by Otto Penzler
In the winter of 1917, when I had been marked “C-3” by a medical board (light duty), I was stationed in London working as a pay sergeant in the Canadian Pay Office at 7 Millbank. There, quite by accident, I learned that a boy with whom I had gone to school in Philadelphia had joined up with the Canadians a year after I did. I’ll call him Paul Henderson, which was not his name. He had been blinded at Vimy Ridge several months before and at that moment was in St. Dunstan’s Lodge, the hospital for blinded soldiers in London.
I took to visiting St. Dunstan’s in Regents Park regularly on Saturday afternoons to have tea and play the piano. Once having overcome my initial ingrained fear of the blind, I continued these visits for many months after Paul Henderson had been invalided back to Canada and resumed his U.S. citizenship—as I did later, in December 1918. It was on one such visit that Captain Duncan Maclain was born, although I had no inkling of it at the moment and it was twenty years later—in 1937—before he came to life in print in The Last Express. The conditions at St. Dunstan’s for the training and welfare of the blind—while modern for World War I—seemed antiquated when compared to Valley Forge, Dibble, or Avon Old Farms. Mobility was given little thought and the grounds of St. Regents Park were festooned with strings for the blinded veterans to follow, and knots marked the benches. When I was visiting there the lodge was so overcrowded with veterans and personnel that it had been necessary to move the piano out in the hall. There was little amusement since radio and talking books were unheard of—the big moments came when some noted entertainer, such as Sir Harry Lauder, Sir George Robey, or Alfred Lester, dropped in for an evening from one of the music halls.
It was on a blustery, freezing December afternoon in 1917 when I first became conscious of the fact that while a blind man might have lost his sight, he hadn’t necessarily lost his mind. I had seated myself at the piano and given my usual introduction by leading off with “Tipperary” and the coterie of blinded British Tommies quickly gathered around me. There was just one straightback chair to the right of the piano next to double doors in the vestibule (always closed since a rear entrance was used) that led out onto the grounds. I had shed my cap and greatcoat and put them on that chair.
The Tommies were packed in almost solidly around me and one British Tommy was standing with his hands lightly on my shoulders while I went through half a dozen pieces. When I had finished and some requests were made, he moved around to the right of the piano, picked up my cap and greatcoat from the chair, sat down and laid them across his knees. I noticed while I was playing that he was giving them a thorough going-over with his fingertips (“brailling,” although it turns a noun into a verb, has become the common term today).
A bell rang and I was suddenly deserted by my captive audience as they poured into an adjoining lounge for afternoon tea. Only the Tommy to the right of the piano remained. He stood up, replacing my cap and greatcoat on the chair, and started in with a preamble, as though something had been burned into his brain.
Then he said: “You certainly have been around in the Canadian army, haven’t you? You’ve been in nearly every bleeding outfit in it. You came over here in nineteen fourteen with the First Battalion, went out to France with them, were invalided back here to England and then joined up with the Fourth General Hospital from Toronto and went out to Salonica with them. You were invalided back from Salonica through Egypt and landed back here at Netley Fever Hospital at Southamption—that big pile of bricks with the corridors a quarter of a mile long.
“When you were discharged from Netley you went to Shorncliffe to the C.C.A.C. [Canadian Casualty Assembly Center]. There you faced another medical board which marked you ‘C-3’ and transferred you to the Canadian Army Service Corps on light duty instead of sending you back to Canada as you had hoped. When they found out that you couldn’t even lift a Ford motor, let alone carry one around on each shoulder, the sergeant in charge of the machine shop kicked to the CO. that he was tired of being sent walking corpses marked ‘C-3.’ So they sent you up to this cushy job with the Canadian Army Pay Corps here in London where you will stay for the duration of the war.”
I stood with my mouth hanging open, staring at him intently until I was positive that I had never seen him before. Then I blurted out, “I suppose you got all this dope from Paul Henderson who was invalided back to Canada from here a couple of months ago.”
“Never heard of him,” he said smugly. “He was before my time. I have only been in here just over a couple of weeks. I was blinded in the big tank push at Cambrai.”
“Then where the hell did you know me and get all my army history? You sound like you had taken it from a sheet in the Canadian Record Office.”
“I don’t know you, never saw you, and never will,” he grinned delightedly. “Sir Arthur Pearson spoke to us here last week about how much a blind man can really see. I decided to try it out on you. Your army history that I just gave you is written all over your uniform.”
I took a closer look at his heavily bandaged eyes and decided that even if he had some vision left, it was obvious that he couldn’t see. “Okay,” I said. “Start at the beginning and spell it out. I’m certainly listening.”
“Well, first,” he said, “you have blue shoulder straps sewed on the khaki ones on your tunic.”
“Blue?”
