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Dell Magazines
www.dellmagazines.com
Copyright ©2008 by Dell Magazines
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NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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Cover Illustration by Barry Waldman
CONTENTS
Black Mask: BLACK MASK by Keith Alan Deutsch
Black Mask: EQMM AND BLACK MASK by The Editors
Black Mask: BODIES PILED UP by Dashiell Hammett
Black Mask: TWO THOUSAND VOLTS by Chuck Hogan
Reviews: THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen
Fiction: SANTA WITH SUNGLASSES by William Link
Reviews: BLOG BYTES by Bill Crider
Fiction: THE FIRST HUSBAND by Joyce Carol Oates
Fiction: ONE OF OUR BARBARIANS by Simon Levack
Fiction: NEIGHBOR LAMOUR by John Goulet
Passport to Crime: PETER IN ST. PAUL'S by Sabina Naber
Fiction: THE MOORHEAD HOUSE by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Fiction: A GATEWAY TO HEAVEN by Edward D. Hoch
Fiction: WILSON'S MAN by Doug Levin
Fiction: HIDDEN GIFTS by Steve Hockensmith
NEXT ISSUE...
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Black Mask: BLACK MASK by Keith Alan Deutsch
As publisher and conservator of Black Mask Magazine, it is a great pleasure for me to help return the publication, after more than a thirty-year absence, to the pages of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
Black Mask (1920-1951) introduced the American hardboiled detective to our popular culture in the early 1920s and has influenced magazines and books, radio, movies, television, and every new form of popular entertainment up to this day.
Perhaps even more importantly, particularly in the writing of Dashiell Hammett and later Raymond Chandler, Black Mask Magazine helped change the way American fiction (and literature) was written and paced. Although Hemingway is routinely congratulated for the invention of the terse, “modern” declarative sentence, Gertrude Stein (Hemingway's mentor) made it clear in her book Narration that it was Dashiell Hammett, in his Black Mask work, who originated the modern narrative style. As to pace, as Raymond Chandler often explained, in the Black Mask story, incident and action piled on action were more important than a clear linear plot. A Black Mask tale was hard-hitting and left the reader breathless.
Black Mask Magazine is also famous, of course, for taking mystery stories out of the parlors of polite society and into the dark underworld of the ever-evolving mean streets of the modern metropolis.
Fred Dannay, an original member of the writing team called Ellery Queen, and the founding editor of EQMM, appreciated as much as anyone the importance of Black Mask to the history of the detective story. During the 1940s and 1950s when Dashiell Hammett was out of favor because of his political views, Mr. Dannay helped keep Hammett's Black Mask stories in print in a celebrated series of Dell paperbacks, which he edited and promoted.
After 1951, when Black Mask Magazine stopped publishing in America, Mr. Dannay acquired the title and kept Black Mask alive in the pages of EQMM, introducing the Black Mask Department, which featured a story from Black Mask (or a tale in the Black Mask style) in almost every issue of EQMM.
In 1973, when I was acquiring all the rights to Black Mask (which by that time had been scattered among many different companies), Mr. Dannay was kind enough to pass the Black Mask name and legacy over to me, and the Black Mask Department in EQMM came to an end. And so I end this brief introduction where I began, by stating again my pleasure in helping to bring Black Mask back to the pages of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
Copyright (c) 2007 Keith Alan Deutsch
[Back to Table of Contents]
Black Mask: EQMM AND BLACK MASK by The Editors
What can readers expect from EQMM's newly restored department Black Mask? Selections will include reprints from the original magazine, rediscovered with the assistance of conservator Keith Alan Deutsch, and new stories commissioned and chosen by EQMM's own editors. Since virtually all of contemporary “hardboiled” and “noir” fiction has qualities that can be traced back to the great early contributors to Black Mask, we will consider the full range of the current field to be our domain, with emphasis (when we can find them) on fast-paced stories full of action.
The most important of all the early contributors to Black Mask was Dashiell Hammett, whose stories about his “Continental Op,” during the magazine's first decade, brought him immediate fame. We begin our series with a reprint of one of the most intriguing of the Continental Op stories, “Bodies Piled Up,” a twisty mix of action yarn, gangster tale, and detective puzzle. Though many of his stories (like “Bodies Piled Up") fall squarely within genre fiction, Hammett's authentic characterizations and his uncompromising depictions of American society earned him a place in mainstream literature as well. His work has become the standard beside which the work of crime writers at the so-called “literary” end of the spectrum is judged. In 1992, the International Association of Crime Writers established an award in Hammett's name “for literary excellence in the field of crime writing.” For this first Black Mask issue we have paired our Hammett reprint with a new story by the 2005 winner of that award, Chuck Hogan. Mr. Hogan's “Two Thousand Volts” is a classic example of the “noir” story: a tale about characters who cannot put things right without crossing a dangerous moral boundary, and in which justice, once considered essential to the conclusion of a mystery, has become something admitting shades of gray.
