who, in order to shield his mother from the suspicion of having caused the death of her disreputable husband, allows himself to be thought guilty of the crime and is convicted of manslaughter under very strong circumstantial evidence. He serves but a few weeks of his fifteen years’ sentence, when he manages to escape through the help of ‘Mr. Townsend, of Jermyn street.’ Graham’s troubles have only just begun, for his footsteps are constantly dogged by the ‘man with the burnt scar’ and he is in daily fear of being apprehended again. The truth is finally brought to light by Graham's faithful little sweetheart, and he receives a pardon for the crime he did not commit. It is a clean, wholesome and fairly well written detective story and will serve to while away a leisure hour when one does not feel in the mood for heavy reading. - The Delineator, March 1899 (online HERE).

Edgar Marette, The Sturgis Wager (1899):

The Sturgis Wager is a detective story written on the lines of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The lesson to be learnt from the book, aside from the interest of the story, is the power of careful and accurate observation. There are thousands of people in this world who having eyes see not. The expression of a face, the twitching of an eyelid, the nervous movement of hand or foot mean nothing to them; the nuances of life have no significance in their eyes; in fact, they do not see them, do not know they are there. The knowledge of a keen observer among men and things seems witchcraft to an untrained person. ‘The Sturgis Wager' was won by the exercise of a mind and eye trained to observe all things and to draw conclusions from the most trivial circumstance. Having once begun the book, the reader will never put it down until he has discovered the method by which Sturgis won his wager and checkmated the master of the murder syndicate. The slender love-story running through a part of the book is of secondary importance. - The Delineator, March 1899 (online HERE.)

And a Sherlock Anecdote:

It was my pleasure next to have a Sherlock Holmes story from Dr. Doyle wherein the great detective is restored to life again, and through an ingenious complication discovers himself. His sudden disappearance, which was never fully explained, did not really result in his death, but in a concussion of the brain in his fall over the precipice, which drove all consciousness of his real self from his mind. Found in an unconscious condition by a band of yodelers, he is carried by them off into the Tyrolese Alps, where after a prolonged illness he regains his health, but all his past life is a blank to him. How he sets about ferreting out the mystery of his identity is the burden of the story and how he ultimately discovers that he is none other than Sherlock Holmes by finding a diamond brooch in the gizzard of a Christmas turkey at Nice, where he is stopping under the name of Higgins, is vividly set forth.

  “And you have never really ascertained, Mr. Higgins, who you are?” asked Lady Blenkinsop, as they sat down at Mrs. Wilbraham’s gorgeous table on Christmas night.

  ‘‘No, Madame,” he replied sadly, ‘but I shall ultimately triumph. My taste in cigars is a peculiar one, and no one else that I have ever met can smoke with real enjoyment the kind of a cigar that I like. I am searching step by step in every city for a cigar dealer who makes a specialty of that brand who has recently lost a customer. Ultimately I shall find one, and then the chain of evidence will be near to its ultimate link for it may be that I shall turn out to be that man.”

Thus the story runs on, and the pseudo-Higgins delights his fellow guests with the brilliance of his conversation. He eats lightly, when suddenly a flash of triumph comes into his deep-set eyes, for on cutting open the turkey gizzard the diamond brooch is disclosed. He seems about to faint, but with a strong effort of the will he regains his strength and arises.

  “Mrs. Wilbraham,” he said quietly and simply. "Ladies and gentlemen, I must leave you. I take the 9:10 train for London. May I be excused?”

  The eyes of the company opened wide.

  “Why—must you really go Mr. Higgins?” Mrs. Wilbraham queried.

  "It is imperative,” said he. "I am going to have myself identified. The finding of this diamond brooch in a turkey gizzard convinces me that I am Sherlock Holmes. Such a thing could happen to no other, yet I may be mistaken. I shall call at once upon a certain Dr. Watson, of London, a friend of Holmes, who will answer the question definitely.”

  And with a courteous bow to the company he left the room, his usually pale features aglow with unwonted color.

Of course, the surmise proves to be correct, and the great detective once more rejoices in his former companions, restored not only to them, but to himself. It was one of the most keenly interesting studies of detective life that Dr. Doyle or anyone else has ever given us, and my regret that the story is lost to the world amounts almost to a positive grief.  - The Delineator, October 1899 (HERE). (Note: Holmes wasn't "restored to life again" until "The Adventure of the Empty House" four years later.)

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How's That Again?

DO you watch a lot of TV and/or movie crime dramas? If so, do you recall things later that you didn't notice at first, but the more you think about it the more you're sure that something wasn't quite right? It could be one (but more likely most) of the following:

The bottom line:

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It All Adds Up

APOLOGIES in advance: If you have trouble reading this story, then feel free to use the hotlink down below it:

John Baer, "A Little Matter of Arithmetic," Detective Story Magazine, February 11, 1922. Also online (HERE). Reprinted in Best Detective Magazine, May 1933.

Resource:

- Two other John Baer stories, "Keep Your Wits!" and "More Than He Could Chew," are highlighted (HERE).

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