Tag: detective stories

The Pulps: ‘Wake for the Living’

The last story in this collection that is marked as a mystery is “Wake for the Living” by Ray Bradbury. It is not really a detective story, but it was published, in 1947, in Dime Mystery Magazine. Many years ago in high school, I believed I had read everything Bradbury ever wrote, but I was of course mistaken, and this story is one I’m pretty sure I haven’t read before.

The story, like most of Bradbury’s, is simple. It is a standout in this collection not only because of the author’s fame but because it is characteristic of the author’s style: Poetical language, fantastical details, minimal plot, and an ironical, bitter ending.

To describe the story at any length is to give it away, though the ending is easy enough to see coming. The story features two brothers, Richard and Charles Braling, who hate each other. Both are elderly, and Charles, in his workshop, is building what he claims will be the ultimate coffin, capable of saving the expense of most funerals. The coffin is huge and full of complex mechanical parts. Charles asks to be buried in it when he dies, but his younger brother Richard defies his wishes.

Once Charles is dead and in the ground in a conventional coffin, Richard, out of curiosity, climbs into Charles’s invention. It turns out that the coffin is a machine capable of carrying out all the elements of a funeral and burial service by itself: It slams the lid shut on Charles, and the story from there proceeds just as you might expect.

This tale does not exactly have any unexpected twists, and aside from the mystery of what Charles’s coffin is (which the reader can easily guess), it contains no mystery. Bradbury’s whimsical writing, however, keeps it interesting despite its predictability.

The Pulps: ‘The Torture Pool’

As proof that the pulps are not lightly dismissed, we have a story by MacKinlay Kantor, who later won a Pulitzer for his novel Andersonville. This collection presents his story “The Torture Pool,” which appeared in 1932 in Detective Ficiton Weekly.

Despite the (evetual) credentials of its author, this story returns us to the general status of this collection: Solid, workmanlike, competent, and somewhat forgettable. The last story stood out because it was outrageous. This story, although one of the better ones in the mystery section, is not so outlandishly entertaining.

The story follows a man who runs gift shop in a small, out-of-the-way town that happens to be a tourist spot. His brother had been a hermit who’d amassed a small but respectable fortune through meager living and selling wild herbs, and he had, five years previous, been found dead, apparently killed for his money.

“The Torture Pool” is notable mostly for its atmosphere, capturing as it does the sun-drenched and swampy backwater in which it takes place. Unfortunately, it lacks tension: It follows a cold case, and the killer’s identity is obvious from the beginning. In fact, the story is not about finding out whodunnit but about the protagonist, who already knows whodunnit, finding a creative way to force the killer to confess (the “torture pool” of the title is a pool of quicksand). The climax is a little contrived, but the extensive cultural and environmental details make it engrossing.

The Pulps: ‘Death’s Passport’

This collection contains two stories by Robert Leslie Bellem, unfortunately. Bellem wrote racy work that appeared in so-called “under the counter” pulps, and his sexually charged writing was infamous enough to get a mocking in The New Yorker, where satirist S. J. Perelman skewered his purple prose in the essay “Somewhere a Roscoe,” which is a truly entertaining work if you can find it (The New Yorker has it behind a paywall, but the Internet Archive will let you borrow it).

If you ever have the chance to read Perelman, you will discover some delightful wordplay as well as several snapshots of serial publications before the middle of the last century. But in “Somewhere a Roscoe,” he does not have to employ his usual wit: He simply quotes Bellem repeatedly, and the quotes are sufficiently goofy to supply all the necessary jokes.

The first example of Bellem’s writing in this anthology is easily the better of the two, though it is the worst of the mystery stories. “Death’s Passport” features Bellem’s most famous creation, the hard-boiled and perpetually horny detective Dan Turner. This story appeared in 1940 in Spicy Detective, a pulp dedicated to mystery stories with risqué content and themes. According to Perelman, Spicy Detective published “the sauciest blend of libido and murder this side of the Gille de Rais.” Dan Turner eventually got his own magazine, Hollywood Detective, which ran from 1942 to 1950. There have also been a couple of movies based on Dan Turner—both of them, as far as I can tell, obscure.

As for “Death’s Passport,” it has a good story buried under it, but that good story is covered with a heavy layer of stupid. Turner comes home one night to find a man in his apartment who’s supposed to be dead: Kensington had supposedly attempted a trans-Atlantic solo flight and died in a crash over the ocean, but he had in fact chickened out and sent another man in his place, a man who was murdered by means of a sabotaged plane.

The story features some double-crosses and dangerous femmes fatales. It is most notable for being written in overdone slang so inventive and absurd that this story is reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. While the slang is merely silly, the obligatory sexual elements do damage to an otherwise engaging plot: At one point, Turner follows a woman back to her place and attempts to seduce her, but when she acts distracted, he instantly concludes that she must be the killer—because only a woman who had recently committed murder could possibly be less than enthusiastic about Turner’s affections!