Just as the original Black Mask Magazine was hard-hitting, readers of our new series should expect the tales contained under this banner to be edgy, and sometimes more violent and harsher in language than other EQMM stories. We hope you'll find this expansion of our range of fiction an enhancement to the magazine. We'll be featuring the department every other month, and we've got some treats in store, including several never before published stories by another past master of hardboiled fiction, Mickey Spillane. Stay tuned!
(c)2007 by Keith Alan Deutsch
[Back to Table of Contents]
Black Mask: BODIES PILED UP by Dashiell Hammett
Among the many good collections of the work of Dashiell Hammett is the recently published The Drain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories (Everyman's Library, September 2007) with an introduction by James Ellroy. Also well worth a look is the 2005 collection Lost Stories (Vince Emery Productions), introduced by Joe Gores, which includes some stories never before reprinted in book form.
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The Montgomery Hotel's regular detective had taken his last week's rake-off from the hotel bootlegger in merchandise in-stead of cash, had drunk it down, had fallen asleep in the lobby, and had been fired. I happened to be the only idle operative in the Continental Detective Agency's San Fran-cisco branch at the time, and thus it came about that I had three days of hotel-coppering while a man was being found to take the job permanently.
The Montgomery is a quiet hotel of the better sort, and so I had a very restful time of it—until the third and last day. Then things changed.
I came down into the lobby that afternoon to find Stacey, the assistant manager, hunting for me.
"One of the maids just phoned that there's something wrong up in 906,” he said.
We went up to that room together. The door was open. In the center of the floor stood a maid, staring goggle-eyed at the closed door of the clothespress. Fr
om under it, extending perhaps a foot across the floor toward us, was a snake-shaped ribbon of blood.
I stepped past the maid and tried the door. It was unlocked. I opened it. Slowly, rigidly, a man pitched out into my arms—pitched out backward—and there was a six-inch slit down the back of his coat, and the coat was wet and sticky.
That wasn't altogether a surprise: The blood on the floor had prepared me for something of the sort. But when another followed him—facing me, this one, with a dark, distorted face—I dropped the one I had caught and jumped back.
And as I jumped a third man came tumbling out after the others.
From behind me came a scream and a thud as the maid fainted. I wasn't feeling any too steady myself. I'm no sensitive plant, and I've looked at a lot of unlovely sights in my time, but for weeks afterward I could see those three dead men coming out of that clothespress to pile up at my feet: coming out slowly—almost deliberately—in a ghastly game of “follow your leader."
Seeing them, you couldn't doubt that they were really dead. Every detail of their falling, every detail of the heap in which they now lay, had a horrible certainty of lifelessness in it.
I turned to Stacey, who, deathly white himself, was keeping on his feet only by clinging to the foot of the brass bed.
"Get the woman out! Get doctors—police!"
I pulled the three dead bodies apart, laying them out in a grim row, faces up. Then I made a hasty examination of the room.
A soft hat, which fitted one of the dead men, lay in the center of the unruffled bed. The room key was in the door, on the inside. There was no blood in the room except what had leaked out of the clothespress, and the room showed no signs of having been the scene of a struggle.
The door to the bathroom was open. In the bottom of the bathtub was a shattered gin bottle, which, from the strength of the odor and the dampness of the tub, had been nearly full when broken. In one corner of the bathroom I found a small whiskey glass, and another under the tub. Both were dry, clean, and odorless.
The inside of the clothespress door was stained with blood from the height of my shoulder to the floor, and two hats lay in the puddle of blood on the closet floor. Each of the hats fitted one of the dead men.
That was all. Three dead men, a broken gin bottle, blood.
Stacey returned with a doctor, and while the doctor was examining the dead men, the police detectives arrived.
The doctor's work was soon done.
"This man,” he said, pointing to one of them, “was struck on the back of the head with a small blunt instrument, and then strangled. This one"—pointing to another—"was simply strangled. And the third was stabbed in the back with a blade perhaps five inches long. They have been dead for about two hours—since noon or a little after."
The assistant manager identified two of the bodies. The man who had been stabbed—the first to fall out of the clothespress—had arrived at the hotel three days before, registering as Tudor Ingraham of Washington, D.C., and had occupied room 915, three doors away.
The last man to fall out—the one who had been simply choked—was the occupant of the room. His name was Vincent Develyn. He was an insurance broker and had made the hotel his home since his wife's death, some four years before.
The third man had been seen in Develyn's company frequently, and one of the clerks remembered that they had come into the hotel together at about five minutes after twelve this day. Cards and letters in his pockets told us that he was Homer Ansley, a member of the law firm of Lankershim and Ansley, whose offices were in the Miles Building—next-door to Develyn's office.
Develyn's pockets held between $150 and $200; Ansley's wallet contained more than $100; Ingraham's pockets yielded nearly $300, and in a money-belt around his waist we found $2,200 and two medium-sized unset diamonds. All three had watches—Develyn's was a valuable one—in their pockets, and Ingraham wore two rings, both of which were expensive ones. Ingraham's room key was in his pocket.
Beyond this money—whose presence would seem to indicate that robbery hadn't been the motive behind the three killings—we found nothing on any of the persons to throw the slightest light on the crime. Nor did the most thorough examination of both Ingraham's and Develyn's rooms teach us anything.
