"For Half of That I Would Solve Every Murder Since the Beginning of Time and Commit Some of My Own"

"The Longsnozzle Event."
By Hal Annas (?-?).
First appearance: Imagination, April 1951.
Short story (15 pages, 2 illos).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).

"As the greatest detective in the galaxy, Len Zitts could easily arrest the murderer. His main interest was in analyzing the weapon used!"

In the future, there's no shortage of murders, which means business is booming . . .

Those inhabiting the story:
~ Len Zitts:
  "Seismographs all over the world register when Len Zitts launches himself in pursuit of a criminal, and the underworld trembles in despair."
~ Mrs. Elmer-Brown Jake-Smith:
  "Very well. I shall prepare myself to endure whatever I must and view as many murders as necessary."
~ Miss Xuren Claustinkelwickwellopiandusselkuck ("Zoo"):
  "In the twentieth century when bandits stalked the cities, when detectives were popping in and out of every second doorway in pursuit of murderers, and wiping off fingerprints in their wake, it is to be presumed that a man and his secretary undertook many things of a confiden-tial nature."
~ Pupsie:
  "His species is almost extinct, but he's smart and he claims his ancestors pursued criminals thousands of years ago."

Comment: An over-the-top absurdist farce that you'll find either delightful or deplorable; Douglas Adams did this sort of thing effortlessly—and better.
Typo: Claustinkelwickwellpiandusselkuck 

Resource:
- One thing's for sure: Whoever Hal Annas is or was (HERE), he had one weird sense of humor.

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"Would Vanity and His Love for the Game Be Strong Enough to Trick Him?"

"In the King Row."
By Lovell Coombs (?-?).
First appearance: Top-Notch Magazine, March 1, 1913.
Short short story (6 pages).
Online at The Pulp Magazine Project (HERE, slow-load PDF;
scroll down to page 171).

"If Father Morse heard that, he'd turn in his grave."

All work and no play . . . you know the rest. Sure, it's nice when you can combine the two; but if you're a thief, that might not be such a good idea . . .

Comment: Because of its background, the unique way crime in stymied, and the integration of a popular board game into the plot, we're giving this one the first and 

probably only "Off-beat Story of the Week Award."

The players:
~ Operator Finnerty:
   Not the best player in the world.
~ The man with the mask:
   He really should focus more on his work.
~ Operator Bates:
   When it comes to the game, he knows his onions.
~ . . . and a few other concerned bystanders.

Resources:
- Thanks to FictionMags, we do know that Francis Lovell Coombs specialized in boys' adventure stories, placing ten of them with Boys' Life in the teens and twenties, the appearance of "In the King Row" in Top-Notch therefore being an exception. Coombs had already used some of the ideas in this story in one of his juvie novels, The Young Railroaders (1909): print version (HERE), audio version (HERE).

Scene from The Young Railroaders

- If you're not familiar with the game that plays a crucial role in the story, see Wikipedia (HERE) and especially (HERE) to brush up on the rules.
- It was last Christmas Eve (HERE) that we featured another railway operator embroiled
in a desperate situation.

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"There Was Murder Done Out There Last Night"

"The Case of the Killer Dogs."
By Hugh Pentecost (Judson Philips, 1903-89).
First appearance: Collier's, May 2, 1953 and May 9, 1953.
Reprinted as "A Matter of Justice" in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1956; Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (U.K.), April 1956; Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (Australia), June 1956; and Ellery Queen’s Anthology #2, 1961.
Novella (15 pages total).
Online at UNZ.

~ ~ ~

Part I: 6 pages, start (HERE) and finish (HERE; scroll down to page 34).

"He came as a guest and as a suitor. He was in love with Lib, and her child had wandered into the woods. And in the woods—unbelievable, terrible, and real—were wild, marauding dogs."

For Macklyn, what starts out as a well-intentioned attempt to find a lost little boy becomes a desperate struggle merely to stay alive. As if matters aren't bad enough, the last thing he's expecting to stumble across is a freshly dead body—the body of someone who died years ago . . .

Comment: If you've never suffered from cynophobia before, you just might after reading this one.

