Son of Gun in Cheek Page 4

  Macaulay appears to have gotten its start sometime prior to World War I; but it was not until the Roaring Twenties that it hit its alternative stride. One of its specialties was “novels of dangerous love,” a.k.a. “novels that make striking revelations,” a.k.a. “novels with a modern tempo,” a.k.a. “novels of life’s passionate affairs”—euphemisms for what passed for sex novels in the flapper era. These carried such provocative titles as Passion Lighting the World, Lovers Should Marry, Glorious Flames, and The Mighty Thing. Another of their specialties was the “exposé,” i.e., nonfiction books about sex. One example is Coquetry for Men, by Horace Coon, which contains such chapters as “How To Select a Lady,” “The Platonic Affair,” “The Brief Affair,” “The Selection of a Mistress,” “How To Keep Her,” “How To Get Rid of Her,” “The Selection of a Wife,” “The Affair During Marriage,” and “The Divorce.”

  But what Macaulay really specialized in was what it called “weird mysteries” and “supersleuth mysteries.”

  In its early years, Macaulay was strictly a reprint publisher; in the criminous category, it gave American readers the works of such French and English writers as Gaston Leroux, Maurice LeBlanc, and William Le Queux. It was not until the late twenties that it began to ease into the original market, while at the same time offering a steady flow of second-rate British imports; this was the primary Macaulay fare until the house’s demise in 1937.

  Almost all of its mystery originals were by American writers, among them such major exponents of the detective story as Herbert Crooker, Charles Reed Jones, S. Fowler Wright, Frederick Eberhard, H. L. Gates, J. Breckenridge Ellis, R. Francis Foster, Oscar Gray, Anthony M. Rud, Samuel Spewack, Frank R. Adams, Frank Shay, and Mrs. Wilson Woodrow. (At the same time its stable of illustrious British authors included E.C.R. Lorac, T.C.H. Jacobs, Gregory Baxter, Spencer Simpson, T. Arthur Plummer, Gerald Verner, and Andrew Soutar.) Macaulay did publish a couple of Arthur B. Reeve’s later Craig Kennedy novels and two mysteries by Frederick Faust (Max Brand) under his Walter C. Butler pseudonym—but if you feel as I do about Reeve and Faust, that fact may also be entered as evidence for the prosecution.

  Are there alternative bigwigs among this splendid array of puzzle-making talent? There are indeed. Take, for instance, H. L. Gates, whose métier (other than sex novels) was the tale of “Oriental mystery.” Chinese, Malays, Siamese, Egyptians, Hindus, and Cambodians, among other nationalities, are featured performers—most often in villainous roles, naturally—in such criminous sagas as Murder in the Fog, The Laughing Peril, and The Scarlet Fan. But the most interesting thing about Gates’s work is not his plots, or his settings, or his characters, or even his prose style; no, it is his strange delusions, repeated in one form or another throughout his books, regarding both the human anatomy and the human (especially the Oriental) physiognomy.

  Stanley chafed her pulses. They were beating slowly, faintly. (The Scarlet Fan)

  Stafford’s fingers found the man’s pulse and his ear sought a sign of life in the heart under the gleaming evening linen. When he raised his head he let the inert pulse drop and whispered aloud a single, terrified word:

  “Dead!” (Death Counts Five)

  In expressive answer Walker’s both hands went to his own throat, the tips of their fingers touching his throat chords [sic] gingerly. (The Scarlet Fan)

  Only with his eyes Meng Fu seemed to grin. His face was blank. (The Laughing Peril)

  [She was] lovely beyond words and strictly modern in every detail. In the loveliness, however, he surprised [sic] a quality far deeper than the surface audacities of pert modernity. (The Laughing Peril

  He was conscious of beige legs that descended rhythmically to tiny pumps. (The Laughing Peril)

  It came to Stafford that the man would be a Hindu, of one of the southern Indian states where the races are sunbaked to a dark green. (Death Counts Five)

  Then we have Frederick G. Eberhard, who was a practicing physican as well as a scribbler and who, according to his publishers, “won fame for his scientific mystery stories.” There is plenty of scientific stuff in his books, to be sure—much of it rather obsessively (and dubiously) involving chemical ways to dispose of corpses. (“‘Potassium dichromate dissolved in concentrated sulphuric acid will dissolve a body, leaving paltry residue of calcium sulphate, carbon, and calcium phosphate. That’s just the common cleaning fluid used in all chemical laboratories. Remove the gold and platinum from their mouths, take off their rings, and all you have to do is pour ’em down the sink.’”) His publishers’ claim notwithstanding, Eberhard’s fame clearly does not rest on his scientific expertise. Rather, it rests on two other factors: his plots, which are nothing if not ingenious; and his dialogue, which is nothing if not moronic.

