Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 12/01/10

by Dell Magazines

“Tell you what,” she said, after a minute. “You can come with me. Confirm it for yourself.”

  Not a situation you encounter every day. Nick made a phone call after she left.

  Nick also made a quick trip to his office, one eye out for Charlie, and counted out five grand from the safe.

  She called him from the garage just before midnight.

  And now here they are in a hotel room in The Plaza, and Charlie, who’d bumbled getting his gun out, is dead on the floor.

  “Well, Nick,” says Lucille. “You got anything for me?”

  Nick hands over the envelope with the five G’s. With this business about Charlie cleared up, Nick’s anxious to see where things might go from here.

  She puts the envelope Nick has given her in the bag, saying, “Thanks again, Nick. I’ve got something for you too.” And she pulls out Charlie’s .38, while Nick is still thinking about what Lucille will look like without her clothes on, and gives him two quick ones in the head.

  Walter set up the meeting at Wolfgang Puck’s again, a three-hour layover this time, before Lucille’s connection back to New York. Perfect timing. Everything humming along with the precision of a Swiss watch.

  It’s that way with everything Walter arranges.

  Well . . . almost everything.

  “So how’d it go?”

  He’s already handed her the envelope with the ten G’s in it. She’s already tucked it safely into the Coach bag, not bothering to count it, or even take a look at it. She knows it’s all there.

  “Almost like you’d planned,” she says.

  Walter raises an eyebrow. “Almost?”

  “Nick didn’t make it.”

  Walter raising both eyebrows now.

  “How’d Nick get in the picture?” Walter asks, studying Lucille’s reaction. Lucille, sipping a Jack and water, raising her shoulders in a “who knows” shrug, making even this simple motion look—Walter searches for the right word in his mind—elegant.

  “I’d met Charlie earlier, in that bar you told me he liked to hang out in. He’d given me a key to stop by his hotel room later.”

  Walter nods. He imagines the scenario would have gone something like that.

  “I was outside Charlie’s door, ready to come in, when I heard the shots. I get inside and there’s Nick on the floor, Charlie standing over him.”

  “What did Charlie say? You coming in like that, seeing him with a gun in his hand?”

  “We didn’t discuss it. I took out my piece, took care of Charlie, and left. Only in the room for a minute.”

  Walter is looking at her like he looks at anyone across the desk from him.

  Lucille thinking it’s the look you’d give a waiter when he finally brought the steaks out a half hour late and they were cold. You’re not going to jump all over him—there’s a certain decorum to be observed—but he knows you’re very disappointed.

  “I can see how you’d be disappointed, losing Nick and all.” She takes a sip of her Jack and water. “But it should make you feel better to know that Charlie got what he had coming.”

  Walter makes that it’s-neither-here-nor-there gesture with his wrist. But he’s thinking about this, taking his time with it, longer than he needs to, just to see if it bothers her.

  It doesn’t appear to.

  But behind that composed façade, Lucille, a woman who rarely second-guesses herself, is doing just that.

  She didn’t really have any choice about Nick. Once she’d decided to take him for the extra five, she couldn’t leave him to tell someone about it later.

  She’s thinking now that Walter isn’t the kind of man you want to change the script on.

  It’s an anxious few moments.

  But as they chat, have lunch, another drink, it appears that Walter’s accepted her explanation. They’ve changed the subject from business and are enjoying one another’s company.

  And suddenly it’s time to get on that flight to LaGuardia, she has to hurry, they’ve dallied over lunch longer than they intended.

  She’s settling into first class on the plane, thinking she’s learned a lesson here, lucky that this turned out as well as it did. Hoping she’ll get to see Walter again.

  Walter is lingering at Wolfgang Puck’s, relaxing with one more Grey Goose martini—three big olives stuffed with goat cheese along with it—taking a few minutes to make the decision.

  The call Nick had made yesterday afternoon from Kansas City was to Walter. Asked him about this beautiful hitwoman he thought looked like Sandra Bullock.

