"It Was About As Ugly a Fix As a Chap Could Be In"

"In the Rockhurst Tunnel: The Ganger's Story."
By Victor L. Whitechurch (1868-1933).
Illustrations by S. H. Vedder.
First appearance: The Harmsworth (London) Magazine, June 1901.
Short short story (6 pages, 4 illos).
Online at Hathi Trust (HERE).
(Note: Some text slightly faded near illos.)

     ". . . we'll give you a chance of seeing one of the biggest railway accidents known, and of telling your friends about it—if you're lucky enough to escape yourself, which I doubt."

Some men are willing to give their lives for their country, but how many would sacrifice their teeth?

Resources:
- FictionMags has an extensive listing of The Reverend Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch's short fiction.

- A movie with a similar theme of a plan to assassinate a V.I.P. (Very Important Politician) on a train is Suddenly (1954) (HERE).

- Whitechurch's railway stories are his chief claim to fame, but he didn't confine himself to them; see previous ONTOS postings (HERE), (HERE), (HERE), and (HERE).

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"When You Tamper with What Has Passed It Is Wise to Remember That Certain Elements in the Present Also Change"

"24 Terrible Hours."
By John York Cabot (David Wright O'Brien, 1918-44).
First appearance: Amazing Stories, May 1942.
Short story (about 16 pages as an EPUB).
Online at Roy Glashan's Library (HERE: HTML) and (HERE: EPUB).

     "Professor Campbell loved his wife, but he was aware that she didn't love him. This led him to a strange act—he gave her the freedom she wanted, via a time machine!"

It's the same old story; people make the mistake of confusing jealousy with love, thinking that somehow justifies anything—even murder . . .

Characters:
~ Calvin Campbell:
  "He himself was neither young nor handsome. He was just a rather old professor in a somewhat obscure college, holding down a young and beautiful wife."
~ Kathleen Campbell:

  "Campbell sighed. He deeply regretted what was to happen. But the situation as it was had finally become unendurable. He couldn't stand it any longer. Loving Kathleen the way he did, 

it was impossible to go on like this."

~ Vickers:
  "Vickers had come to teach at the college over a year ago. He'd started as an instructor. Campbell had been responsible for his rise to a professorship; had made sort of a protege 
of him until he finally realized what was going on."

Resources:
- David Wright O'Brien's SFF is very good, which is why we keep returning to it; see our coverage of a few more of his stories (HERE, in reverse chronological order).
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"The Telegram, the Desire for the Perfect Crime, Killing Him in the Dark—They All Add Up to Thymocentric Subparathyroid"

"The Mental Bloodhound."
By Helmar Lewis (Lewis [or Louis] Helmar Herman, 1905-72).
First appearance: Mammoth Detective, March 1943.
Short story (10 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

     "Here is a banquet hall full of criminologists and detectives and a murder is committed and nobody knows who did it."

Embarrassing, isn't it? Even more embarrassing, the victim is killed right in the middle of 
his lecture before that attentive audience of experienced crime solvers. The average stage magician could probably finger the culprit right away, but this case won't be solved until a man who can barely move is able to, as one character tells him, "figure this one out accord-
ing to your glands and what-nots."

Comment: Like a lot of Englishmen, our author's grasp of American slang is shaky, at best.

Characters:
~ Lester Gould:
  "At the beginning of the banquet, Gould read off some telegrams. Some were congratula-
tions and good luck and that sort of thing and some were from fellas who couldn’t come. Then, when he starts to read one of them, he stops and then he laughs."
~ Professor Ogden Wright:
  ". . . was a guy what hadn’t been outa bed for three years . . ."
~ Nurse Grace Chesley:
  "You'd murder but you wouldn't steal."
~ Mrs. Gummins:
  ". . . has a good share of postpituitary, only she’s obviously subthyroid."
~ Hennessey:
  "That American bobby wi’ the red ’air and the green suit."

Resources:
- FictionMags's list for "Helmar Lewis" shows that he had 7 SFF stories placed in Amazing/Fantastic (see the ISFDb HERE) and 4 crime fiction stories published in 
Mammoth Detective in 1943-44; after that, nada.
- Nurse Chesley helpfully provides a thumbnail description of a usual armchair 
detective's modus operandi: "You're never at the scene of the crime. You never 
see the victim or the suspects and yet, you always can figure out who did it." 
Go to Wikipedia (HERE) and Old Time Radio Downloads (HERE) for more.

