Gun in Cheek (2 page)

The "alternative classics" and their authors, however, have been neglected to the point of invisibility. Much has been written about the contributions of Doyle, Christie, Hammett, Chandler, Stout. But how many readers—indeed, how many aficionados—are aware of the contributions of Michael Morgan, Tom Roan, Eric Heath, James O'Hanlon, Sydney Horler, Michael Avallone, Robert Leslie Bellem, Milton M. Raison, and Joseph Rosenberger? Everyone has heard of
The Hound of the Baskerviles
,
The Maltese Falcon, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Big Sleep
. But how many know the joys to be found in
Decoy, The Dragon Strikes Back, Murder of a Mystery Writer, Murder at Horsethief, Lord of Terror, Bride of Terror, and The Bat
?

The purpose of this book is threefold: first, to rectify the neglect of these writers and their works, to give them the critical attention they deserve; second, to provide a different historical perspective on crime fiction—its detectives, its sub-genres, its publishers—and on the social attitudes it reflects (which are often more pronounced in the bad mystery than in the good one); and third, to add a few chuckles—perhaps even a guffaw or two—to the heretofore sobersided field of mystery criticism. It is all well and good to take the genre seriously; as a mystery writer, I take it (and this book) rather seriously myself. But it is not hallowed ground, as some would have us believe. Nor should it be so snooty in its newfound position as a "legitimate" literary art form to want to bury its so-called black sheep or refuse to give itself an old-fashioned horse laugh now and then.
*
The ability to laugh at one's self, it has been said, is the sign of a healthy organism. And the mystery, one hopes, is a very healthy organism.

As to my qualifications for undertaking such a project, I submit the following credentials: mystery novelist, short-story writer, anthologist, and essayist; collector and student of mystery criticism, biography, bibliography, history, and ephemera; owner of several thousand mystery novels, collections, anthologies, and pulp and digest magazines, a good many of which are quite bad. I also submit the following sentence from my novel,
The Stalker
: "When would this phantasmagoria that was all too real reality end? he asked himself."

Can there be anyone better suited to write a tribute to the alternative classics of crime fiction than the author of that immortal line?

*Academics consider it "legitimate" nowadays, anyhow. The self-styled 'literary establishment" considers any prose that has a plot, makes a linear kind of sense throughout, and does not involve suburban sexual angst to be trash, or at best subliterary.

" . . . I have a plot for a book that I intend to write some day that I believe gets over the perfect murder most adequately. . . . In that book I shall show that the police and detectives are utterly baffled and that at last the murderer himself has to come forward and tell how he committed the crime. I will have him to do this out of a pure sense of bravado and love of the dramatic, or possibly motivate it by showing that he is suffering from an incurable disease and is going to die soon anyway."

"Sounds like a lot of baloney to me," snorted Lang.

—Eric Heath,

Murder of a Mystery Writer

"Fire's a damned sight worse," he muttered. "Cripes, my head's like a pumpkin! It's always at the back of my mind."

—Ellery Queen,

The Siamese Twin Mystery

T
he amateur detective, or AD as he is affectionately known to insiders, is the most popular crime-solving creation among the writers of detective fiction. Beginning with Jacques Futrelle's Professor F. X. Van Duesen, "The Thinking Machine," in this country, and, somewhat later, Chesterton's Father Brown in England, the AD has seen more bloodletting, faced more peril, and unraveled more mysteries than all professional detectives, public and private, combined.

The AD can be of either sex, of any age; can possess any quirk or specialized knowledge and be of any profession (or no profession at all). The AD roster includes doctors, lawyers, merchants, thieves; little old ladies with a homicidal eye and fusty professors with very large brains; bored young men of wealth and breeding, and derelicts on Skid Row; newspaper reporters, poets, playwrights, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, unpublished writers, songwriters, and insurance underwriters; salesmen, bankers, Indians, artists, magicians, priests, nuns, gamblers, teachers, scientists, sports figures, photographers, publicans—and a hundred more. The AD can be hard-boiled, soft-boiled, half-baked, well-pickled, or sugar-coated. He/she can use fists, guns, wits, half-wits, innocence, guile, luck, pluck, deduction, guesswork, or any combination of these to solve a case and bring an evildoer to justice.