  Walter was surprised that the man couldn’t recognize a Rene Russo lookalike when he saw one, but he kept it to himself.

  Walter was bemused at what she was trying, curious to see how it might play out. He’d paid her well, but another five grand to get Charlie out of the picture was not unreasonable.

  She is enterprising, give her that.

  “Go along with it,” Walter had said. “That way we’ll have a confirmation about how it went down.”

  Walter remembering he’d told Nick to be careful . . . an afterthought.

  Apparently Nick hadn’t taken his advice to heart.

  Walter has to make the call within the next hour. The plane’s in the air, the guy’s at LaGuardia waiting for the flight, waiting for Walter’s call.

  Walter had sent him out there after he heard from Nick. Just in case something unusual might happen.

  Walter is meticulous, covers all the bases.

  He has to make the call, tell the man either to go ahead and do what Walter had discussed with him earlier, or tell him to forget about it, go into the city, have a nice night on the town, fly back to Chicago tomorrow.

  Walter finishes his martini and orders another. It’s rare for him to have three at one sitting.

  Walter thinks of the similarities between his organization and the Army. You have your officer corps—the best and the brightest—and you have your soldiers. The people who get the job done. People who follow orders without question.

  That’s the way it has to be.

  Oh, once in a while you come across someone who stands out, shows some initiative. You try to move those people up the ladder. Take advantage of their skills.

  Maybe Lucille fits into that category.

  It’s a tough decision.

  He finally dials the number.

  Walter would like to see Lucille again. Maybe work with her (a tighter rein next time), maybe see her socially.

  He’s sorry it’s not going to happen.

  Well . . . that’s why they pay him the big bucks.

  Copyright © 2010 Wayne J. Gardiner

  Previous Article Mystery Classic

  Mystery Classic

  Melville Davisson Post

  SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY RUSSELL ATWOOD

  “The obvious is at the base of all boredom,” Melville Davisson Post wrote nearly a century ago. “The thing that provides our perpetual interest in life is that the events lying just ahead of us cannot be determined. It is the mystery in the next moment, the next hour, the next ...

  A CRITIQUE OF MONSIEUR POE

  MELVILLE DAVISSON POST

  At four o’clock in the morning Monsieur Duclos entered the Café des Oiseaux in the Rue des Petits Champs. It was an unusual hour for an honest storekeeper to be out of bed in Paris, but M. Duclos had a sufficient reason. Fair dealing, albeit somewhat slow of foot, had brought M. Duclos to...

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  Fiction

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  Mystery Classic

  Melville Davisson Post

  SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY RUSSELL ATWOOD

  “The obvious is at the base of all boredom,” Melville Davisson Post wrote nearly a century ago. “The thing that provides our perpetual interest in life is that the events lying just ahead of us cannot be determined. It is the mystery in the next moment, the next hour, the next day that we live to solve.”

  Now largely forgotten, Post was an early and successful write
r of detective fiction, the author of Uncle Abner: Man of Mysteries (1918), which Ellery Queen declared “the finest book of detective short stories written by an American since Poe.”

  Born in 1869 to a prosperous family of West Virginia, Post grew up learning about horses, cattle raising, and the outdoorsman’s life, all of which provided material for his later writings. He earned a law degree from West Virginia University in 1892 and practiced general and criminal law. Drawing on his fascination with the law, he published his first book in 1896, The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason, one of the first “legal thrillers”; two more collections of Mason stories quickly followed. In 1901 he shifted his attention to corporate law, and he was married in 1903 to a woman from a prominent Roanoke, Virginia, family.

  When the couple’s only child, a son, died at eighteen months in 1906, Post withdrew from his law practice, and he and his wife left America, traveling for several years throughout Europe. It was during this time that the success of his first novel, Dwellers in the Hills, made Post a feted celebrity. With the advent of World War I, they returned to West Virginia and resettled in Clarksburg permanently, where he devoted himself entirely to writing, becoming one of the most commercially successful magazine writers in America.

