Red Death: Murder at Maneuvers (1938), by Royce Howes

Royce Bucknam Howes (1901-1973) wrote eight detective novels, but he was better-known in his day for his journalism.  Born in Minneapolis, he briefly attended the University of Minnesota before serving in a National Guard regiment in World War One.  He joined the Detroit Free Press in 1927, rising to become the newspaper's editorial director. During World War Two he headed the Army News Service, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Milo Radulovich

In 1953 the United States Air Force brought dismissal proceedings against Air Force Reserve Lieutenant Milo J. Radulovich, claiming that his father and sister had Communist sympathies.  Howes and the Free Press took up the cause of Radulovich, who was a native of Detroit, prompting the Deputy Inspector General of the Air Force to pay a visit to the Free Press bosses, where, according to Howes, he informed them that "the newspaper would be well advised to stop championing the Reservist's cause."  At a hearing Lieutenant Radulovich was stripped of his commission.

Despite pressure from the Air Force, however, Radulovich's case was taken up by no less than CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, who aired the story on his popular See It Now program.  A month after the program aired, Radulovich was reinstated.

Over half a century later the Radulovich affair (and Murrow's part in it) was dramatized in the Oscar-nominated film Good Night, and Good Luck (2005).

In 1955 Howes won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing for his editorial "The Cause of a Strike," which analyzed the responsibility of both labor and management for an unauthorized strike that sidelined 45,000 Chrysler workers.

So you can see that mystery writing was rather a lesser matter for Howes.  Yet mystery writing is what we do here at the blog of The Passing Tramp, so herewith is a consideration of Royce Howe's fifth detective novel, Murder at Maneuvers, which offers some interesting sidelights on the Radulovich affair that was to come fifteen years later.

Though the novel is under 80,000 words, it took me a good while to finish Maneuvers, not because it is a bad detective novel but because it is not all that an engrossingly-told one.  It is rich neither in material clues, rounded characters nor colorful settings.  However, when I finished the book I had to admit it was competently put together.

The book details the fallout from the fatal shooting of a Soviet military officer, General Damoff, observing summer maneuvers at an arming training camp, Camp Waller.  Howes' series detective, police captain Ben Lucias (Maneuvers is the third Captain Ben Lucias mystery), is at Camp Waller as the guest of the commander, Colonel Deyo Opper, an old friend of his from their days serving with U. S. forces in the Philippines.

Opper functions fitfully as a Watson figure and is fairly entertaining.  There are five additional army officer characters, who are not all that distinguishable, aside from Lucias' martinet antagonist, Major Hovek.  Also playing important roles in the novel are two men and two women who are partners in a local speak-easy, where the officers go to drink hard liquor in this "local option" county.

Two of the speakeasy proprietors, Leo Brusiloff and his sister Marie, turn out to be Communists. Howes' attitude to Communism, as reflected by his characters in the novel, is interesting.  He views American Communists as harmless cranks and many Soviet Communists as admirable people. Lucias and "good" characters in the novel repeatedly dismiss the Communist threat to the United States, while "bad" characters foolishly fulminate against the Red Menace, sounding like Joe McCarthy prototypes.

Here's Lucias on Leo Brusiloff:

Brusiloff is what you'd all a Red.  Probably harmless enough and doesn't do anything but sit around talking about world revolutions and the bosses.  He's the kind that gives professional patriots a fat living and preachers something to talk about when they run out of ideas.

After reading these words it's pretty easy to see Howes taking on McCarthy in the 1950s.

And here's Lucias on the deceased General Damoff:

He told himself again that he would like to get the fellow who killed Damoff....The general had seemed to be a fine man, and he certainly had been a remarkably good physical specimen.  To Lucias it seemed particularly grievous that a big, staunchly molded man such as Damoff should come to his end by a bullet in the back.

Although this is not a richly clued mystery, there are clever dodges involving guns and motivations and I especially enjoyed the final chapter, where Lucias explains all in a classic English drawing room denouement (though it takes place in Camp Waller visitors' bureau). In the end, I would say I enjoyed Murder at Maneuvers enough to seek out more of the genre work by this interesting author.

Paperback Novelties: Dread Journey, by Dorothy B. Hughes

Here's an unusual paperback from 1947, Pocket Books' edition of Dorothy B. Hughes psychological thriller Dread Journey (1945).  I'll be reviewing this train mystery later this week (a book review of another mystery will be uploaded later today).