Cast of characters:
~ Macklyn Graves:
  "I'm getting to think like a private eye."
~ Elizabeth ("Lib") Crowder:
  "I don't want you dead just so that the police will get interested."
~ Dicky Crowder:
  ". . . was nowhere around, it seemed, and Macklyn reported back to Lib with the unhappy conclusion that the boy must have set off after the hunters. The result was that Macklyn, reluctantly armed with Lib's shotgun, had set out to find him."
~ Lucian Crowder:
  ". . . was a complete extrovert, could charm his way through any situation, could handle the most temperamental actress, author or director."
~ Fred Fowler:
  "'Fred Fowler,' Macklyn said, 'is a sort of one-man crime commission. He's exposed more crooks in our city government, more racketeers, bookmakers, dishonest policemen, Communist agents, confidence men and business swindlers than any man alive. And I'll tell you a secret, angel. My guess is he hasn't had pneumonia recently, and if he's invented that kind of a story, it means he's here on business. Or—'"
~ Larry Cuyler:
  "Grace and I go our own ways, and no questions asked."
~ Digby ("Digger") March:
  "Lib admired his positiveness and his vitality, but she felt not the slightest affection for him. And Dicky openly hated him. Digger had never learned not to be patronizing with children."
~ Van Anderson:
  ". . . intense, tragic and with nothing to offer but his heart. There was a Mrs. Van Anderson, and it was generally known that she was in a 'retreat' somewhere and that she would never return from it. It was a situation which had pushed Van Anderson slightly off center himself. He had nothing to offer but his desperate need for affection and companionship."
~ Bob Streeter:
  "Just so Mr. Graves'll rest easier, we can count heads here. Is anyone missing?"

Typo: "It he had time"

~ ~ ~

Part II: 9 pages (HERE).

"They wouldn't believe Macklyn. They said that he couldn't have seen a man dying in the woods—where was the man? Where was the body? But Macklyn was positive there had been a murder."

There's at least one person, however, who must believe him, and that's whoever it is who's taking shots at him with a rifle . . .

Additional cast:
~ Dr. Jelliffe:
  "You fell a couple of times. You might have a concussion, Mr. Graves."
~ Sergeant Jackson:
  "Don't misunderstand me, sir. We don't doubt for an instant that you're telling the truth as you saw it. Only, all things considered, it's possible it really didn't happen the way you think
it did."

Comment: Our author just barely escapes lapsing into soap opera.

Resources:
- Hugh Pentecost often wrote under the Judson Philips byline, and Judson Philips often wrote as Hugh Pentecost; for all the details see Wikipedia (HERE), the GAD Wiki (HERE),
Bold Venture Press (HERE), and (for his obit) the New York Times (HERE).

- The last time we perused any of Pentecost's work was about two years ago (HERE).

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"He's the Man You're Going to Kill for Us"

IN SCIENCE FICTION/FANTASY circles the byline Robert Randall might be known to a few, but for most of us it just doesn't ring a bell; in fact, the name obscures two SFF writers who went on to greater fame and fortune:

"Hero from Yesterday."
By Robert Randall (Robert Silverberg, born 1935, and Randall Garrett, 1927-87).
First appearance: Imagination, December 1957.
Short short story (8 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).
(Note: Pages are faded.)

"They were a peaceful people and somehow couldn't stand the thought of executing their only criminal. The answer was to discover a — HERO FROM YESTERDAY."

Sometimes the right man for the job is the wrong one for everybody else . . .

Not really: A 20th-century .38 automatic pistol could not be described as "snubnosed."
Typo: "we went [want] to gauge".

~ ~ ~

"Vanishing Act."
By Robert Randall (Robert Silverberg, born 1935, and Randall Garrett, 1927-87).
First appearance: Imaginative Tales, January 1958.
Short short story (8 pages).
Online at Comic Book Plus (HERE; select page 112 from the dropdown menu).

"These crimes were perfect—no clues, no fingerprints—no nothing. Even the police had no idea exactly how perfect they really were!"

No matter where they go, human beings are never far from temptation . . .

Typo: So which is it: "N'Yok," "N'York," or "New York"?

Resources:
- Several articles about the infamous gangster mentioned in "Hero from Yesterday" are available online: Wikipedia (HERE), History.com (HERE), and the FBI (HERE).
- Despite what the authors tell us in "Vanishing Act," the largest moon of Jupiter (in fact: HERE; in fiction: HERE) isn't Callisto (fact: HERE; fiction: HERE) but Ganymede (fact: HERE; fiction: HERE); and unlike the 1950s, these days it seems even more unlikely that Callisto is inhabited by "invisible pixies about two feet high, four arms, two legs, greenish-gray in color" — and you might as well forget about these folks:

"Life on Callisto" - Artwork by Frank R. Paul

"Serenis, Water City of Callisto" - Artwork by Frank R. Paul

- According to the SFE (HERE), "Vanishing Act" was the last collaboration between Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett; see the ISFDb for separate bibliographic entries for Silverberg (HERE) and Garrett (HERE) and links to other websites.
- We last touched base with Garrett (HERE) and Silverberg (HERE).