To give some flavor, I’ll give some quotes. Here is a typical example of Dan Turner describing a woman:

She was embellished in a nightgown three shades thinner than watered whiskey and a lot more potent. Through the gossamer material I could tab her various tempting thems and thoses—including a pair of tapered white gams, a set of lyric hips, and a duet of curves that made my fingers tingle up to the elbows. Some damsels are built that way: just looking at them makes you pine for your vanished youth.

In fact, every damsel Turner encounters is built that way. Plain, dumpy, elderly, or fully clothed women simply don’t exist in his universe. Every woman is in her twenties, scantily clad, round in all the right places, and willing.

And every passage, no matter how mundane its contents, contains a barrage of inventive analogies:

I’ll say one thing for Dave Donaldson: when he scents a pinch in the offing he can drive like a maniac. He blooped that sedan up to seventy from a standing start; kicked the everlasting tripes out of it. The yellow-haired Vale cutie shivered against me like a cat coughing up lamb-chops; she must have thought she was headed for the pearly gates. Her even little teeth chattered like pennies in a Salvation Army tambourine.

Admittedly, this is one of the most entertaining stories in the collection, but it’s entertaining in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way. Although this anthology contains no true standouts, most of the stories display the workmanlike style and solid construction that characterized the pulps. Bellem’s work, on the other hand, represents what the pulps have unjustly been remembered for—overwrought prose and exploitative themes.

The Pulps: ‘The Deadly Orchid’

Probably the best of the detective stories in the collection, or at least the most involved, is this one by T. T. Flynn, originally published in Detective Fiction Weekly in 1933. The hard-boiled narrator has been hired to take down the “Orchid,” a seductress and blackmailer, who has incriminating letters that can destroy a banker. Teamed with a female sidekick with a sharp tongue, the narrator has pose as a newlywed and find a way to beat the Orchid at her own game.

The story rides largely on the banter between the characters, especially the narrator and the woman posing as his wife. They fight in the usual manner, displaying mutual exasperation and mutual attraction. The story’s conclusion hinges on some creative devices and a few implausibilities. It makes for entertaining reading, though there are no true surprises.

The Pulps: ‘One Hour’

Dashiell Hammett was one of the pioneers of “hard-boiled” detective fiction and is now considered one of the greatest mystery writers of all time, so this collection rightly includes an example of his work. Hammett led a colorful life, having worked as a Pinkerton agent and later serving a prison sentence for running a Communist front group, and he made considerable contributions not only to literature but to comic strips and film.

“One Hour” stars the Continental Op, one of his recurring characters, a detective working for the fiction Continental Detective Agency. “One Hour” contains a complicated murder mystery, but its gimmick, as suggested by the title, is that the Op solves it in only one hour’s time, mostly by stumbling upon the solution and then engaging in a lengthy battle as he corners the evildoers. Goodstone apparently selected it to showcase the directness and brevity of Hammett’s narration.

The story finds the Op asked to solve a murder committed with a stolen car. Despite the terse description and brief time span, the story is a bit hard to follow as grasping both the mystery itself and its solution requires the reader to keep careful track of certain spatial relationships between streets and buildings. However, its centerpiece is neither the mystery nor its solution but the fistfight at the climax, which fills a full page and a half of a six-page story.

Much as I enjoyed reading this, I can’t help but ask if it’s the best example of Hammett’s work. It’s an early story, published in Black Mask in 1924, and its gimmick makes it feel anticlimactic since the Op solves the mystery with such little legwork, hitting on the answer while still doing the preliminary, routine questioning of witnesses and suspects.

The Pulps: ‘Mr. Alias, Burglar’

As we get into the mystery-story section of The Pulps, we first encounter “Mr. Alias, Burglar” by Ridrigues Ottolengui. Although amusing in a way, it is obviously inspired by Sherlock Holmes and suffers from the defects of some of the worst Sherlock Holmes stories.

The tale opens by introducing Mitchel, a wealthy and extremely self-confident amateur detective who apparently solves murder cases after the typical drawing-room fashion. A man who goes by the name of Alias approaches him and declares that he can rob him without his detection. They agree to bet on this and then go their separate ways, Alias to the work of committing ther robbery and Mitchell to the work of foiling or detecting it.

As Tony Goodstone points out in his brief commentary on this story, it commits the “cardinal sin” of revealing all the clues at the end instead of delivering them throughout the story for the reader to figure out—but it has to do this because there is really no mystery here. Instead, the story features Mitchell mind-reading, predicting the future, and jumping to conclusions, all while pretending that his baseless assumptions are the power of deduction. Much as Holmes leaps to the conclusion that Watson must have been in India because he has a suntan—and turns out to be correct because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have it so—Mitchell precisely guesses when and in what way Alias will perform certain acts, and what his reactions will be to certain phenomena.

The story is entertaining mostly because of the dialogue: In the key scenes, these two men arrogant men, both supposing themselves to be intellectual giants, exchange verbal barbs. Their ripostes are fun to read, but they don’t have nearly the gravity that Ottolengui apparently thought they did.