“Sure, you’re wearing brass C-1’s—that is a ‘C’ with a bar under it and a ‘1’ attached underneath. That was your original unit, the First Battalion of Infantry, and all the infantry in the first contingent in nineteen fourteen wears those blue shoulder straps. The Medical Corps wears red. You were invalided back from France because you have a gold perpendicular wound stripe on your sleeve. Right?”
“Right! Go on.”
“Well, the metal bars on each of those blue shoulder straps just read Canada in raised letters so the infantry was your original unit. Now, take your greatcoat. It has just the regular khaki shoulder straps but the bars on each shoulder are cut out CAMC, running from back to front, and easy to feel. Over them you have ‘four’ with a small bar over a ‘G’ in brass. That shows you were overseas with the Fourth General Hospital. It came from Toronto and was the only unit from the Canadian Army which was out in Salonica. I’m no wizard but I happened to have had a cousin who was with the same outfit, the Fourth General Hospital, and most of the men from Salonica were invalided back with fever through Egypt. So I took a guess that the same thing happened to you. All the men invalided back to England from anywhere with fevers end up in Netley and then at the C.C.A.C. at Shorncliffe. But the badge on the front of your cap is Canadian Army Service Corps, indicating that was the last unit you were transferred to here in England. My cousin went through that light duty routine, only they sent him out to France again driving a lorry. Now, I know you’re stationed up here in London with a permanent pass since you are up here nearly every Saturday afternoon, playing the piano. You have sergeant’s stripes on your greatcoat so I imagine you’re working as a pay sergeant in the Canadian Pay Office. They have no emblem of their own.”
Just then, an orderly stopped in from somewhere to collect him for tea, leaving me too dumbfounded even to inquire his name. He left me with a happy smile and a wave of his hand saying, “I’ll be seeing you.” He never did, of course, and I never saw him again. It was after New Year’s of 1918 the next time I went up to St. Dunstan’s and my blind detective had gone.
It was ten years later (1927) before I came in contact with Paul Henderson again.
My father died in Philadelphia in January 1927. Banks had already closed in Florida and our family savings were going fast while I fiddled around without much success at writing. But I had tasted blood because Field and Stream had bought my first short story, “The Captain’s Lost Lake,” in 1926 for $60. I hastened up to Philadelphia from Florida to see what could be salvaged from my father’s business and the day after his funeral, Mrs. Henderson, Paul’s mother, phoned me to say that she had seen the notice of my father’s death in the ne
wspapers. She told me her own husband had died five years before. She and Paul were still living in the old family house on Queen Lane in Germantown, and could I come to dinner. I sensed desperation in her voice and went out to see them the following evening—a filthy snowy night.
The house was a mausoleum, housing a frail invalid already feeling the effects of a cancer which killed her in 1930, and her blind, 31-year-old son, who hadn’t been out of the house since his father’s death, five years before. The dinner was meager but by the time it was served none of us much cared—the bootlegger had made a delivery earlier and the orange blossom cocktails had flowed freely.
Paul’s mother, through ignorance, fear, and too much love, did practically everything for him except take him to the toilet. It helped turn Paul into an alcohol-soaked cabbage with nothing to do but sit and look at the back of his eyes and curse at the fictional Max Carrados and his fictional supernatural powers. Paul was too frightened to move from the house that had become the only world he knew—and his mother, through misdirected love, encouraged his indolence.
I sold out the Trades Publish Company that belonged to my father and went to New York, where I obtained a job as general manager of Bing & Bing Hotels. Within three months after his mother died in 1930, Paul Henderson sold the heavily mortgaged house in Germantown and sobered up long enough to catch a train to New York—purely because I was there. He hoped that I could get him a job—at anything, even making brooms. God knows I tried! But I soon realized that Paul had lost all interest in life, and I dreaded the tenth of every month when his small pension check would arrive. He’d disappear from the room I had gotten for him on Bank Street in Greenwich Village and make the rounds of speakeasies where kindly but misguided customers would buy him drinks when his money ran out. I started to think it might be better for him if he were a troublemaker and created a disturbance so the police could pick him up and tuck him safely away long enough to get off the booze. It took me more than a year to enlist the aid of enough friendly bartenders who would call me as soon as he came in.
The Depression caught me full in 1932 and I was laid off with twenty other administrative office workers a week before Christmas—facing a world that seemed utterly jobless. I determined at that moment that I’d never work for a corporation again and I’d succeed at writing or starve to death trying. I rented an apartment for $25 a month in a basement in Astoria and started my first full-length book—a Florida mystery called Blood on Lake Louisa. Paul moved in with me two months later and on and off for a year we existed on what short unsigned pieces I could sell to The New Yorker and Liberty. I established a moderate credit rating at a nearby friendly Italian grocery and ate so much spaghetti that I finally broke out with a wheat rash. During this time, I sought out a great deal of material regarding famous blind people and read about them to Paul. I hoped that some of their accomplishments would inspire him, but I eventually realized that Paul had slipped into his own private paranoiac world—identifying with Max Carrados, using liquor to bolster confidence that he could duplicate the impossible feats of Ernest Bramah’s overdrawn character. Paul would also challenge the accomplishments of blind persons with a negative approach that defied argument, such as claiming that John Milton “was educated at Cambridge, besides being an established poet before he went blind at forty-four.”