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"You Wanted Excitement and You're Going to Get It"

HERE'S A NON-SERIES story by the most successful uberpulpster of all time:

"Time for Murder."
By Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970).
First appearance: Dime Detective Magazine, January 15, 1934.
Novelette (30 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).
(Notes: Parental caution: Strong language; many typos too numerous to bother with, but you're welcome to count them; and there's also a missing page [18]. Good luck with your reading experience.)

"Amateur burglar extraordinary—that's what George Brokay wanted to be—and he got his wish! But he never knew there could be so many angles to a simple job of house-breaking until he stepped into that darkened room . . ."

Segments:
   Chapter One: "Brokay Goes West"
   Chapter Two: "Monkey Business"
   Chapter Three: "Cover for a Crook"
   Chapter Four: "The Fence"
   Chapter Five: "Time for Murder"
   Chapter Six: "Brokay Entertains the Law"

Two murders but only one killer; two motives, one obvious, one not. Our money's on the monkey; after all, he was alone at both crime scenes . . .

The lineup:
~ George Brokay:
  "I want to have some adventure; I want to have some fun. I want to have some excitement."
~ Sam West/William East/Carl North:
  "By God! I believe you mean it!"
~ Gladys Ordway:
  "You should be interested in her, because she's the same sort that you are—a woman who has more money than she knows what to do with."
~ Jocko:
  "That monkey represents the best clue we've got. He's going to lead to a solution of the mystery one of these days."
~ Thelma Grebe:
  ". . . keeps her own confidences. That's why she's on the job. If it wasn't for that, she'd be found in an alley some night with her throat slit."
~ Charles Giddings:
  "I'm on special duty with the police. I am very friendly to Thelma Grebe, but I understand there has been a serious crime committed here."
~ Rhoda Koline:
  ". . . for the life of him, Brokay could not keep from staring at her, and wondering how she could be interested in a life of crime, or why such a refined young woman could be, as the burglar had expressed it, 'on the lam'."
~ Frank Compton:
  "What do you mean, a fence? I make an honest living, my friend. I never touched anything stolen in my life. You, a murderer, should talk to me about being a fence."

Resources:
- If you've never heard of our author (and just where have you been the past eighty years?), there's plenty of information on the Interthingie about Erle Stanley Gardner: Wikipedia (HERE), The Thrilling Detective (HERE), Detnovel (HERE), and The Erle Stanley Gardner Page (HERE).

- We've bumped into Gardner a few times over the past four-and-a-half years; see, for example, (HERE), (HERE), (HERE), (HERE), (HERE), (HERE), and (HERE).

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"Holmes, the English Consulting Detective, and Lupin, the French Gentleman-Burglar, Have More in Common Than Might Be Thought"

"Crime Fiction at the Time of the Exhibition: The Case of Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin."
By David Drake.
First appearance: Synergies, Royaume-Uni et Irlande No. 2 (2009).
Article (13 pages: 11 pages of text).
Online (HERE; PDF).

JUST PRIOR TO the great Franco-British Exhibition of 1908 held to celebrate the Entente Cordiale signed in 1904 by the United Kingdom and France (see "Resources," below), the kind of mania for Sherlock Holmes stories that had gripped English readers in the previous decade now, upon their translation, seized French readers, naturally creating an appetite for more, more, more. Not to be outdone, an opportunistic journalist-publisher named Jean Lafitte decided to launch a Gallic version of the Great Detective:

   "Given [Sherlock] Holmes’ huge popularity in both France and Britain at the time of the Exhibition and the hope in France that [Arsène] Lupin would emulate Holmes, a brief examination of the Holmes phenomenon at the end
of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century is called for."

Lafitte persuaded a serious-minded litterateur named Maurice Leblanc to undertake the task:

   "Leblanc’s sketchy character outlines make it clear that he was not attempt-ing to write a Holmes pastiche as others had done both in France and in England. The purpose of introducing Holmes into the Lupin tales was to place Lupin on the same level as Holmes and stage a ‘battle of the giants’. But Leblanc does not take Holmes’s reputation as a genius for granted: he spells
it out."

Was this, then, an opportunity for the French to upstage their cross-Channel rivals when Leblanc pitted Lupin against the Sage of Baker Street?

   "For French readers, Lupin’s repeated success in outwitting Sholmès/Holmes is not simply one character in a book getting the better of another, it is also France getting the better of England."

According to our author, however, we shouldn't make too much of it:

   "But it would be wrong to see the Lupin stories featuring Holmes as anti-English polemics. The tone is playful and humorous and Leblanc enjoys exploiting the fact that, as we have seen, it was widely believed that
Holmes was a real person."