- Professor Wright believes criminality stems from our glandular activity; in a previous 
story (HERE), the main character believes it's possible to find it in the blood.
- Finally, a variation of the trick used by the killer here turned up in an episode of the 
TV series Death in Paradise seventy-plus years later.
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"They Call L.A. the City of the Angels, but a Private Dick Knows Better"

HERE WE HAVE a story that, according to the author, "is meant to be both an hommage to the works of Raymond Chandler and a criticism of them." Let's see if it is . . .

"The Big Dream."
By John Kessel (born 1950).

First appearance: Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, 

April 1984.

Collected in Meeting in Infinity (1992); reprints page (HERE).
Novelette (34 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).
(Parental caution: Strong language and adult situations.)

     "He started up the walk toward the street and a blow like someone dropping a cinder block on the back of his neck knocked him senseless."

Some people are gifted with charisma, effortlessly attracting others to them, garnering followers who are willing to go to ridiculous lengths to please these charmers; that, in itself, isn't necessarily a bad thing (freakish, yes). For PI Mike Davin, however, the charm with which this guy Chandler seems to be endowed is proving unmistakably fatal to the man's friends and associates—and, as a prospect of intense personal interest to our gumshoe, unless Davin can avoid falling under Chandler's spell, he's next . . .

Characters:
~ Michael Davin:
  "The jasmine smelled good, but lying under a bush in a flower bed dimmed your apprecia-tion. Davin rolled over and started to look for the back of his skull. It was not in plain sight."
~ Raymond Chandler:
  "Everyone who loved this man defended him, and he remained oblivious to it all, self-pitying and innocent when he ought to be guilty."
~ Cecily Chandler:
  "'Mr. Davin—I'm paying you for information. Don't leave me in the dark.' The voice that had been so thrillingly sexy two days before was that of a worried old woman."
~ Estelle Lloyd:
  ". . . was kneeling on the bed, shaking. She had a small automatic pointed at him."
~ May Peterson:
  "'He hired me himself. Maybe he didn't think he hired me because I got a nice figure, but I figured out pretty quick that was in the back of his mind.' She smiled. 'Pretty soon it was in front.'"
~ John Abrams:
  "A year later Ballantine drops dead in the office. Chandler helps the coroner and the coroner decides it was a heart attack. Mr. Dabney gives up and makes Chandler the new auditor, and within another year he's office manager and vice-president. Very neat, huh?"
~ Quintanella and Sanderson:
  "You tell me to talk, he tells me to shut up. Every time you guys get a burr in your paws, you make guys like me pull it out for you. Call me Androcles."
~ Big Lou:
  "As I tried to get up I got hit in the ear with a fist that felt like a baseball bat. Just to show there were no hard feelings, Lou kicked me in the ribs."

Typo: "he though about getting"

Resources:
- The Big Three databases have ample info about John Joseph Vincent Kessel: Wikipedia (HERE), the SFE (HERE), and the ISFDb's bibliography (HERE).

- If you'd like to compare the Raymond Chandler in our story with the Raymond Chandler in real life, see Wikipedia (HERE):

  "After the armistice [ending World War I], [Chandler] returned to Los Angeles by way of Canada, and soon began a love affair with Pearl Eugenie ('Cissy') Pascal, a married woman 18 years his senior and the stepmother of Gordon Pascal, with whom Chandler had enlisted. Cissy amicably divorced her husband, Julian, in 1920, but Chandler's mother disapproved of the relationship and refused to sanction the marriage. For the next four years Chandler supported both his mother and Cissy. After the death of Florence Chandler on September 26, 1923, he was free to marry Cissy. They were married on February 6, 1924. Having begun in 1922 as a bookkeeper and auditor, Chandler was by 1931 a highly paid vice president of the Dabney Oil Syndicate, but his alcoholism, absenteeism, promiscuity with female employ-

ees, and threatened suicides contributed to his dismissal a year later."

