A gleam came to Vickers’ eyes. “You think this bomb would explode if I played high G sharp on this trombone?”
Quade nodded slowly. “With iodine and ammonia you can make an explosive so sensitive a fly lighting on it will detonate it. Soup’s an expert on explosives. He experimented with this, mixed the stuff in just the right proportions. You can vibrate all you want and nothing will happen. But make a sound in high G sharp—and this house will go up!”
Without a word Vickers went into the bathroom. Quade heard him running the water in the tub and carried in the vase.
A few minutes later they returned to the living-room. “And now,” said Quade, “let’s round up a few people and see what’ll happen.”
Various detectives brought them to Sergeant Vickers’ little apartment on West 46th Street. There was Murdock, president of the Murdock Publishing Company, his secretary Martha Henderson, Al Donnelley and finally—brought in handcuffed to a cop—Soup Spooner himself.
Vickers got them all seated in his apartment, with detectives posted at strategic spots. The chairs, by prearrangement, all faced Sergeant Vickers’ music stand and the mantel piece. A red glass vase was prominent on the mantel piece.
Oliver Quade then took charge of the show. “Folks, you’ve all been brought here because you all had something to do with the death of Billy Bond, a young song writer; one of you committed the actual crime of murder.”
Murdock, pompous as ever, exclaimed, “I demand to be allowed to call my attorney.”
“Later,” said Quade, “and you’ll need him, too. You’re a damn crook, Murdock!”
“You’ll hear from my lawyer about that remark.”
“I don’t doubt it, yet, for the benefit of the other witnesses, I’ll repeat my statement. You’re a crook, Murdock.”
“I’ve got testimonials from hundreds of satisfied clients,” Murdock cut in. “Bona fide testimonials. I can prove—”
“Sure, you can. I could bottle salt water and sell it as a cure for cancer and a certain number of people would write and tell me how it cured their incurable cancer. People are like that. They’re gullible as hell.” Quade grinned crookedly. “And the most gullible of all are would-be song writers. The radio and the movies have made the people in even the most remote sections, song conscious. The words of a song are simple. A million people could write words for a song. And so a million people who read your cleverly worded ads are potential suckers.”
Quade picked up a magazine and turned to the ads. He read: “ ‘Song poems wanted. Fame and fortune may be yours. You write the words. We furnish the music. Big royalties. Murdock & Company, New York City.’”
“A sucker reads that ad,” Quade went on. “He sends you a song poem and you give him a form letter telling him the lyrics are swell and have all the elements of a potential hit. All Mr. Sucker needs with his lyrics is some good music and, by a strange coincidence, you have a famous song writer on your staff who was so impressed with the lyrics he’ll gladly write the music for them—for a mere $50.00.”
Al Donnelley began to squirm in his chair. Murdock snorted. “So what? Al does write the music for some of these—er—would-be song writers. We render a definite service. The small fee isn’t exorbitant. The postal authorities—”
“Okayed you on that, I know. They couldn’t say anything about your publishing enterprise, either. If you can get a few suckers to kick through for a song printing job, well—it’s perfectly legitimate to make eight or nine hundred percent profit on the printing, which you let out to a music printer.”
Murdock shrugged. “I’m listening. You’ll listen when Nick Darcy gets after you.”
“Oh, he’s your lawyer, too! O.K.! So the songs of nine hundred and ninety-nine of these suckers are tripe. But the thousandth song, or maybe it’s the ten thousandth, is a natural. Such a song was one called Cottage By the Shore, submitted by one Billy Bond.”
“All right,” conceded Murdock. “Bond sent me some lyrics. Tripe that he got back. You can’t prove otherwise.”
“I think I can. As it happened, Billy Bond wrote the music for his own song. You couldn’t hook him on that fee, but he fell for your ad, anyway, and sent you the song. Instead of clipping him for a printing fee, you told him the song was no good. You admit that. But it was good. And you knew it. So you changed a word here and there, turned a copy of the thing over to your dummy, Al Donnelley, who took it to Wingate, who in turn published it—adding to the string of song hits already produced by Al Donnelley!”
Al Donnelley opened and closed his mouth. He looked frightened. But over the face of Murdock came a grim look.
