"So why don't you just flap your wings and fly away?" I suggested. (Wheeler Fortune)
Wheeler isn't exactly a lone-wolf cop, nor does he do all his bantering with women, male suspects, and coroners. He is forever at odds with Sheriff Layers, his superior, who doesn't care for Wheeler's decorum. And in his early capers, he is forever exchanging quips with a sometime partner named Sergeant Polnik, who just may be the stupidest cop in the history of the roman policier. (Yates must have felt sorry for poor dumb Polnik along about 1970; in Burden of Guilt, published that year, he mercifully killed him off.)
Here is a typical Wheeler/Polnik exchange from a 1963 novel:
"Since when did you get around to using all those two-syllable words?"
"So that's what they were?" he said in a respectful voice. "I didn't know, even, the doctor was talking dirty." He edged closer toward me and lowered his voice to a confidential roar. "Say, Lieutenant? What does that 'gamut' mean, exactly?"
"I'd like to explain but I don't think you're old en,geant," I said quickly. . . .
"Lieutenant, how come you know what it means and you got to be at least ten years younger than me?"
"I had a lousy home life," I said. . . . "I want you to stay here, Sergeant. Check the guards on the gate. Find out who was on duty through the night and if they heard or saw anything unusual. Then check the records on Nina Ross. . . ."
"Sure, Lieutenant." The muscles in his jaw stiffened dutifully. "I got just one question. Who is Nina Ross?"
"The girl who was murdered!" I tried hard but I couldn't keep a note of shrill hysteria out of my voice.
"Cheez! You sure had me worried there, Lieutenant. I figured it was maybe the nurse at the reception desk. You know, the old bat who figured 'nut' was a dirty word?"
"Well," I said desperately, "if she gets out of line you can fix her real good—just say 'gamut!' right in her face." (The Girl Who Was Possessed)
And this, finally, is Wheeler in action:
"Drop it, Lieutenant!" he said tensely.
I figured if I did drop it, it probably wouldn't make any difference, he'd still shoot me. So I didn't drop it. He pulled the trigger and a split second later the room exploded in front of my eyes.
My reflexes got to work belatedly, and I pressed the trigger of my own gun; then pressed it twice more. .
Williams still leaned against the door, but his gun was on the floor. [He] was dying, and dying fast.
I felt the top of my head and my fingers got wet. I explored cautiously and decided the slug from his gun had ploughed a furrow across the top of my scalp. Close enough to hurt, but no more than that. One inch lower, and I would have been a bad verse on a chunk of granite. (The Victim)
Thus Al Wheeler.
Add him up with Kethridge, Price Price, and Steve Conway, and you have a composite of the American cop as portrayed by crime writers in the United States over the past fifty-odd years. It is a composite that gives one pause to reflect.
Is it any wonder police officers tend to get upset when you ask them if they read mystery novels?
4. The Saga of the Risen
Phoenix
Norma Goold was the most beautiful corpse Allen Starke had ever beheld. When he had seen her, lithe and young and magnetically compelling, doing her number at The Gayety burlesque house a few hours previously, he had understood his friend Paul Cloud's infatuation with her. And even in death the power she had over men continued.
Paul Cloud, and his whole family with him, was drawn into the net of suspicion spread as a result of Norma's violent demise. So was Paul's fiancée, and the playboy backer of The Gayety, and an Italian gambler who had known La Goold when her name had been plain Marcella Cadorna. And before it all ended, Allen wished he had never left Kentucky's peaceful blue grass for New Orleans.
—Jacket blurb for
Death for the Lady,
by Stewart Vanderveer, Phoenix Press
Once upon a time, in the kingdom of New York, there was a publishing company called Phoenix Press.
Like many others born during the Great Depression, Phoenix was a lending-library publisher, which is to say that it grew up in a very tough and competitive neighborhood and was often forced to fight for survival with other lending-library publishers—Godwin, Greenberg, Arcadia—that operated in the same ghetto. Phoenix's parentage is unknown. Perhaps it had no parentage in the conventional sense; perhaps it simply sprang from the ashes of some defunct flapper-era publisher, youthfully alive and functional, ready to do battle in the marketplace. Such is the stuff of legends and fairy tales.
