Puzzle for Fiends (29 page)

BOOK: Puzzle for Fiends

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Where had I been? I thought of Selena. Matched up against that voice, her glamour dissolved like a mist. Suddenly Selena seemed sleazy.

“Peter, tell me. Please tell me. Where have you been?”

“Oh, that,” I said.

“I’ve got to know, darling. There are dozens of reporters plaguing me.”

“Get rid of them—quick.”

“I’ll try. But I’ve got to feed them a sop first—like Cerberus.”

“Who’s Cerberus?”

“Something that someone had to feed a sop to.”

I thought of telling her to say I’d been visiting friends. That made a neat half-truth. But I had learned from the Friend family what gaping pitfalls awaited the half-truth monger. For Selena’s sake as much as mine I had to lie. The he had better be simple.

“Tell them,” I said, “that I don’t remember. Suddenly I was wandering about the streets of L.A. That’s all I know.”

“All?”

“All. You know. Everything went black.”

“Ah right. I’ll tell them that.” She paused and then added with a trace of anxiety: “Am I supposed to believe it too?” I was wondering if I had the price of a taxi or whether I’d have to bum it from her when I got home.

“Try, baby,” I said. “If it’s too much for you, I’ll think up something else.”

“Like, maybe, the truth?”

“You never know,” I said. “If my back’s slap up against the wall, I may even tell you the truth.”

FIN

PATRICK QUENTIN

Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge were pen names under which Hugh Callingham Wheeler (19 March 1912 – 26 July 1987), Richard Wilson Webb (August 1901 – December 1966), Martha Mott Kelley (30 April 1906 – 2005) and Mary Louise White Aswell (3 June 1902 – 24 December 1984) wrote detective fiction. In some foreign countries their books have been published under the variant Quentin Patrick. Most of the stories were written by Webb and Wheeler in collaboration, or by Wheeler alone. Their most famous creation is the amateur sleuth Peter Duluth. In 1963, the story collection The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.

In 1931 Richard Wilson Webb (born in 1901 in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, an Englishman working for a pharmaceutical company in Philadelphia) and Martha Mott Kelley collaborated on the detective novel
Cottage Sinister.
Kelley was known as Patsy (Patsy Kelly was a well-known character actress of that era) and Webb as Rick, so they created the pseudonym Q. Patrick by combining their nicknames—adding the Q "because it was unusual".

Webb's and Kelley's literary partnership ended with Kelley's marriage to Stephen Wilson. Webb continued to write under the Q. Patrick name, while looking for a new writing partner. Although he wrote two novels with the journalist and
Harper's Bazaar
editor Mary Louise Aswell, he would find his permanent collaborator in Hugh Wheeler, a Londoner who had moved to the US in 1934.

Wheeler's and Webb's first collaboration was published in 1936. That same year, they introduced two new pseudonyms:
Murder Gone to Earth
, the first novel featuring Dr. Westlake, was credited to Jonathan Stagge, a name they would continue to use for the rest of the Westlake series.
A Puzzle for Fools
introduced Peter Duluth and was signed Patrick Quentin. This would become their primary and most famous pen name, even though they also continued to use Q. Patrick until the end of their collaboration (particularly for Inspector Trant stories).

In the late 1940s, Webb's contributions gradually decreased due to health problems. From the 1950s and on, Wheeler continued writing as Patrick Quentin on his own, and also had one book published under his own name. In the 1960s and '70s, Wheeler achieved success as a playwright and librettist, and his output as Quentin Patrick slowed and then ceased altogether after 1965. However, Wheeler did write the book for the 1979 musical
Sweeney Todd
about a fictional London mass murderer, showing he had not altogether abandoned the genre.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

As Patrick Quentin