What the most enduring of the amateur detectives seem to have in common is an abiding interest in criminology, an encyclopedic knowledge of trivial and/or esoteric facts, a Sherlockian intelligence, a penchant for withholding evidence from the police (but never from the reader, no matter how obliquely it is couched), and such endearing qualities as the enigmatic smile, the gimlet eye, the curled lip, the disarming grin, the sharp retort, the clever pun, the cryptic remark, and the perfect squelch. Consider the great ADs of mystery fiction: Father Brown, Dr. Fell, Ellery Queen, Lord Peter Wimsey, Reggie Fortune, The Great Merlini, Miss Marple, Perry Mason, John J. Malone, "The Old Man in the Corner," Mr. and Mrs. North, Miss Hildegarde Withers. When these ladies and gentlemen embark on a case, it is bound to be a memorable one.

The same is true of the great ADs on the other side of the qualitative coin.

The earliest of these is Joseph Rouletabille, a Parisian reporter who solves a number of cases in the early 1900s narrated by his Watson, Sainclair, and created by French writer Gaston Leroux.
 
The first,
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
(1907), is well known and also considered by some – John Dickson Carr, the grand master of the "impossible crime" story, was one—to be among the finest "locked-room" mysteries ever penned. This may be true, if one reckons solely on ingenuity of plot; but if one takes into account stilted writing, nonexistent characterization, incredible coincidences, and a welter of disguises, aliases, and red herrings—plus such other implausibilities as the fact that Roületabille, already a successful journalist, is not much older than sixteen when he solves the mystery of the yellow room—Leroux might seem better placed, or at least equally well placed, at the opposite end of the mystery spectrum.

From this standpoint, his most (or least) accomplished work is the second of the Rouletabille cases,
The Perfume of the Lady in Black
(1909). Chief among its noteworthy aspects is a preposterous plot in which the villain of
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
, a brilliant former detective named Frédéric Larsan, who was supposedly killed off in that book, returns alive and in disguise (a la Sherlock Holmes) to commit a new locked-room murder, this one involving the use of false-face and a tricked-up wardrobe. There are also more aliases, red herrings, and coincidences, some crudely worked out motivations, a final "revelation" that Rouletabille is the illegitimate son of Larsan, and such artful prose as:

He rushed to the canal, sobbing, and, with a prayer, uttered as much to the Lady in Black as to God Himself, threw himself into the water. Happily, in his despair, the poor child had forgotten that he knew how to swim.

He had mocked her, even while the tears had streamed down his cheeks. I could never have believed that Rouletabille could have been so cruel or so heartless—or, even, so ill-bred!

The first of the notable ADs on the American front is Professor Herman Brierly, who appears in four novels by Will Levinrew published in the late twenties and early thirties. Brierly is an elderly research scientist of the following description: "small, exquisitely formed body, not over five feet tall; tiny hands and feet, bushy, snow-white hair, bushy black brows over dark blue eyes so deeply sunken in their sockets as to seem jet black; high, fresh complexion rarely found except in infancy." Brierly is also a superintellect of a crabby, somewhat egotistical nature that puts him in a class with his obvious role model, Philo Vance. His stock-in-trade is solving crimes through "scientific deduction," which is a masking euphemism for the fact that he unravels the most convoluted, Van Dineish plots with a minimum of detection and a maximum of obscure textbook science and pathology.