  His wife, Ann, died of pneumonia in 1919, but Post carried on, continuing to write and publish his work in the burgeoning magazine market of the time, concentrating mainly on stories of mystery and adventure, and creating no fewer than six popular detective series characters. He died at the age of sixty-one from a head injury resulting from a fall from his horse, and was buried beside his wife and son. His last collection of detective stories, The Silent Witness, was published posthumously in 1930.

  Post was a pioneer of the then-young literary form known as “detective fiction,” and his influence is still felt today, though his works are out-of-print. He was an early champion of the genre’s merits, refusing to admit any difference between a fine “literary” story and a fine “mystery” story.

  “The primary object of all fiction is to entertain the reader,” he once wrote. “If, while it entertains, it also ennobles him, this fiction becomes a work of art; but its primary business must be to entertain and not to educate or instruct. . . . [T]he short story is to our age what the drama was to the Greeks. The Greeks would have been astounded at the idea common to our age that the highest form of literary structure may omit the framework of the plot. Plot is first, character is second.” Post felt that the writer who presents a problem to be solved or a mystery to be untangled offers those qualities in fiction that are of “the most nearly universal appeal.”

  I believe Post deserves renewed attention today more than ever before. His example is important because he, like all of us now, lived on the cusp of a new century. Just as we’ve passed with trepidation from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, he navigated the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century with a similar sense of mixed enthusiasm and wariness: The enthusiasm of explorers wary that, in the rush away from the past, we’re casting away wisdom we desperately need in the future.

  Certainly, morality may be one of the first casualties of this race to tomorrow, and it’s interesting that Post’s two most famous creations represent moral polar opposites: Randolph Mason, a misanthropic attorney who uses his vast knowledge of the law to help crooked clients avoid its justice; and Uncle Abner, a stalwart, early-American gentleman farmer of complete integrity and an almost Biblical power to ensure justice.

  In his introduction to The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason, Post explained his intention to present “tales that shall explore the possibility of baffling not the detector of crime but the punishing power of the law.” Randolph Mason is a lawyer of great acumen, but without moral sense. He takes advantage of obscure technicalities of the law—and often these loopholes were described so accurately that the stories themselves helped effect legal reforms. Randolph Mason is an unacknowledged progenitor of Erle Stanley Gardner’s lawyer sleuth, Perry Mason, who never advocated “breaking the law” but who felt no reluctance in “bending it” to aid a client in peril of his or her life and liberty.

  Uncle Abner, a cattle rancher and outdoorsman, was far less interested in the laws of man than he was in the justice of God and in a moral balancing of the universe. His tales collected in Uncle Abner, Man of Mysteries (1918) are set just before the Civil War, in the frontier land of Virginia. They are all narrated by his nephew, an adult relating past events of rural crime and mystery experienced during his boyhood. The best-known of these stories is the oft-anthologized “The Doomdorf Mystery,” a seminal locked-room puzzle about a man found shot to death in a room which no assassin could have entered or left. William Faulkner, when he tackled a series of mystery stories later collected in the book Knight’s Gambit, modeled his detective Uncle Gavin directly upon Post’s famous sleuth.

  It was in these twenty-two stories featuring Uncle Abner that Post deliberately set out to reinvent the form. “The modern plan for the mystery or detective story can no longer follow the old formula invented by Poe and adopted by Conan Doyle,” he wrote. “All life has grown quicker, the mind of the reader acts more quickly, our civilization is impatient at delays. In literature, and especially literature of this type, the reader will not wait for explanation. . . . Instead of giving the reader the mystery and then going over the same ground with the solution, the mystery and its solution might be given together. The developing of the mystery and the development toward the solution would go forward side by side; and when all details of the mystery were uncovered, the solution also would be uncovered and the end of the story arrived at . . . [t]his new formula, as will at once be seen, very markedly increases the rapidity of action in a story, holds the reader’s interest throughout, and eliminates any impression of moving at any time over ground previously covered.”