How often do we see African-Americans on crime fiction paperbacks in the 1940s and 1950s.  Experts, help me out here!

In this case I think the most striking individual is the African-American railway porter.  His glance at the couple directs attention to them (and particularly the woman's fearful reaction to what she sees in the passenger compartment), but he holds attention in his own right.

a Pullman porter

The depiction of the porter on this paperback seems quite a ways off from what we were getting with portrayals of African-Americans in such forties films as the Charlie Chan mysteries, for example. Superb artwork, I think, one of the classiest paperback covers from the era that I have seen (does it remind anyone else a bit of Mexican mural art?).

On African-American porters see this interesting article by article by Lawrence Tye, author of the book Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class (2004).

Paperback Novelties: Criminal Menace

I often check out Killer Covers, out of my fascination with pop culture as represented by old crime fiction paperbacks. At the risk of intruding on this blog's territory a bit, here are four 40s/50s cover variations on the theme of menace.

Kill and Tell, by Howard Rigsby (1951; Pocket Book edition 1953)

Dramatic cover of an attractive woman menaced in telephone booth.  The color red calculatedly highlights the woman's lips and breasts.

All we see of the man is a hand, but that's enough, along with the terror in the woman's eyes, to convey menace.

The Scarlet Slippers, by James M. Fox (1952; Dell edition 1953)

Here we have a live woman (bosom) and, presumably, a dead one (legs).  Again the color red, along with turquoise blue, is present to highlight features of female anatomy (and the scarlet slippers themselves are a fetish object).

Off to the side we have another menacing male, this time depicted in full. But here we sense from the man a calm and cool menace, as suggested by that cigarette, which he smokes with such an air of laconic arrogance.

Is he a detective? Blackmailer? Murderer?

Dead as a Dummy, by Geoffrey Homes (aka The Hill of the Terrified Monk) (1943; Bantam edition 1949)

Note first the change to a pithier, alliterative title.  Here the object of menace is a man, except....get a load of what he's holding.

That's no dame, that's a dummy!  And what a dummy!

Note: Geoffrey Homes was the pseudonym of Daniel Mainwaring (1902-1977), best known for the novel Build My Gallows High (1946), adapted by Mainwaring into the classic noir film Out of the Past (1947).

The Judas Cat, by Dorothy Salisbury Davis (1949, Bantam edition 1951; recently reviewed by John Norris)

Here the woman (in red) is being shielded by a man. There's not immediate menace, but it may be out there, reflected in the glare of the man's flashlight.

The man and woman are investigating as a team. The man is gentler looking then many of his fellows on crime paperbacks, with a flashlight in his hand rather than a (ahem!) rod. It's significant, I think, that this is the only book of the four that was written by a woman.  I think the artist was trying to appeal to more of a female readership with this cover.

Note too this is the only book of the four that bothers to carry a critical blurb on the cover (this approach is carried on in the back, where, under the headline NEWCOMER RATED TOPS, we find critical blurbs from our old friends --see previous blog pieces--Judge Lynch of the Saturday Review, Anthony Boucher and Craig Rice).

I wonder which cover most appeals to you?

"Such stories have a tendency to create a bad impression of the Chinese people" Yee Gow Suen on A. E. Apple's Mr. Chang Crime Tales

In 1931, Yee Gow Suen of Dermott, Arkansas wrote a letter to Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine, one of the premier publishers of pulp crime fiction between the wars, complaining about the Mr. Chang stories of Detective Story Magazine mainstay writer A. E. Apple.  The letter was published in the January 2, 1932 issue:

jacket to one of the two
collections of Mr. Chang tales
published by Chelsea House
Street & Smith's publishing imprint

Dear Editor: There is not any doubt in my mind that Mr. Apple is a great writer.  But his imagination is too broad with the facts.  The things he describes in his hop-joint [a place where people gather to smoke opium-TPT] story are not true, because no such things exist in this country.  

Why does Mr. Apple always place a Chinese in a villain role, with a desire to trap an American girl? Such stories have a tendency to create a bad impression of the Chinese people.  His Rafferty stories are clean and great.

Your other authors are grand.  Tell them to keep up the good work.  Hope you will forward a copy of this letter to Mr. Apple, and also print it in the chat.  I am

"A Chinese Who Knows"

The editor did indeed forward Apple a copy of the letter, and Apple's reply was printed in the same issue.