But Phoenix Press was stronger and more dedicated than the other lending-library publishers, and soon it surpassed them all to become the strongest in the kingdom. Guided by the keen eyes and iron hearts of its two chief editorial wizards, Emmanuel Wartels and Alice Sachs, it produced more mysteries, Westerns, and light romances during the thirties and forties than any other house. It was surely the monarch of all lending-library publishers everywhere.
This, however, was not its greatest distinction. Rather, it is the fact that in less than twenty years, Phoenix published almost as many wonderfully bad novels as all the other publishers combined.
The reason behind this remarkable achievement was an unstinting devotion to the principles of capitalistic free enterprise. Or to put it another way, it was a matter of greed. Phoenix published a large quantity of books and yet paid absolute minimum royalties to its writers. In an article for the Writer's 1941 Year Book, novelist and screenwriter Steve Fisher says that he received the handsome sum of $125 for all rights to his first novel, Spend the Night, in 1935. Rates escalated dramatically to $300 for all rights—and even to $500 for some of Phoenix's more prolific contributors—in the late thirties; where they remained for many years to come. This policy of paying rock-bottom prices allowed Phoenix to buy manuscripts that had been rejected by the major publishers and by some of the other lending-library outfits as well. And the preponderance of these manuscripts were, to put it in charitable terms, only marginally publishable by most standards. Thus, by a combination of design and accident, were so many classics given life in the kingdom.
Perhaps providentially, the reign of the Phoenix was fated to be short. It had barely reached the age of legal majorityeighteen–when rising printing costs, the paperback boom of the early fifties, and the closing of a substantial percentage of small lending-library outlets toppled the Phoenix empire into the ashes from whence it came. This is not to say that it died; it was denied the noble end of death. Instead it was consolidated with Arcadia House, one of its archrivals, under the Arcadia imprint in 1952. Even its primary editorial wizard, Alice Sachs, was absorbed in the merger and assumed command of Arcadia's line of Westerns and (increasingly fewer) mysteries until the early sixties. Ms. Sachs even managed to survive an outright sale of the firm at that time, when it underwent another metamorphosis into Lenox Hill Press; she rather amazingly continues to the time of this writing as Lenox Hill's senior editor, holding forth at the same old Phoenix address in New York City, 419 Fourth Avenue, and still buying light romance fiction. (Lenox Hill—not to be confused, incidentally, with the academic publisher of the same name—has never published a regular mystery line and abandoned its long-standing series of Westerns in 1975. Still, the company manages to survive as the last link to a vanished era and a vanished publishing kingdom—the sole heir to what was once a lending-library fortune.)
Be all of this as it may, the Phoenix legacy—and the Phoenix mystique—of the thirties and forties is still with us today: the books themselves. Even though an average of only two thousand copies of each title were printed, and most surviving books have library date stamps; card pockets; borrowers' signatures; coffee and other, stranger stains; dog-eared pages; pages defaced by scatological graffiti disguised as readers' comments; or any combination of these, copies of most titles turn up fairly often in secondhand bookstores and on mail-order book dealers' lists. As do the cheap but durable paperback reprint
editions of several Phoenix titles published just prior to and during World War II by such ephemeral outfits as Atlas, Black Cat, Bleak House, Hangman's House, Tech House, and Novel Selections, Inc. (which published Mystery Novel Classic, Mystery Novel of the Month, Western Novel of the Month, Adventure Novel of the Month).
Phoenix books were surprisingly well packaged. Dust jackets sported attractive artwork, the paper was of good quality, and there were relatively few typographical errors. In their early years, they even used a distinctive colophon for their mysteries, which depicted a smiling Grim Reaper carrying a large scythe cleverly drawn so that it was also a question mark. To read irony into this by speculating that Alice Sachs and her cohorts knew just what sort of books they were unleashing on an unsuspecting public would seem to be a misinterpretation. Such matters as colophon and editorial selection appear to have been guileless.
The total number of novels to appear under the Phoenix imprint probably approaches one thousand, with a full third of those being mysteries. Not all of that third can properly be termed alternative classics; even Phoenix Press was not that awesome. But the number that do achieve classic status are quite high—and there are a great many near-misses.