In Ingraham's room we found a dozen or more packs of carefully marked cards, some crooked dice, and an immense amount of data on racehorses. Also we found that he had a wife who lived on East Delavan Avenue in Buffalo, and a brother on Crutcher Street in Dallas; as well as a list of names and addresses that we carried off to investigate later. But nothing in either room pointed, even indirectly, at murder.
Phels, the Police Department Bertillion man, found a number of fingerprints in Develyn's room, but we couldn't tell whether they would be of any value or not until he had worked them up. Though Develyn and Ansley had apparently been strangled by hands, Phels was unable to get prints from either their necks or their collars.
The maid who had discovered the blood said that she had straightened up Develyn's room between ten and eleven that morning, but had not put fresh towels in the bathroom. It was for this purpose that she had gone to the room in the afternoon. She had gone there earlier—between 10:20 and 10:45—for that purpose, but Ingraham had not then left.
The elevator man who had carried Ansley and Develyn up from the lobby at a few minutes after twelve remembered that they had been laughingly discussing their golf scores of the previous day during the ride. No one had seen anything suspicious in the hotel around the time at which the doctor had placed the murders. But that was to be expected.
The murderer could have left the room, closing the door behind him, and walked away secure in the knowledge that at noon a man in the corridors of the Montgomery would attract little attention. If he was staying at the hotel he would simply have gone to his room; if not, he would have either walked all the way down to the street, or down a floor or two and then caught an elevator.
None of the hotel employees had ever seen Ingraham and Develyn together. There was nothing to show that they had even the slightest acquaintance. Ingraham habitually stayed in his room until noon, and did not return to it until late at night. Nothing was known of his affairs.
At the Miles Building we—that is, Marty O'Hara and George Dean of the Police Department Homicide Detail, and I—questioned Ansley's partner and Develyn's employees. Both Develyn and Ansley, it seemed, were ordinary men who led ordinary lives: lives that held neither dark spots nor queer kinks. Ansley was married and had two children; he lived on Lake Street. Both men had a sprinkling of relatives and friends scattered here and there through the country; and, so far as we could learn, their affairs were in perfect order.
They had left their offices this day to go to luncheon together, intending to visit Develyn's room first for a drink apiece from a bottle of gin someone coming from Australia had smuggled in to him.
"Well,” O'Hara said when we were on the street again, “this much is clear. If they went up to Develyn's room for a drink, it's a cinch that they were killed almost as soon as they got in the room. Those whiskey glasses you found were dry and clean. Whoever turned the trick must have been waiting for them. I wonder about this fellow Ingraham."
"I'm wondering, too,” I said. “Figuring it out from the positions I found them in when I opened the closet door, Ingraham sizes up as the key to the whole thing. Develyn was back against the wall, with Ansley in front of him, both facing the door. Ingraham was facing them, with his back to the door. The clothespress was just large enough for them to be packed in it—too small for them to slip down while the door was closed.
"Then there was no blood in the room except what had come from the clothespress. Ingraham, with that gaping slit in his back, couldn't have been stabbed until he was inside the closet, or he'd have bled elsewhere. He was standing close to the other men when he was knifed, and whoever knifed him closed the door quickly afterward.
"Now, why should he have been standing in such a position
? Do you dope it out that he and another killed the two friends, and that while he was stowing their bodies in the closet his accomplice finished him off?"
"Maybe,” Dean said.
And that “maybe” was still as far as we had gone three days later.
We had sent and received bales of telegrams, having relatives and acquaintances of the dead men interviewed; and we had found nothing that seemed to have any bearing upon their deaths. Nor had we found the slightest connecting link between Ingraham and the other two. We had traced those other two back step by step almost to their cradles. We had accounted for every minute of their time since Ingraham had arrived in San Francisco—thoroughly enough to convince us that neither of them had met Ingraham.
Ingraham, we had learned, was a bookmaker and all-around crooked gambler. His wife and he had separated, but were on good terms. Some fifteen years before, he had been convicted of “assault with intent to kill” in Newark, N.J., and had served two years in the state prison. But the man he had assaulted had died of pneumonia in Omaha in 1914.
Ingraham had come to San Francisco for the purpose of opening a gambling club, and all our investigations had tended to show that his activities while in the city had been toward that end alone.
The fingerprints Phels had secured had all turned out to belong to Stacey, the maid, the police detectives, or myself. In short, we had found nothing!
So much for our attempts to learn the motive behind the three murders.
We now dropped that angle and settled down to the detail-studying, patience-taxing grind of picking up the murderer's trail. From any crime to its author there is a trail. It may be—as in this case—obscure; but, since matter cannot move without disturbing other matter along its path, there always is—there must be—a trail of some sort. And finding and following such trails is what a detective is paid to do.
In the case of a murder, it is possible sometimes to take a short-cut to the end of the trail by first finding the motive. A knowledge of the motive often reduces the field of possibilities; sometimes points directly to the guilty one.
EQMM, January 2008 Page 1