  One of his more outrageous plots is that of Super-Gangster (1932). The supreme villain of this title is in fact a lunatic with a Napoleon complex who calls himself the Emperor (his moll’s name is Josephine, what else?) and who, early on in the narrative, undergoes plastic surgery to transform himself from a handsome dude to an ugly one. Reason: So he can walk into the Big House and bust out a couple of his pals (Creepers Clarke and the Rambler, who are awaiting execution in the hot squat) and at the same time knock off a couple of his old enemies (Sleepy Withers and the Hoot Owl). How is he able to walk into prison unchallenged? you may well ask. Why, his new ugly puss is an exact duplicate of Warden Hunt’s (the warden’s ugliness being the result of an old war wound), and he, the Emperor, has kidnapped the real Hunt so as to be able to take his place.

  Two other of Super-Gangster’s dizzy plot components are worth mentioning. One is “an unexpected spinal operation” that leaves the Emperor paralyzed below the waist, causing him to lose interest in Josephine but allowing him, as the dust jacket blurb says, “to fully appreciate a gift copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover.” The other is a castle hideout on the Hudson River, known as “The Castle Home for Feeble Minded,” which is outfitted with a surgical chamber of horrors, dozens of thugs and mugs, and machine-gun nests in the turrets. It is at the Castle Home for Feeble Minded that the Emperor, fittingly enough, meets his Waterloo.

  As alternatively dazzling as Super-Gangster is, it is not Eberhard’s masterwork; that honor belongs to The Skeleton Talks, published the following year. This one is a full-fledged detective story, featuring the exploits of “supersleuth” and “investigator extraordinary” Bradley Holmes. Holmes is “one of those strange mortals who exist on loss of sleep,” so courageous that he thinks nothing of taking “a copious drink from his decanter in spite of the thought that it might contain a poison,” and given in his less exalted moments to such exclamations of amazement as “Jumping Jee-whiziz!” A man to be reckoned with, you will agree.

  In The Skeleton Talks, Holmes is on the trail of a mysterious “super crook” (Eberhard’s heroes and villains are always “super”) known as the Hawk, who “sets murderous traps and kills his victims in devious and obscure manners.” One of these devious and obscure manners is an innocent-looking paper bag, sealed at the top and stuffed into the victim’s desk drawer—an infernal device of diabolical cunning. To wit:

  “The bag, as you know, was loaded with concentrated hydrocyanic acid gas,” Holmes explained. “You saw the [sharp knife fastened to a set spring] before the bag was split. The spring was released by a very sensitive thermostat which was fastened to the electric light bulb.”

  “Clever and utterly hellish,” said Martin as he examined the thermostat.

  “The murderer may be mad but he is also a satanic genius. Why, he even removed the incandescent bulb from the lamp and substituted an old carbon light—one that would generate more heat. The heat expanded the thermostat, it in turn released the spring and the knife sprang upward to slit the bag and release the gas.”

  “You are right, Holmes. The man is an intellectual.”

  Indeed he is. And he leads the “detective extraordinary” a merry chase through a publishing office (one of the Hawk’s victims is a myste
ry writer named Braxton Hicks), a curio room full of skeletons, an undertaking parlor, a mausoleum replete with secret passages, a series of catacombs “in the bowels of a cemetery,” the cemetery itself, and numerous other locations. Along the way we find out the answers to such puzzling questions as : Why has the Hawk stolen the manuscript of Hicks’s latest mystery novel, The Skeleton Talks? Why has the Hawk machine-gunned a carload of cops? Why has the Hawk scragged Scruggs, the wise-cracking mortician? And why would this “underworld demon” want to keep moving a dozen skeletons from one place to another—unless it is to prevent one of them from “talking” and revealing his true identity?

  We are also, along the way, treated to a great deal of Eberhard’s inimitable dialogue. Here is a conversation between a cop and Medical Examiner Martin:

  “Looks like a post mortem in this case,” said Martin after his examination [of a corpse]. “It’s either poison or death from a natural cause.”

  “Could he have passed out from fright?” suggested O’Grady.