The most interesting of his cases is
Murder on the Palisades
(1930), in which a number of people are murdered in a gloomy old mansion on the New Jersey Palisades, across the Hudson River from New York City. Because Levinrew was a devotee of Van Dine, this novel, like his others, is chock full of footnotes, interminable question-and-answer sessions, befuddled cops, bizarre occurrences, and clues of the esoteric variety (the first few letters of the Hebrew alphabet, for example, play an important, if rather unbelievable, part in the plot). But it is none of these things that distinguishes
Murder on the Palisades
-,rather it is the sheer number of exotic methods of murder and attempted murder—certainly more than in any other mystery novel in the genre's history—and the identity of the "instrument" used in perpetrating most of the crimes.

Characters are murdered, or almost murdered, by the injection of microorganisms to cause spinal meningitis; by mixing a quantity of ergotized (ergot is a poisonous grain fungus) flour with whole-wheat flour and baking it into a loaf of bread; by poisoning some chocolate-coated almonds with almond-tasting nitrobenzol; by injecting a drug called phiorizin, which causes diabetes, so that the person can then be given too large a dose of insulin, which will send him into fatal insulin shock; and by scratching a man's hand with a match that has been dipped into ajar of hydrophobia germs. But the crowning method is a locked-room murder in which a missile, presumably a stone, is hurled through a window to crush a man's skull but then "disappears" before the police arrive on the scene seconds later. The explanation for this one is demonstrated as follows by Professor Brierly:

[They] suddenly saw an object, at the end of a rope, rise above the roof with incredible velocity.
 
Thi object described giant arc, and continued describing the arc, limited by the rope with undiminished speed…

The rope flattened out on the roof; the object at its free end continued with undiminished speed outward and downward, the rope flattened out against the rear of the building and the object at the end of this gigantic lash whipped through the closed window with a crash, shortly to reappear hanging taut at the end of the rope, oscillating gently.

According to the professor, this device—a large catapult affixed to the roof by bolts, with a rope stretching to it from a staple—works in the following manner:

"This rope is taut. I have at the end of it in the toe of this stocking a stone a little larger than a baseball. I tied a piece of string around the stocking above the stone, although hardly necessary. I now put it into the catapult which is aimed upward in the direction of the garage door, in perfect line with the window. The force of the catapult will shoot it almost straight upward, but the pull of the rope on that staple will prevent it from going straight upward. Also, it will not jerk as it would if I propelled it straight upward or straight outward from the staple. No, this counter-force will make it describe the arc you saw. Whirl a watch-chain and see the undiminished speed with which it will wind itself around your finger, to the very end. Same principle involved here. The initial impetus on the end of the watch chain is not around the finger, but straight ahead or upward as it is here. This staple acts like the finger on the chain."

The person responsible for most of these fanciful acts is an embittered member of the household, the wife of one of the victims, who has been confined to a wheelchair since suffering a paralyzing attack of poliomyelitis. It was she who worked the catapult from the roof, we are told, but since she couldn't get around to commit the other crimes, she hypnotized her twelve-year-old son, who is suffering from a form of dementia praecox, and ordered
him
to commit them in her stead. When Brierly has the boy hypnotized as part of his reconstruction of events and instructs him to reenact his crimes, the youth becomes "all evil, the personification of murderous desire," and the sight of him causes a hardened newspaperman to tremble "as if with the ague" and a hard-boiled cop, "inured to hardships in himself and others, familiar with ugly sights and scenes, exponent of the third degree with recalcitrant prisoners," almost to faint dead away. Brierly, however, is unmoved. Nothing much bothers the true scientist—and the true AD—in his never-ending pursuit of truth, justice, and the American way.

A considerably different, if no less notable, amateur detective is Tony Woolrich, a New York drama critic fathered in the forties by Milton M. Raison. Woolrich's greatest case is
Murder in a Lighter Vein
(1947), about which Anthony Boucher wrote in the
San Francisco Chronicle
: "This latest exploit of Tony Woolrich . . . is in plot and writing simply down to Mr. Raison's standard. I list it only to warn you that this (to quote the jacket) 'intimate, behind-the-scenes tale of big-time radio' does not even have the virtue of reasonable accuracy in depicting the industry."