Quade went on: “The song was published only a few days ago. When Billy Bond heard it, he recognized it for his own and he came to you and squawked. Said he was going to sue you. You denied stealing his song.”
“Of course I did!” snarled Murdock. “I never even read his tripe.”
Quade proceeded relentlessly: “But Billy Bond sent in an item to The Showman and when you saw that, Murdock, you began to get scared. You could smell trouble, so you sent for Soup Spooner.”
Soup Spooner yawned. “Ho-hum, here we go again!”
Quade shot him a quick look. “Soup killed Billy Bond, then he cut Cassidy, the piano player’s throat, because Cassidy had picked up and taken home Bond’s original manuscript. You, Murdock, didn’t want that to be floating around. You made only one little mistake, Murdock. But you couldn’t help that. Because when Billy Bond first wrote his song, he made two copies.” Quade was making this up fast. “One of them he sent—to Iowa, to his father. It’s dated, and it proves that Al Donnelley’s version, called Cottage By the Sea, is a plagiarism!”
Quade reached into his breast pocket and took out a folded song manuscript. “This,” he said, “is another copy that we happen to have. As someone here knows, it was sent to someone else. I’m going to ask Sergeant Vickers here to play it on his trombone. And I want you all to listen and see for yourselves if it isn’t note for note like Al Donnelley’s Cottage By the Sea.”
He handed the music to Sergeant Vickers and the detective spread it out on his music stand. He picked up his trombone, blew a practice note or two.
Quade was watching Soup Spooner. The chemist-killer’s eyes were fixed carelessly on the red vase on the mantel and there was a mocking smile on his lips. Quade knew suddenly that Soup would not break. He had no nerves. Even though he knew he was within thirty seconds of eternity, that he could not escape it without confessing to two murders, he would say nothing. Soup Spooner was that sort of man.
Sergeant Vickers moistened his lips with his tongue, nodded and blew one note on the trombone.
Martha Henderson screamed. “Stop it! Don’t play!”
Quade stabbed his forefinger at Murdock’s secretary. “Why shouldn’t he play, Miss Henderson?”
“Because I don’t want to hear that song. If a man’s been killed because of it, I—” She trembled violently.
“Nonsense, Martha!” Quade said sharply. “The rest of us want to hear it. Don’t we, Murdock?”
“Go ahead,” said Murdock.
Vickers put the trombone to his lips again. This time he played two notes. Then Martha Henderson catapulted from her chair, heading for the mantel. Quade put out his foot and tripped her.
Martha Henderson hit the floor on her hands, screamed and came up to her knees. “Don’t!” she screamed. “Don’t play! You’ll kill us all and—and I don’t want to die!”
Quade stooped and caught her wrists. “Why not play it, Martha?”
She fought Quade, her eyes constantly on the vase on the mantel. She was completely hysterical now. “Because you’ll kill us. The bomb—if you play, the bomb’ll go off! We’ll blowup!”
Soup said disgustedly, “A dame! The finest chemical experiment I ever made and a dame spoils it!”
“You
r iodine-ammonia bomb, Soup?” Quade asked softly. “It’s already gone down the drain. The vase is empty.”
Murdock, the music racketeer, was slumped in his chair, his eyes popping. “I—I don’t understand all this!”
Quade said, “So, you’re only a crook, Murdock. Not a murderer. You weren’t mixed up in the other. It was Martha Henderson, your trusted secretary. And Al Donnelley.”
Soup said, “Ah, that stuffed shirt! He didn’t know what it was all about. He couldn’t write a song if he had to. Martha slipped him the stuff now and then that he got published. Martha got it from the trash in the office and he cut her in on the profit.” He sniffed. “I shoulda known better than to trust a dame. Jeez! That woulda been swell if he’d played that piece. This whole place woulda gone—boom!”
Frank Gruber,
Hardboiled Humor, &
the Noir Revolution
Frank Gruber (1902–1969) was one of the most successful and prolific writers of the pulp era. At his peak he produced three or four full-length novels a year, many about series characters Johnny Fletcher and his sidekick Sam Cragg. Each year Gruber also wrote numerous short stories, many featuring Oliver Quade, “The Human Encyclopedia,” that is arguably his most warmly remembered series character.