  “Possibly,” returned Martin. “However, I never went in much for that solution of a death. Shoot him to the morgue. I’ll slice him up and see what happens.”

  O’Grady turned [to one of his men]. “Shoot both stiffs to the slab house.” Turning to Martin he asked, “It’s all right to give the Sawbones [i.e. the dead man] formalin?”

  “The undertaker can pickle him,” Martin replied. “He’s been murdered. But don’t let Hicks pass on to the coffin sellers until I whittle him.”

  And here is Holmes introducing himself to Dr. Martin:

  “Dr. Martin, my name is Holmes, Bradley Holmes,” said Holmes by way of introducing himself.

  And here is some telephone conversation between Holmes and a police sergeant:

  “Is O’Grady there?”

  “No he isn’t. What’s more, he isn’t likely to be here.”

  “Sure he will be,” replied Holmes. “He just left me a while ago. He’s probably run into something. . . .”

  “Yeah, he ran into something all right. Someone turned a chopper on him at 10th and Armitage. His whole squad was knocked off.”

  “What?” yelled Holmes.

  “Somebody bumped them off.”

  “Who?”

  “How in hell would I know. It wasn’t the Boy Scouts.”

  “You’re kidding me, Sergeant.”

  “If I’m kidding you my grandmother was a virgin.”

  And here is the venal Hawk, soliloquizing in his lair:

  “Gone!” he exclaimed, and as evil a looking expression as ever characterized madness came over his countenance. “Damn her! No wonder she didn’t bring the junk. She’s taken the money instead and is probably telling the police about me anonymously. Once rid of me she intends to enjoy my riches. Well, I’ll get her before they get me—the lousy hussy! Doomed! Duped! Me, the Hawk! And by a woman! I should have known better. Why did I ever allow her to come here? Kipling was right, a woman’s a woman and a good cigar’s a smoke.”

  And finally here is an extremely telling passage of dialogue between Holmes and a publishing house editor, proving that Eberhard may have been an alternative giant but he was not without his pithily accurate insights:

  “These authors are cranks. They imagine things. They wouldn’t be authors if they didn’t. . . .”

  “I can readily imagine that a mystery story writer might go haywire.”

  “Not only they,” said the editor as he threw up both hands. “The highbrow scribblers, the sex mongers and the birds grinding out westerns! They’re all temperamental—goofy—haywire or whatever you choose to call them.”

  As marvelous as Gates and Eberhard were, neither could match the sheer inventive acuity of the premier Macaulay author, Anthony M. Rud. Rud’s three novels published in 1934 and 1935 might have been used by the firm’s editors as models to which their other writers should aspire. Two of these, House of the Damned and The Stuffed Men, are alternative works of considerable stature.

  Rud, a Chicago native who turned to fictioneering not long after his graduation from Dartmouth in 1914, was first and foremost a pulp writer. Of his eight novels published between 1923 and 1941, at least three were first written as pulp serials. In the twenties and thirties he contributed numerous jungle adventure, humorous cowboy, criminous, science fantasy, and macabre stories to such magazines as Argosy, The Lariat, Thrilling Wonder, Detective Fiction Weekly, Weird Tales (where his best-known story, “Ooze,” was first published in 1923, in the debut issue), and even Black Mask in its infancy. He understood better than most that pulp readers craved the unusual above all else (an understanding that allowed him to find work as a pulp editor on both Adventure and Detective Story to supplement his free-lancing income). In those days it didn’t matter if stories remained within the boundaries of probability, or if they even made much sense at all; what mattered was that they be fast-paced, exciting, and imaginative. Rud gave readers what they wanted in abundance and with appropriate pyrotechnics. His imagination was nothing if not fertile. At their most unfettered his flights of fancy are every bit as wild and wonderful as those of Harry Stephen Keeler, Tom Roan, and Sydney Horler.

  Rud specialized in eccentric (and eccentrically named) characters, many of whom are either blessed or cursed with strange powers, maladies, and/or thought processes, and in eerie and very improbable plot situations, often constructed to include fantastic schemes and large casts of characters. In his detective fiction—all three of his Macaulay novels are, among other things, detective stories—he likewise specialized in sinister private estates and architectural monstrosities full of trap doors, secret passages, and any number of weird gadgets, and in bizarre “impossible” murders, usually perpetrated with the aid of pseudoscientific gimmickry. Corpses litter the fictional landscapes of The Rose Bath Riddle, House of the Damned, and The Stuffed Men—not as many as Hammett provided in Red Harvest and “The Gutting of Couffig-nal,” perhaps, but more than enough to satisfy the most bloodthirsty of readers.