Apple assured Suen that he knew many Chinese people and believed "them to be the most honest of races." He noted that he had introduced the character of Doctor Ling, a Chinese detective employed by "honest Chinese merchants" to pursue and "eliminate Mr. Chang as a blot on their race."

The villainous Mr. Chang, Apple asserted, merely "happened to be Chinese; no matter what other race he might have been, there would have been objections from that race."

Apple claimed "Mr. Chang just
happened to be Chinese...."

According to the publisher the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, which reprints a great deal of older crime fiction, Elmer Albert Apple (the initials of the first two names were transposed in his pseudonym) was born in Cleveland, Ohio and moved to Toronto, Canada, where he married and had one child.  The family later moved to the district of Muskoka, Canada, where Apple did his writing "in a shed in the back of the house which he called the jail."

Apple ended the Mr. Chang series in 1931.  In his letter to Suen, Apple mentions having suffered from a "long illness."  In fact, he stopped writing entirely about this time, though he lived into the 1950s.

There is more on Apple and his fiction here, on the Battered Silicon Box website, which has reprinted his pulp fiction.

Suen thought Apple's "imagination
was too broad with the facts,"
resulting in stories that unjustly
portrayed Chinese people

The Mr. Chang series gets no less than four full pages of coverage in Bill Pronzini's classic survey of bad crime fiction, Gun in Cheek (1982).

Pronzini writes that the Mr. Chang stories overflow with "hilarious logic....insane coincidences, incredible situations, a crazy quilt of plot devices, Abbott and Costello characters, and a cathode-ray device 'resembling a three-circuit nonregenerative radio' that is capable of killing people at thirty feet, can be strapped on the back and used portably as long as the wearer carries a very long electrical cord with him, and is known among other appellations as the Crime Ray, the Death Ray and the Murder Machine."*

*(Gun in Cheek is not in print currently, but you can and should find a second hand copy)

The Mr. Chang stories are also discussed by Robert Sampson in Volume Three of his fascinating Yesterday's Faces (1987) series of volumes on crime fiction of the past.

Apple's Rafferty series, which Yee Gow Suen in contrast with the Chang tales enthusiastically praised as "clean and great," is about a character whom the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box designates as the "Raffles of Canada."

Today Demott, Arkansas, is a town of about 2800 people, about a four hours drive from Memphis, Tennessee.  It has been noted for having, back between the wars, a small but significant population of Jewish businesspeople.

It would be interesting to find out more about Yee Gow Suen, a Chinese-American who loved American pulp crime fiction but clearly not its racist aspect.  According to arkansasgravestones, he was born in 1903 and died in Dermott, where he and his wife owned a store, in 1991.  The Arkansas Delta: Land of Paradox (1996) mentions Dermott as one of the delta towns still having a Chinese grocery in the 1990s.  For more on this subject, see this interesting article, "Mississippi Bok Choy: Telling the Stories of Chinese American Groceries in the South."

Mysteries Unlocked (2014): Essays in Honor of Douglas G. Greene

Mysteries Unlocked now has an Amazon page.

As you know if you regularly read this blog, this book, scheduled for publication in July, is a collection of essays in honor of the seventieth birthday of Professor Douglas G. Greene, biographer of the great Golden Age detective novelist John Dickson Carr, head of Crippen & Landru Publishers and one of the most accomplished and admired figures in mystery genre criticism over the last thirty-five years.

Incidentally, there will be an electronic version.

Here is a list of the additional contributors (with links to blogs, etc.), in alphabetical order:

Sergio Angelini
Mike Ashley
Mauro Boncompagni
Jon L. Breen
John Curran
Michael Dirda
Martin Edwards
Roger Ellis
Joseph Goodrich
Julia Jones
Marvin Lachman
Peter Lovesey
Jeffrey Marks
Tom Nolan
Patrick Ohl
Boonchai Panjarattanakorn
B. A. Pike
William Ruehlmann
Jack Seabrook
Steven Steinbock
Helen Szamuely
Henrique Valle
David Whittle

A lot of fellas here, I know, but we do have essays that cover Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers (2), Margery Allingham (2), P. D. James, Jill Paton Walsh, Craig Rice (yes, Craig's a she) and Carolyn Wells.  Not to mention essays on Thomas Hanshew, Max Rittenberg, J. S. Fletcher, John Dickson Carr (2, plus he gets mentioned a lot elsewhere, believe me), Anthony Berkeley Cox, Edmund Crispin, Patrick Quentin (a conglomerate name that for a time included two women writers), Hake Talbot, T. S. Eliot, Fernando Pessoa, Raymond Chandler, Fredric Brown, Ross Macdonald, Ellery Queen, Rene Reouven, the Detection Club and Doug Greene himself of course.*

*(additionally Jon L. Breen writes about a raft of ten forgotten mystery short story writers)

Also, I am pleased to note that, with ten U. S. contributors, we are not exclusively a U. S. crew by any means.  Admiration for Doug's work and the mystery fiction he has written about and published extends across the globe.