Leblanc couldn't resist references to Holmes in his stories, although the compliment was never returned:

   "Thus, by including Sholmès/Holmes in his Lupin tales, Leblanc was following a well established tradition within the detective/crime fiction
genre, namely cross-referencing in order to increase the status of one’s
own hero. There is no reference to Lupin in Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories,
but it is clear that Conan Doyle was aware of Leblanc’s creation."

. . . almost to the point of a lawsuit, be it noted. Nevertheless, the two characters weren't exactly alike:

   "At first glance we are struck by the differences between Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Leblanc’s Lupin. The majority of the cases undertaken by Holmes, the gallant, asexual, rational yet bohemian aesthete, take place in England, mostly in London or within easy reach of the capital, and are set between
1886 and 1904. [With his first adventure taking place in 1905] Lupin, on the other hand, is a dashing, flamboyant, raffish Don Juan French bandit-hero of the Belle Epoque. Most of Holmes and Watson’s adventures are nostalgic returns to the gas-lit Victorian world of the hansom cab and the steam train
. . . Lupin’s world is altogether faster moving and imbued with technological progress. For example, the very first tale is set on a transatlantic liner, on the first page there is a reference to the wireless telegraph and a Kodak camera is central to the plot . . ."

. . . but they did have a couple of character traits in common:

   "What links Holmes and Lupin is that they both operate according to a
similar moral code. Both pride themselves on being professionals, and
while remuneration is important it is not their main driving force. Holmes often repeated that he worked rather for the love of his art than to acquire wealth and while his charges were on a fixed scale he often waived them. Lupin is in Leblanc’s words ‘brave and chivalrous’ and describes his victims
as ‘people inferior to himself, not worthy of sympathy’."

As for the two authors, they came to see that they were both victims of their own success:

   "Finally, a similarity between the creators of Lupin and Holmes. Both
Leblanc and Conan Doyle aspired to be recognised as writers of respectable mainstream literature . . . But both were disappointed. Eventually and reluctantly they realised that they were shackled to their creations."

Typos: "Robert Louis Stephenson"; "Marcel Leblanc"; "baulk".

Resources:
- Good summary articles about our authors and their characters are on Wikipedia: Arthur Conan Doyle (HERE) and Sherlock Holmes (HERE); Maurice Leblanc (HERE) and Arsène Lupin (HERE).
- An anarchist named Alexandre [Marius] Jacob, a "gentleman burglar," had an unanticipated influence on Lupin's development; see (HERE).
   [Note: "Alexandre Jacob (September 29, 1879 – August 28, 1954), known as Marius Jacob, was a French anarchist illegalist. A clever burglar equipped with a sharp sense of humour, capable of great generosity towards his victims, he became one of the models for Maurice Leblanc's character Arsène Lupin." — Wikipedia]
- The Franco-British Exhibition of 1908 was a big deal at the time; see (HERE), (HERE), and (HERE)—and if those aren't enough, there's a 336-page book about it (HERE).

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"I Did Not Come Here To Be a Private Detective"

"Aider & Abettor: A Tale of Modern Smuggling."
By Victor L. Whitechurch (1868-1933).
First appearance: The Harmsworth Magazine, August 1900.
Short short story (5 pages; 4 illos by Alec Ball).
Online at Hathi Trust (HERE).

"The fishermen, when they went out for their night haul, would bring back something more than fish."

For the Archdeacon, intentions matter as much as actions; on a fishing trip to Camford he's about to clash, not with someone else, but his own conscience . . .

The people herein:
~ Mrs. Wise:
  "Lor' a' mussy, it's a parson!"
~ The Archdeacon:
  "You don't exactly comprehend the position of ecclesiastical dignitaries, Wise! So remember the case stands thus: I know nothing whatever of the business. Do you understand?"
~ Sam Wise:
  "Yes, sir—none o' th' other chaps shall know. I'll answer for that."
~ Captain Oggleton:
  "But there's no catching the beggars. If anyone knows about 'em, d'ye think they'd
tell? Not a bit of it. Though I say their silence makes 'em just in the same boat with
the thieving rascals. What do you think?"

Resources:
- According to England's Accessories and Abettors Act of 1861 (HERE), in full force at the time of our story, "an accessory to an indictable offence shall be treated in the same way
as if he had committed the offence himself."

- When he put his mind to it, The Rev. Victor Lorenzo Whitechurch could spin a sprightly story about crime (although this isn't one of them, unfortunately); see these previous
ONTOS postings collected (HERE) and FictionMags (HERE) for more.

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