  This theory of the mystery is clearly at work in “A Critique of Monsieur Poe.” In it, two men meet at a Parisian café in the wee hours of the morning and engage in an apparently innocent literary discussion, which soon develops into a dangerous game of cat and mouse. But who is the cat and who is the mouse?

  Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post, December 31, 1910, and later collected in Melville Davisson Post’s book, The Nameless Thing (1912), the story has otherwise remained out of print for nearly a hundred years despite the fact it is a classic tale of suspense. One reason for this might be that The Nameless Thing is presented not as a collection of short stories, but as a “novel” involving three men—a judge, a doctor, and a priest—pondering before a dying fire the “impossible” death of a man found bludgeoned in a sealed room. As they work their way to the solution of this “locked room” mystery, they exchange other tales of men and women who have met strange fates. These eleven tales are spread across the book’s chapter demarcations, so a story beginning in the middle of one chapter concludes in the middle of the next. For this reason, The Nameless Thing has long gone unmined by enterprising anthologists. Until now.

  And thanks to the new medium of the electronic book, Melville Davisson Post is now available to a new generation of readers. His works in public domain, including those featuring Uncle Abner and Randolph Mason, can be found on the Web. The following story can be found in a Kindle edition of that “lost” classic, The Nameless Thing.

  Copyright © 2010 Russell Atwood

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  A CRITIQUE OF MONSIEUR POE

  MELVILLE DAVISSON POST

  At four o’clock in the morning Monsieur Duclos entered the Café des Oiseaux in the Rue des Petits Champs. It was an unusual hour for an honest storekeeper to be out of bed in Paris, but M. Duclos had a sufficient reason.

  Fair dealing, albeit somewhat slow of foot, had brought M. Duclos to a substantial shop looking from a cross street into the Rue de la Paix. It was edging him slowly into that fashionable quarter. Already Hugette Rozier, she who created
hats in the rooms above his shop, had said the word:

  “Monsieur Duclos, we belong out there!”—pointing into the Rue de la Paix.

  “But, madame,” he had said, “to get on there one must have something in his shop not to be found elsewhere in Paris.”

  “And that thing you have, monsieur.”

  He had scratched his head then. “I cannot think of it, madame.”

  “But I can: it is called honesty, Monsieur Duclos.”

  The creator of hats was very charming and monsieur bowed. Then there came a twinkle into his eyes.

  “And you, madame?”

  The petite Hugette laughed like a blackbird.

  “Ah, monsieur, I am perhaps not so fortunate, but for that reason I do not despair.”

  Her hand darted between the buttons of her blouse, a ribbon snapped and she extended her half-closed palm near to the eyes of Monsieur Duclos. He saw there an elegant young man—a miniature studded with diamonds. It was only for a moment that Hugette’s rosy palm flashed before the eyes of M. Duclos, but in that moment the shrewd bourgeois dealer in jewels observed a number of things—namely, that the case of the miniature was a genuine antique; that the diamonds were false—the bent tines of the metal proclaiming how recently this paste had been substituted. And the painting on the ivory disk! It had been done yesterday, in the Rue de Rivoli!—he could put his finger on the very shop.

  Ah, well, if one were setting up a little modiste in the Rue de la Paix one could not afford to be too honest. There would be expense enough; the baker and the candlestick-maker would not take fairy gold—a bit of deception in this behalf could be forgiven him. If, when he had cast up the cost of the venture, this elegant Lothario had purchased an ancient miniature for a dozen francs, forced the noble face of some subject of a Louis to make way on the ivory disk for his own, set the denuded metal wreath with brilliants and hung it about the charming neck of Hugette under the lace blouse—why, from the viewpoint of an economical bourgeois, he was a prudent young man.

  It was quite as well. Hugette would have no inkling of this prudence until the affair went on the rocks and she came to the pawnshop with the salvage. And then, what did it matter? In loveland all treasures are alike—oak leaves on the morning after!