Great Detectives

by Otto Penzler

  It is all very well for Commissioner Kulkarni, Head of Crime Branch, to state in that television film the BBCwallahs were making—if this is what he did state, because I for one have never seen sight or sound of that film—it is all very well for Kulkarni Sahib to state that he himself is wishing and wishing to have a sensitive fellow like Ghote on his staff and that he would make an altogether fine detective officer. But what I am asking is this: there is such a matter as a question of politeness, and if you are being interviewed by the chap who is writing all these books, well then, what more polite can you be saying than that you have a high opinion of the chap he is writing about? Isn’t it? Isn’t it? Isn’t it?

  And there is one other thing I can tell you also. However many cases this Ghote fellow tucks under his belt only, he would never rise above inspector rank. Never. Never.

  Matt Helm

  Donald Hamilton

  THERE IS MOVE THAN a touch of James Bond in Matt Helm. Both work for their respective governments, the United Kingdom and the United States, performing heroic feats of counterespionage in a variety of locales, generally assisted by beautiful young women. Bond takes his orders from “M”; Helm takes them from “Mac.” Both men are physically violent when the situation demands it, and neither shows hesitation or remorse if he is forced to eliminate an enemy. They do have their differences, however. While Bond drives a classic Bentley, Helm is most comfortable at the wheel of his battered old pickup truck. Bond prefers vintage champagne or gimlets; Helm drinks beer or martinis. Bond’s environment is the supper club and the gambling casino; Helm prefers the outdoors and made his living as a free-lance writer of Western novels and a wildlife photographer until his country asked for his services.

  Just as the James Bond novels served as the basis for a successful series of motion pictures (notably with Sean Connery as agent 007), Matt Helm is the hero of four major films (starring Dean Martin). The character was somewhat altered—some might say distorted—for the films, as was the case with the 1975 television series with Tony Franciosa, to make Helm appear even more like Bond. The extensive Helm saga, published as paperback originals, has enjoyed the rare distinction of critical praise and enormous popular appeal.

  Born in Sweden, the 61-year-old Donald Hamilton now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is the successful author of many books, among them such Westerns as The Big Country, which became a renowned film starring Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, Jean Simmons, and Burl Ives.

  Matt Helm

  by Donald Hamilton

  “LOOK,” SAID MY EDITOR, calling from New York back in the late 1950s, “look, you really can’t call that guy George, you know.”

  “What guy?” I asked.

  “The guy in your last book. The one we’re working on.”

  “Oh, that guy.” I was already busy with another book, a Western as I recall. “What’s the matter with George?”

  “It’s too damned anti-hero.”

  I said, “General George Patton would hate you for that. Not to mention old George Washington himself. And what about George Armstrong Custer? No anti-hero, he, although I guess you couldn’t call him much of a hero, either, after the way he let himself get clobbered at the Little Big Horn.” The phone was silent. I gathered I wasn’t making a tremendous impression at the other end. I sighed. Maybe he was right. He often was, damn him. “Okay, if you insist, I’ll give it some thought and write you …”

  “I’ve got to have it now. We’re just wrapping it up.”

  I said, “Well, it’s your dime. Hold on.” I thought for a while. I frowned and scratched my head. I looked around the room. The family Bible on the bookcase caught my eye. Aha! Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Luke? It didn’t have quite the right feel to it. “Hell, call him Matthew,” I said, and so Matt Helm was born, but not quite. It took another long-distance telephone call to finish the job.

  “About Death of a Citizen,” said my editor some months later, after discussing other business.

  “About what?”

  “Death of a Citizen. That’s what we’re calling it now, remember?” I’d originally entitled the book something else, never mind what. He went on. “You know, Don, I’ve been thinking, if you take that guy, and kill off his wife, you might have a great series character …”

  Well, I didn’t kill off the wife, I just arranged a bloodless divorce, but the basic idea was sound. The editor in question isn’t editing anymore; he’s turned agent. It’s too bad, because he was a good editor, with a good editor’s knack of seeing not only what was wrong with a book or character—although he was never bashful about pointing that out—but what was right with it. He saw what was right with Matt Helm before I did: that he was not an anti-hero, and that the time was ripe for him. We’d had too many anti-heroes.