Most Phoenix mysteries, classic and nonclassic alike, were written by unknowns; a high percentage, in fact, are first novels. Consider this glittering partial array of heretofore unrecognized talent: M. G. MacKnutt, E. Spence de Puy, and Virginia van Urk—no doubt pseudonyms adopted by writers who had read other Phoenix books; Arville Nonweiler, K. Alison La Roche, H. Donald Spatz, Helen Joan Hultman, Kelliher Secrist, Oliver Keystone, H. W. Sandberg, M. W. Glidden, L. Morningstar, Gilbert Eldredge, Stewart Vanderveer, Saul Levinson, Addison Simmons, Amelia Reynolds Long, Paul H. Dobbins, Wallace Reed, Minna Bardon, and Robert Portner Koehler.
At least two Phoenix "discoveries" did go on to make names for themselves, in and out of the genre. Soft-cover spy novelist Edward S. Aarons sold his first three mysteries here, under his Edward Ronns pen name—the only three of his early novels he refused to allow to be reissued in modern paperback; he evidently did not want to answer to his public for such youthful sins as The Corpse Hangs High and Murder Money. And well-known editor, publisher, author, and bibliophile William Targ published his only novel with Phoenix, a collaboration with Lewis Herman entitled The Case of Mr. Cassidy (1939).
Established writers were also permitted in the Phoenix stable, of course, always provided that they came cheap. Among this group are:
Robert Leslie Bellem, whose highly idiomatic pulp work was immortalized in an article by humorist S. J. Perelman and who is being given further recognition later in these pages; his only hard cover novel, Blue Murder, was a 1938 Phoenix selection.
Harry Stephen Keeler, the once-popular "wild man" of the mystery, who seems to have been cheerfully daft and whose plots defy logic and the suspension of anyone's disbelief; several of his later novels found a proper home at 419 Fourth Avenue.
Noel Loomis, Mack Reynolds, and William McLeod Raine, each with a single criminous book. Their efforts are testimony to the fact that writers of some prominence in other genres are not always well advised to try the mystery form.
Another interesting facet of Phoenix mysteries was their unique and enticing titles. For example, we have The Case of the Little Green Men, The Case of the 16 Beans, The Case of the Barking Clock, The Case of the Six Bullets, and The Case of the Deadly Drops. Then we have Corpse in the Wind, The Corpse Came Calling, The Corpse Came Back, The Corpse at the Quill Club, and The Corpse With Knee-Action. Next we have Murder Goes to Press, Murder Goes South, Murder Is a Gamble, Murder Is an Art, Murder on Beacon Hill, Murder in the Stratosphere, Murder at Pirate's Head, Murder at Horsethief, Murder at Coney Island, Red-Hot Murder, The House Cried Murder, The Hooded Vulture Murders, and the provocative Murder Does Light Housekeeping. And finally we have Death After Lunch, Death in the Night, Death in the Dunes, Death on the Cuff, Death Paints a Picture, Death Gets a Head, Death ala King, Death Walks Softly, and Tread Gently, Death.
No one has come across it yet, but there has to be a Phoenix book somewhere called The Case of the Corpse Who Was Murdered to Death.