  — "Raymond Chandler," Wikipedia

- We encountered Kessel earlier this year with his "The Miracle of Ivar Avenue" (HERE).

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"He Unwittingly Seemed to Have Brought Danger Down Upon His Own Head"

"Murder Wears a Muffler."
By Giff Cheshire (1905-?).
First appearance: Short Stories, April 10, 1948.
Reprinted in Short Stories (Canada), September 1948.
Short story (14 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

     "You run quite an organization. Hard-looking mugs—beautiful dames—swanky little tuck-aways. What's it all about?"

At first it looks like a simple holdup that's escalated to a panicked killing, but Andy Bow senses there's more to it than that; eventually it'll come down to discrediting a dead man, earning the ire of the deceased's girlfriend; trying to deceive a closed circle of cold-blooded killers; and, most puzzling of all, figuring out how this vicious coterie manages to make a string of murders look like accidents . . .

World War II honorable discharge button.

Resources:
- When FictionMags describes Gifford Paul Cheshire as a "prolific writer of westerns," they're not kidding.
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"I Was Willing to Sacrifice My Life for the Sake of Science"

"Blood Will Tell."
By George Ethelbert Walsh (1865-1941).
First appearance: The Argosy, April 1899.
Short short story (9 pages).
Online at the Pulpgen Archive (HERE).

     "The mystery surrounding the murder of the postmaster at Piketown, and the unexpected fashion in which it was cleared up—The village doctor and the part played by his blood sampling theories."

If you want to know everything about a murder, there's no better source than the murderer himself . . .

Comment: We wouldn't be surprised if Robert Louis Stevenson's account of the tragedy of a certain doctor (HERE) was a strong influence on the development of this story's plot.

Resources:
- FictionMags tells us about our author: "Born in Brooklyn." We can infer from his book and story titles list (Bumper, the White Rabbit; Washer, the Raccoon; Scavengers of the Sea, etc.) that, while he focused on outdoor adventure fiction (see HERE) and other nonfiction (HERE), Walsh weaved in and out of the various genres from the late 1880s to the early 1930s. [FictionMags data.]
- A concise overview article about blood is on Wikipedia (HERE).

- While the idea that criminality originates in the blood is an ages-old superstition that's never been scientifically proven, on a more positive note, in South Korea and Japan your blood type could earn you a hot date (HERE).
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"You Had Motive and Opportunity, and Stand to Gain by the Murder"

"Nicky and the Tin Finger."
By John D. MacDonald (1916-86).
Illustrations by Charles Chickering (1891-1970).
First appearance: The Blue Book Magazine, September 1948.
Short short story (6 pages, 5 illos).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

     "A robot detective? Yes sir! And something very special, both as a robot and a detective."

Whenever things really go wrong in life, crackpots and oddballs automatically become objects of suspicion, so when a would-be vending-machine monopolist gets himself unceremoniously launched towards that big pinball parlor in the sky, it seems obvious 
to the community at large that the reclusive local tinkerer, himself the deceased's stiffest competitor, must have had something to do with it—more likely, in their minds, everything 
to do with it . . .

Characters:
~ Big George Loke:
  ". . . was extremely dead. Big George had endeared himself by passing out little favors from time to time, and the majority of the people of Udella were unhappy to see the source of the little presents stopped so suddenly, and they were more than a bit annoyed with Nicky Lugan and began to scream for his scalp."
~ Nicky Lugan:
  "He is a little round man with the expression of a young owl who has found out that life can be beautiful. And a natural tinkerer!"
~ Kopal:
  ". . . on the city desk, wasted no time in shooing me off to interview Nicky when it became evident that a tinkerer had done the dirty to Big George Loke."
~ Moe:
  "I have never been able to break myself of the habit of nodding at Moe when Nicky intro-duces me to him. Moe is the only robot in Udella."
~ Barney:
  "This—this extroverted metallic personality is going to find out who rubbed out Big George?"

Resources:
- Previous encounters with John Dann MacDonald on this weblog can be found (HERE) and (HERE), while run-ins with robots as detectives and perps are (HERE), (HERE), (HERE), (HERE), (HERE), (HERE), and (HERE).

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