  Matt Helm wasn’t the gentle civilian protagonist, long fashionable in suspense fiction, who gets involved in mysterious undercover shenanigans against his will, takes a hell of a beating, and finally pulls up his socks, musters his feeble and amateurish resources, turns the tables on his tormentors, and walks off with the girl, swearing he’ll never, never get mixed up in anything like that again, so help him. I’d written about anti-heroes, both eastern and western, with reasonable success; in fact you might say that my writing career, such as it was, had been built on anti-heroes. Now, however, it seemed that the time of the hero had come, both for me and for those who were kind enough to read my books.

  I found Helm a refreshing change from the pacific citizens whom I’d been arranging to get reluctantly enmeshed in sinister spiderwebs of intrigue. Here, for Pete’s sake, was a man who went looking for trouble, a tough professional deliberately sticking his neck out as required in the line of duty. After all the peaceful patsies I’d written about, a guy like that was a revelation, from the author’s angle. He opened up a whole new field of writing—but I’ll admit it didn’t occur to me at the time that it was a field I’d still be cultivating eighteen years later. That was my editor’s contribution.

  I had, as I’ve already indicated, planned only one novel about this stimulating but—for me and for the times—somewhat unorthodox character. Encouraged to bring him back, I went to a retired manuscript that hadn’t turned out very well: another gentle-anti-hero yarn set in Scandinavia, where I’d recently spent a year. I thought I might, perhaps, be able to salvage the basic plot and the fine Nordic settings. To my surprise, the whole previously unsuccessful story (The Wrecking Crew) came to vibrant—and violent—life when I switched the polarity, so to speak, and used a decisive hero who acted, for a change, instead of an irresolute anti-hero who sat around waiting to be acted upon.

  Apparently most readers found him as much fun to read about as I found him fun to write about, and Matt Helm was on his way. However, there were some who disapproved.

  “I’m sorry, I simply can’t stand them,” a fellow-writer’s very frank intellectual-type wife told me at a cocktail party, referring to my Helm books. “That man, the one who kills people, he’s so unpleasant …”

  I poked and pried a bit. If there was something basically wrong with my newly established character, something that turned readers off, I certainly wanted to know about it. I discovered that what the lady considered unpleasant about Matt Helm was that he wasn’t unpleasant at all. She was morally offended by the notion of a relatively nice guy running around with a gun. Great. She’d got the idea. She just didn’t like the idea. People who killed people ought to be obviously horrible monsters all the time, in her opinion, and my writing about a homicidal character who wasn’t cricket.

  She had, of course, put her finger on the fundamental conflict that, I feel, makes Matt Helm Matt Helm; a conflict I set up deliberately for one book, that still seems to intrigue people as I now tackle the nineteenth volume in the series. It can be stated very simply:

  a. He’s actually a pretty good guy.

  b. He kills.

  Well, let’s leave that for a moment, while we consider other attributes of Helm. H
e’s six foot four and he weighs around two hundred pounds. He’s not particularly handsome and he’s always wary of women who claim to find him irresistible—as an experienced professional agent, he can’t help suspecting them of ulterior motives. Sometimes he’s right, but sometimes he isn’t. He’s not particularly concerned about male clothes; he does, however, have an old-fashioned prejudice against female trousers, although he’ll admit ruefully that this crusade is now a lost cause. Where food is concerned, he’s pretty much a meat-and-potatoes man, although he does prefer good meat and well-prepared potatoes. His drink is the martini but he’s not rabid on the subject; he’ll drink whiskey if he has to. He has also been known to partake of wine and beer. He quit smoking back when he was a peacetime photographer—the smoke interfered with good, sharp darkroom work—and he’s never gone back to the habit although he has no strong feelings about it. He finds that his photographic experience provides him with a convenient and convincing cover upon occasion.