Are there truly memorable detectives, professional and amateur, in Phoenix mysteries? Yes indeed. Nowhere else in crime fiction will you find such heroic figures as:
Duke Pizzatello, a roscoe-packing, gasper-puffing private dick known to friends and enemies alike as "the wop," who enjoys getting next to dames almost as much as he enjoys knocking off gunsels with a roscoe that stutters: "Chud-chudchud-chudf' (Blue Murder, by Robert Leslie Bellem)
Paul Plush, a Latin professor in a girls' school, who stumbles on some poison-pen letters and is nearly poisoned by a murderer, not to mention the poison pen of the author. (Oliver Keystone's Arsenic for the Teacher)
Blackie White, a 5-foot-2-inch private detective "with a body like a tank and the eyes of a baby," who says things like "Holy suffering mother-in-laws!" when he's excited. (Philip Johnson's Hung Until Dead)
Sheila Coates, a redheaded taxi dancer who is visited by a corpse and subsequently finds true love—not, fortunately, with the corpse. (Clinton Bestor's The Corpse Came Calling)
Bill King of the San Francisco Times, who wisecracks his way to the solution of the murder-by-the-severing-of-an-artery in-the-victim's-leg. Why such an odd method of murder? The author doesn't explain it adequately, perhaps because he was something of a knee-jerk writer. (The Corpse with Knee-Action, by B. J. Maylon)
Thibault Parew, amateur sleuth and authority on international affairs, archeology, aviation, science, criminology, music, painting, drama, liquor, women, counterespionage, and the well-turned phrase. His favorite saying is "By the shades of the sorrowing Aphrodite!" He also says "Deuced pretty take-off," and "You're beauteous, my dear, and extremely lovely," while solving a couple of impossible (very impossible) murders in a locked airplane. (Murder in the Stratosphere, by Gilbert Eldredge)
The Ramsay twins, Dee and Jon, "a pair of willful romanticists," who get to the bottom of some murders in Wisconsin and run afoul of such personages as Body-Finder Gillicuddy and Mr. Doppner, who has "wet macaroni for a backbone." Dee is a housewife of considerable Gothic idiocy; Jon is a university professor whose master's thesis was called Stuttering & Tics. (Aryule Nonweiler's Murder on the Pike)
Margaret Annister, who gets involved with such characters as political boss Criocan Mulqueeny, Chinese xylophonist Ichabod Tsung, gang leader "Gorilla" Svenson, obstetrician Dr. Feredaigh Ovenu, and a monster with "a common evolutionary organ" we later discover to be his little finger—and still manages, unlike the reader, to emerge unshaken by her experiences. (The Case of the Mysterious Moll, by Harry Stephen Keeler)
The plots of Phoenix mysteries, too, are unusually interesting. Take the following, for instance:
Robert D. Abrahams's Death in 1-2-3. Murder strikes the New York consulate of a small South American republic, and there develops such inspired stuff as secret societies and daggers with coded numbers engraved on them. The story is narrated in the present tense by a private eye who has all the wit and charm of Calvin Coolidge, and that nobody leaves the consulate for more than three pages at a time or does much except talk only adds to the fun. In no other mystery can you read until page 73, skip to page 203, and feel that you haven't missed a single plot thread.
Louis Trimble's Murder Trouble. A slam-doozy (as they used to say) about headless corpses, corpseless heads, a hero who prefers to spend his wedding night digging up dead people, a dynamited outhouse on a snowy winter's eve (I wouldn't take that sitting down), and the smuggling of nylon stockings across the Washington state border from Canada.
Murder with Long Hair, by one-time radio writer H. Donald Spatz. All that needs to be said about this one is to quote the dust-jacket blurb: "Steve Daniels and his beautiful blonde bride attended a summer stock performance in the Poconos starring Jessica Sanford and were invited by Jessica's friend, editor Edison Cushing, to join his house party, where Jess
ica was found drowned in the lily pond."
The Case of Mr. Cassidy, by William Targ and Lewis Herman. In which amateur criminologist and "connoisseur of incunabula" Hugh Morris becomes enmeshed with bibliophiles (one of whom is renowned writer and Sherlockian Vincent Starrett), a first edition of Poe's Tamerlane, and a "notorious and uncaptured Chicago throat-cutter" called the Fiend. As detective Morris says about the atmosphere of a certain nightclub: "It's an illusion, like the slowed-up speed in a marijuana dream. It's all an enormous hashheesh hallucination, blossoming with gorgeous non-existent blossoms, fragrant with odors unknown to any perfumer, sonant with the crashing, melodic chords of a thousand piece orchestra, peopled with moon-breasted houris reclining languorously on cloud-quilted divans." It certainly is.
Robert Portner Koehler's Murder Expert. A gaggle of mystery writers, including the female narrator (males without the talent of a Cornell Woolrich should never try to write first-person females), are gathered at a party, and some of them are subsequently murdered in various ways. It is not so stated, but one gets the impression that each of the victims wrote for Phoenix Press.
The Purple Pony Murders, by Sidney E. Porcelain. Characters with such names as Breeze, Clay, and Kite populate this thrilling racetrack yarn, which has a little bit of everything, including French lessons (" 'Oui. Always eet waz Martini and Creme Yvette een ze leetle ponee avec biscuits.' ") and a couple of the most improbable horse races ever run ("Murder is like a horse race. You start out with a lot of suspects, you look into their records, but you never are sure which one of them is the winner, or as it happens, the murderer. A dark horse you didn't think of might be the one who crosses the line!")
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