By the late 1930s Gruber had visited Hollywood, and sold the screen rights to Oliver Quade with hopes that a regular series of films would be made (see Gruber’s essay on writing Oliver Quade mysteries in our Behind the Mask feature following the last story in this collection). Unfortunately only one lackluster Quade film was made. However, within a few years, Gruber was writing successful screenplays almost every year, including such major features as The Mask of Dimitrios, Terror by Night (one of two superior Sherlock Holmes scripts for Basil Rathbone), and with his companion and fellow Black Mask contributor, Steve Fisher, the classic noir thriller Johnny Angel. This last film was based on the novel Mr. Angel Comes Aboard by fellow Black Mask writer Charles G. Booth.
Although Gruber had a light touch, and successfully combined humorous characters with authentic hard-boiled milieus, a technique that was a major influence on later mystery writers like Craig Rice, Gruber claimed that he, Steve Fisher, and Cornell Woolrich became great friends at Black Mask and together developed the noir thriller under the brilliant hand of editor Fanny Ellsworth. Ellsworth was the great woman editor of the pulps who took over Black Mask from Captain Joseph Shaw in 1936 and promoted a kind of dark, psychologically centered emotional tale in Black Mask, often of innocent men trapped by fate. Gruber describes his writing friendships in his colorful autobiography, The Pulp Jungle, which is also an informal history of pulp magazines, and the era in which they flourished.
Gruber wrote more than three hundred stories, sixty novels, and more than two hundred television and film scripts, mostly mystery and western tales. Perhaps his most beloved character is Oliver Quade, the Human encyclopedia, whose seemingly infinite knowledge of even the most arcane subjects helps him solve crimes in a long series of pulp stories.
According to an early reminiscence called The Starving Writer, published in The Writer (July 1948), Gruber arrived in New York in 1934 one month after Steve Fisher. They had been corresponding and met up in Ed Bodin’s office; Bodin was literary agent for both friends at the time. Gruber, like Fisher, arrived alone with a typewriter, a suitcase, and a few dollars. As Gruber noted in many reminiscences, “I had one thing else … the will to succeed.” Both Gruber and Fisher shared this powerful desire.
After a few dry months, Fisher and Gruber began to sell the occasional story. In 1936, Fisher married Edythe (Edie) Syme, an editor at Popular Publications, Inc. Gruber and his wife often went to dinner with Fisher and Edie.
By then, Fisher and Gruber had become close friends with Cornell Woolrich with whom they occasionally had dinner on those rare occasions when they were able to sidestep Woolrich’s restrictive, overbearing mother.
Fisher, Gruber, and Woolrich all started to sell to Black Mask after Fanny Ellsworth took over editorial reign. In The Life and Times of the Pulp Story in Brass Knuckles (1966) Gruber claims that he and Fisher managed to take the reclusive Woolrich to a party where they all got drunk. The next day Fanny Ellsworth called Gruber and reported that Woolrich had come tearing into the Black Mask offices threatening never to write for the magazine again because Fisher and Gruber had told him that they were getting three times the word rate for their stories than Fanny was giving Woolrich. Fisher and Gruber had been too drunk to remember the hoax!
Gruber knew Ellsworth well from selling lead rangeland novels to her during the years she ran the very successful, Ranch Romances. Gruber thought Ellsworth an extremely erudite and perceptive editor who could have run The Atlantic Monthly or Harpers. In The Life and Times of the Pulp Story Gruber claims that he introduced Fisher to Ellsworth and helped him break into Black Mask. Both Gruber and Fisher credit Ellsworth with deliberately and perceptively changing the course of the magazine.
It is difficult to remember seventy-five years after the revolution, but Steve Fisher, Cornell Woolrich, and Frank Gruber lead the second wave of Black Mask boys in the late 1930s and ushered in a sea change in crime fiction narration. Fanny Ellsworth, who became editor at Black Mask with a new strategy, favored a change from the objective, hard-boiled writing promoted by Joseph Shaw and the earlier editors of Black Mask to the subjective, psychologically and emotionally heightened writing that came in vogue under her guidance.