  Professionally, he’s knowledgeable about automobiles, and a good wheelman. He’s never mastered flying, however, and airplanes make him a bit apprehensive, although he did manage to get a small one down once without killing himself, after the pilot had suffered a sudden demise at 5000 feet. He’s picked up a little seamanship during the course of his career—he’s had to—but he doesn’t consider himself a very good boatman.

  On the other hand, he does admit to a certain expertise where firearms are concerned. He’s a very good marksman with a rifle, and competent with a pistol, although he doesn’t have much faith in quick-draw techniques or equipment. Like many pros, he feels a smart operative ought to know enough about any developing situation to have his gun ready in his hand when he needs it, without having to indulge in any risky, last-minute, sleight-of-hand tricks. He likes edged weapons and knows fencing, a knowledge that has stood him in good stead with instruments varying from sticks to machetes. He has a number of unarmed-combat tricks, enough to get by on. He thinks fist-fighting is stupid. As a pro, he either fights to kill or he doesn’t fight.

  As for his background, he comes from Scandinavian parentage, and acquired a college education on the second try, having been thrown out of the first school he attended for reacting too violently to upperclass hazing. After college, he put in time as a newspaper photographer, and had a brief army experience, but was soon selected for the special, nameless, government organization of which he is still a member. Released from active duty at one point, he married and had three children while making his living for several years with camera and typewriter. The violent past caught up with him, however, the marriage broke up, and he went back to work for the man in Washington known only as Mac. …

  Would I have put together this character this way if I’d known from the start that I’d be spending a couple of decades with him? That’s a stupid question. I didn’t put Matt Helm together, he put himself together. In the first book, particularly, but also in subsequent volumes, he simply revealed himself to me with a ruthless logic any writer knows. A good character runs the show. All the author can do is chase along behind him with a typewriter.

  Which brings us back to the basic question: what makes this a good character—from the fictional, not the moral, viewpoint? I believe close to twenty million people have now bought the books. They must like something about Matt Helm; something beyond the entertainment value I try to provide in the action stories in which he figures.

  What makes people want to read about a pretty nice guy who kills people? Do they, perhaps, find him a refreshing antidote to the sentimental hypocrisies currently fashionable?

  You tell me.

  Duncan Maclain

  Baynard H. Kendrick

  IN THE SEARCH FOR a new twist, mystery writers have created detectives with every imaginable intellectual or psychological idiosyncrasy or, as a variation on that search for uniqueness, physical deformity. When these distortions are invented purely as a gimmick, they frequently serve only to demonstrate the author’s lack of imagination. Occasionally, however, a deviation from normality is either a logical development of personality or powerfully informs it. That is when an immortal is born. Duncan Maclain is such a character.

  Tall, dark, handsome, a superb dresser and extremely personable, Maclain was blinded totally in World War I while serving as an intelligence officer. Instead of withdrawing from the world, he worked tirelessly to develop his other senses, and was so successful that he is able to function as well as most men with eyesight. He moves gracefully, is a deadly shot (locating his target by sound), reads voraciously, in Braille, enjoys music, and assembles massive jigsaw puzzles. Kendrick is not fantasizing Maclain’s accomplishments; everything his hero does has been done by real people who are blind.

  Upon his release from the military, Maclain established a private detective agency in New York City. He is assisted by his best friend and partner, Spud Savage; by Rena, Spud’s wife, who is his secretary; and by his Seeing Eye dogs: Schnucke, who is gentle, and Dreist, who is not. Longstreet, a blind insurance investigator on a recent ABC television series starring James Franciscus, is based on Maclain.

  A founder of the Mystery Writers of America, Kendrick carried membership card number one. Exactly one hour after Canada entered World War I, he became the first American to enlist in the Canadian army. From his research on Maclain grew the Blinded Veterans Association. He lived in Leesburg, Florida, until his death early in 1977.