  The protagonist of all three of Rud’s Macaulay novels (and of a series of novelettes in Detective Fiction Weekly) is J.C.K. “Jigger” Masters, a former “whistling caddy” (golf, not tea) turned Long Island “crime analyst.” Masters first came into the public eye, Rud tells us, at the tender age of eleven, “back in the days when golf sticks had names instead of numbers.” While caddying on the Burning Bush Club Course No. 3, Locust Valley, Long Island, “he had discovered a corpse with an iron club, a jigger, crammed down his throat. Weeks after police had given up the case as an unsolved mystery, he appeared at the station with a complete case against a man who had not been suspected. And the iron jigger, a peculiar club designed to combine loft and distance as well, had been the arch key of his evidence.” Some eleven-year-old kid!

  Now, at the age of thirty, there is “nothing of the dilettante-in-crime, or the brilliant amateur, about Masters. “No, sir. He is now a full-fledged, card-carrying supersleuth. He has had one “failure,” though, since becoming a detective of Holmesian skills: he hasn’t been able to find a suitable Watson, “some kind of dependable companion . . . who could keep level eyes on the horizon, and feet on the ground.” Instead he has “developed an organization of subordinates who did excellently well in following his directions in the routine work. Not one of them, though, was any more of a friend or a companion than was his inconspicuous Studebaker coupe, or his .32-20 S&W revolver.” These subordinates include Mitsui, his “Jap servant” (who sounds suspiciously Chinese in his speech patterns); Tom Gildersleeve, a meerschaum-smoking ex-automobile mechanic whose favorite expression is “For the luvva some Dago woman”; and Marshall Vandervoort, a young man-about-town who helps Jigger over the protestations of his socialite wife, and who also has a favorite expression—a Robin-the-Boy-Wonderish “Holy Helen of Troy!” (Not to be outdone, Jigger likewise owns a favorite exclamation: “Now what in the name of all the seven sacred sea lions . . .”) Lieutenant Conner of the Essex County Police is staunchly in Ji
gger’s corner, as are all other Long Island police agencies: they seem willing and eager to turn complete control of an investigaton over to him at the drop of a corpse. Even the governor stands in awe of the former whistling caddy’s deductive talents.

  Lest you think Masters is purely a cerebral sleuth—all brains and no iron jigger, as it were—it should be pointed out that he can fight and shoot with the best of the hard-boiled dicks. He also comes prepared for any emergency, any contingency. Not only does he carry his trusty .32-20 S&W revolver in “an armpit sling,” he also carries a fascinating array of other lethal—and nonlethal—articles which he uses for offensive or defensive purposes, depending on the situation. He doesn’t just secrete these items in his (doubtless) capacious clothing, either. No, Jigger is too clever for that. He uses his head in more ways than one:

  Near the roots of his wiry black hair at the crown of his head, the detective had a . . . small phial hidden. This contained exactly ten drops of the same liquid once carried by the women of Russia’s famous Battalion of Death, when going forth to do battle against bestial male enemies. But Jigger kept it hidden there as a last-ditch offensive weapon, ordinarily. Only once in his career had he been compelled to use it. That time he killed a degenerate who otherwise would have added another horror to his roster of sex crimes.

  Jigger’s first full-length case, The Rose Bath Riddle, was published by Macaulay in 1934, and is somewhat disappointing from an alternative point of view. It starts promisingly with the murder of Simon Corlaes, a nationally known “chemical magician” and amateur satyr, in his private bath: he is literally frozen to death in the midst of a scalding hot shower, while trying to wash off some body dye he put on himself as part of a practical joke on his guests. But Rud explains this “impossible” all too quickly: in Corlaes’s adjacent laboratory, the murderer hooked up a tank of liquid oxygen to the water pipe supplying the shower bath. From then on the narrative degenerates into a lot of uninspired twaddle: more homicide-by-chemistry, familial intrigue, and double-dealing, much dithering around on and off the Corlaes estate, a secret passage behind a bookcase, and a lawyer named Jellybean Binney, who looks “something like a spinning top, with his small head, seeming lack of neck, and corpulent body tapering down to very tiny feet.” Minor stuff, compared to what Rud accomplished in his next two Jigger Masters adventures.