This little-noticed shift in style in Black Mask fiction, “The Ellsworth Shift,” led to the creation of the film genre we now know as noir through the writings of Steve Fisher, particularly in his film scripts, and through the novels and short fiction of Cornell Woolrich, whose writings we now also call noir, although the term was originally applied only to film.
This dark new style and psychology in crime fiction narration jumped from magazine and book publications into screenplays, and led in the 1940s to the emergence in Hollywood of the classic age of the noir film thriller.
The obsessive, dreamlike narration favored by Fisher and Woolrich in their tense crime tales was a perfect match for the dark shadows, and frightening, expressive camera angles developed in German and Hollywood horror cinema. Narrative fiction style, and camera photography styles, played against and enriched each other in the development of this new film genre.
In his seminal essay, Pulp Literature: Subculture Revolution in the Late 1930s, from the Armchair Detective published in the 1970s, Fisher was the first to note this paradigm shift in Black Mask fiction. The gifted new woman editor, Fanny Ellsworth, used Fisher, Woolrich, and occasionally Gruber, who also supplied humor to the emotional new mix.
Humor was another taboo under the old Shaw regime. Most effectively through the art of Woolrich and Fisher, Fanny Ellsworth turned the emphasis in Black Mask fiction away from the objective, unemotional, hard-boiled writing style Hammett and the first wave of Black Mask writers introduced to the magazine, and for which Black Mask is celebrated.
Black Mask author William Brandon provides us with the most revealing portrait I know of Joseph Shaw discussing the art of objective writing in the early 1930s when he was at the height of his influence. Brandon recounts many conversations he had with Shaw in his little-known memoir, “Back in the Old Black Mask” (The Massachusetts Review, Winter 1987):
“Shaw wanted action, naturally, as did any right-thinking pulp, but what Shaw wanted most of all was style.
“Objectivity was part of what Shaw meant by style—a clean page, a clean line, an uncluttered phrase.
“Even the illustrations—Shaw called them ‘end pieces’—that Shaw liked were of a certain elegance and were meant to excite the imagination rather than a surface emotion. But traditionally the pulps left nothing to the imagination and the cruder the emotion the better. I think Shaw would have argued for hard and cruel emotion too but I think he felt it was better effected by clean an
d plausible and objective subtlety.”
Brandon makes it very clear that Shaw was not interested in character expressed through psychology, but only as it was expressed through external action.
Shaw didn’t buy any of Brandon’s detective stories, but he introduced him to “Fanny Ellsworth across the hall, a pretty and witty and red-haired young woman who edited Ranch Romances (“Love Stories of the Real West”), and Fanny started buying—at rare intervals—western stories I wrote in what I thought was a humorous vein.”
Fanny was comfortable with complexity in the stories she edited. She liked strong emotion and humor in a story, regardless of its genre.
Shaw was uncomfortable with humor and he mistrusted complexity in his narratives, whether in plot or in psychological states.
By all contemporary accounts, Fanny Ellsworth was one of the great fiction editors of all time. Frank Gruber describes her as one of the brightest, most urbane people he met in New York. Gruber and Steve Fisher both assert that when Fanny Ellsworth took over control of Black Mask she came with a well-mapped vision for a change in the kind of crime fiction the famous magazine would feature.
Ellsworth immediately started to buy stories from Frank Gruber, who wrote lead stories for her Ranch Romances pulp, and also Steve Fisher, who she recognized had a natural talent for expressing strong and complex emotions. She also increased the number of stories she purchased from Cornell Woolrich, who also had a natural way with twisted, pathological emotional states presented in strange, dark, haunted plots.
Ellsworth quickly established a much more subjective, emotionally driven style of crime writing than Shaw. Commentators on Black Mask’s influence on film and popular culture have not often noticed these changes in style and direction.
Certainly, Curt Siodmak’s science fiction noir masterpiece, Donovan’s Brain, the darkest of obsessive, subjective, first person narratives, serialized in Black Mask in 1942, years after Fanny Ellsworth had left, would not have made it into Black Mask if the talents of Fisher (nine stories from August 1937 to April 1939) and of Woolrich (twenty-two original stories from January of 1937 to June of 1944) had not first been let loose on its pages.
Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia Page 41