  Duncan Maclain

  by Baynard H. Kendrick

  THE FIRST SHORT STORY ever written about my blind detective character, Captain Duncan Maclain, appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in January 1953 (there has only been one other, which also appeared in Ellery Queen’s). That was more than fifteen years after the first full-length mystery, The Last Express, about Captain Maclain, who was a fictional U.S. Army officer blinded at Messines in World War I. It was published by the Crime Club in 1937. Following is the introduction to this short story, written by Frederic Dannay, co-writer with his cousin, Manfred B. Lee, under the pseudonym “Ellery Queen,” who, like this writer, is one of the Grand Masters of the Mystery Writers of America, Inc.:

  Ernest Bramah is generally credited with having invented the first modern blind detective, Max Carrados, but the most famous exponent in the contemporary field of blind detection is, without doubt, Captain Duncan Maclain, created by Baynard Kendrick. Mr. Kendrick acknowledges that it was the earlier blind detective who started him writing about Maclain—but for curious reasons … in Mr. Kendrick’s opinion, Max Carrados had very strange powers that went far beyond the limits of credibility. For example, Carrados could run his fingertips along the surface of a newspaper, feel the infinitesimal height of the printer’s ink over the paper itself, and “read” any type larger than long primer. Mr. Kendrick questions that feat, and we must say we are inclined to side with Mr. Kendrick. …

  Indeed, Mr. Kendrick found it so difficult to swallow Max Carrados’s supersensory accomplishments that he determined to create a blind detective of his own—a completely believable sleuth who could deduce by touch, hearing, taste, and smell, with no reliance whatever either on sight or sixth sense. And the simple truth of the matter is that while Baynard Kendrick has spent fifteen years of his life unearthing extraordinary things done by the totally blind, he has never had his blind detective do anything which he, Kendrick, had not actually seen done by a living blind man, or had fully authenticated.

  When it came to developing the character of Duncan Maclain, Mr. Kendrick again went to the highest authority—real life. He patterned the character of Maclain on that of a real person—a young blind soldier in St. Dunstan’s Home in London, who by touching the emblems on Kendrick’s own uniform, accurately traced four years of Kendrick’s Army career.

  Canada declared war on Germany on August 8, 1914, four days after Great Britain. I was living in a boarding-house in Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit, and left a lunch table to go downtown to the Armory a
nd enlist. So far as can be ascertained, I was the first American to join up with the Canadian forces in World War I. After a few weeks’ training at Valcartier, Quebec, I became No. 6468, Private Kendrick, B.H., 1st Battalion, 1st Brigade, No. 1 Company in No. 1 Section. Since even then I was six feet, two inches, I was the tallest man in my company and became flank man on the line. This was a hair-raising experience inasmuch as I was forced to pace 33,000 men in a review before Sir Sam Hughes, of whom the Canadians gleefully sang, to the tune of “John Peel”: “Do you ken Sam Hughes, the enemy of booze. The first champeen of the dry canteen. And the camp so dead you have to go to bed, but you won’t have a head in the morning.”

  The first expeditionary force sailed from Gaspe Bay on the twenty-first of September and the 1st Battalion of 1200 men was on board the White Star liner Laurentic. Thirty-three ocean liners crossed in that convoy in three rows of eleven each—the largest convoy to that date that the world had ever dreamed of or seen. There was certainly no tinge of patriotic fervor in my enlistment. I was 20 years old and the idea of putting an ocean between me and Detroit, where I had once been arrested for vagrancy for sleeping out in Grand Circuit Park, and drawing $1.10 a day plus food and clothes and medical expenses looked like paradise.

  If this autobiographical prologue seems prolix and redundant I will have to plead guilty as I put it here for just one purpose—to make the point that not until 1917 when I was 23 and blindness confronted me face to face, had I ever given it a passing thought. By that time I had served in France, Egypt, and Salonica and had spent over two years in army hospitals. Subconsciously, I believe, like 99 percent of the people in the world, I blotted the condition from my mind beyond relegating it to the shadowy realm of the tin cup, pencil, and street-corner school.