I will be posting the full table of contents soon.

Wedding From Hell: Unidentified Woman (1943), Mignon Eberhart

Poor Victoria Steane!  Her wedding was all set to go, when, just two days before she was to make her walk down the aisle all dressed in white, there were two murders on the grounds of her gorgeous family country estate, regally situated amidst Florida pine trees and palmettos. And it turns out Victoria is the lead suspect in the crimes!

Nifty jacket of the American first edition showing Victoria Steane on
the spine and a shocking scene that tales place  near the end of the novel

Along with mystery, romance constitutes the lifeblood of Mignon Eberhart novels; and weddings, either impending or recently concluded, are common features of her books. Sometimes the heroine has just married and is having doubts, while sometimes, as in Unidentified Woman, she is about to get married and having doubts.  Murder puts her through her paces, but somehow by the end of the novel not only is she out of legal jeopardy but her romantic situation is settled--happily ever after.

1940s Dell mapback laying out
the scene of the crimes

In Unidentified Woman, protagonist Victoria Steane, lovely lumber mills heiress, has recently evaded prosecution for murder in the drowning death of Henry Frame, her late father Victor's "trusted employee and closest friend," who happened to be massively embezzling from the estate.  It is now generally believed that Frame's death was either accident or suicide.

Seemingly exonerated after this ordeal, Vicky is on the verge of marrying Michael Bayne, an office manager in the Steane Mills--though she's having doubts--when death again strikes on the Steane estate.

Twice in one night, actually!  The titular "unidentified woman" is found drowned in the river like Frame was and someone very close to Vicky is found strangled in the estate's pump house.

John Campbell, the former State's Attorney who had threatened Vicky with prosecution, now is in the army (war seems imminent) and, it appears, in love with Vicky.  But there is a new State's Attorney who is out to charge her not just with one murder, but three!  How does Vicky get out of this mess?  Not without having to deal with yet more violent death on the Steane estate, that's for sure.

Anthony Boucher picked Unidentified Woman as one of his twenty favorite mystery novels form 1943 and I must say it's a good example of an Eberhart mystery.  There's a nicely-conveyed setting in Florida--a first, I believe, for Eberhart at this time--a complex plot and not too much love stuff for this male reader (the author in some of her books has a tendency to make them almost more romance novels than mysteries).  Additionally, there's an amusing character in Vicky's teen aged second cousin, Agnew Isham, who does a bit of sleuthing (I also liked Agnew's widowed mother Bessie and her erratic attire).

Often in her books Eberhart falls back on the romance formula of a beautiful young woman who is strangely bereft of friends and family (except maybe an aunt somewhere). Here there's lots of family, as well as a housekeeper, a butler, a cook, a maid and a gardener, all on a fine country estate. We could almost be reading an English Golden Age mystery.

My only real complaint is that I don't feel the book is really fair play. We can't really "solve" the mystery until there's an information dump near the end, or so it seems to me. Nevertheless, Unidentified Woman is a satisfying tale of murder, mystification and emotional tension--one that would film well too.

There is a Return: Anita Blackmon's Adelaide Adams Mysteries Are Back

Adelaide Adams, one of the best "nosy spinster" mystery protagonists from the 1930s is back in print after seventy-five years.  Arkansas author Anita Blackmon's two Adelaide Adams detective novels, Murder a la Richelieu (1937) and There Is No Return (1938), have been reprinted by Coachwhip and are available through Amazon (by the way, if you are searching for Anita Blackmon by name on Amazon, note that she is NOT the author of the erotic novels by a modern author of the same name that are being offered on that website).

These are very enjoyable books by a very interesting woman (see my previous blog piece here).  If you enjoy Mary Roberts Rinehart, Mignon Eberhart and Leslie Ford, you should enjoy Anita Blackmon. In both books there is also a five-page introduction by me, which I adapted from my blog article.