By 1932 I had reached the point of utter desperation with Paul and made an attempt to convince him that someone with even more severe handicaps than his could do something productive. I finally succeeded, through my agent, in getting in touch with Mr. John A. Macy, whose wife was the famous Anne Mansfield Sullivan who had trained Helen Keller. Mr. Macy was quite ill and died several months later, in August 1932, but the lengthy letter I wrote his wife interested her enough to furnish me with a list of famous blind people—and in reply to my complaints about Max Carrados, she wrote me: “You’re a mystery writer … so why not draw on the knowledge that you’ve accumulated and create a blind detective of your own—one who would be the antithesis of Max Carrados, who would never perform any feat in his detection or deduction that couldn’t be duplicated by someone totally blind—presuming they had the necessary brains and willpower to train themselves to try it.”
Thus the idea of Captain Duncan Maclain was born. It was in 1937 that the Crime Club published the first of the books about him, The Last Express. For forty years he has served me well—in serialization, syndication, movies, and foreign editions. He’s responsible for the organization of the Mystery Writers of America, Inc., and for the Blinded Veterans Association—formed at Avon Old Farms Army Schools of the Blind at Avon, Connecticut, in 1945, in which I hold honorary life membership Card No. 1. Even today, if you sit up late enough and watch the third repeat of Longstreet on ABC, you can see that the series is based on “Characters Created by Baynard Kendrick.”
Speaking to the B.V.A. on the occasion of their twenty-first annual convention at the Deauville Hotel, Miami Beach, Florida, on August 20, 1966, I was asked by one of the members if I happened to remember the name of that young blind soldier in St. Dunstan’s Home in London who through his perspicacity had quite unwittingly been the progenitor of the B.V.A. I was forced to say no—I hadn’t forgotten his name for I never knew it; he was merely one of a number of blinded British Tommies ensconced for the time being in St. Dunstan’s.
I intended to call this piece “The Birth of a Blind Detective” because, to me, Captain Duncan Maclain was really born—and I hope will live forever—showing to sighted people that although the blind of the world may have lost their eyes, their brains and their work live on.
Mark McPherson
Vera Caspary
VERA CASPARY’S LAURA IS one of the rarest of literary gems—a classic recognized as such from the first by its readers. Curiously, critics gave it lukewarm or mixed reviews upon publication, but quickly reversed themselves to applaud it.
Three characters dominate the action of the novel, which is presented largely from their points of view: Laura, the enigmatic and romantic beauty of the title; Waldo Lydecker, the epicene columnist who loves her; and Mark McPherson, the unusual, sensitive detective who falls in love with the ethereal Laura as he investigates her murder. His eerie, haunting passion marks him as a character destined for immortality but doomed to a single volume. Vera Caspary chose to write no more of his pursuits. Indeed, after Laura, any further case would have been anticlimactic.
Vera Caspary has written dozens of original screenplays and stories on which motion pictures have been based, notably Les Girls, Letter to Three Wives, I Can Get It for You Wholesale, The Night of June 13, Easy Living, and the excellent Fritz Lang thriller, The Blue Gardenia. Among her eighteen novels are Bedelia, Evvie, Stranger Than Truth, The Husband, The Weeping and the Laughter, The Dreamers, The Rosecrest Cell, and Elizabeth X.
In addition to Dana Andrews’s memorable portrayal of Mark McPherson in the 1944 film, the romantic and idealistic hero has challenged other actors. Hugh Marlowe appeared in the 1947 Broadway drama (which had a modest run), and Robert Stack was McPherson in Truman Capote’s television adaptation, in 1968. Miss Caspary remembers that production as “an abortion.”
Born in Chicago in 1899, Vera Caspary Goldsmith now lives in New York City’s Greenwich Village. She married producer I. G. Goldsmith during her long stay in California.
Mark McPherson
by Vera Caspary
MARK MCPHERSON IS HONORED TO be included in this catalog of distinguished detectives. He is the only one, I believe, who has not appeared in a series of murder stories, but became a hero only once.
McPherson was conceived of necessity, born of prejudice. In my first draft of Laura (in play form) the detective had no special quality. He was simply a device. Later, when the novel was started, the detective was the only character who failed to come alive. The other characters were fashioned in the forms of people I’d known, not prototypes but combinations of friends and acquaintances.
There were no detective
s in my working or social life. As editor of Fingerprint Magazine I had interviewed a number of professionals in the trade, including J. Edgar Hoover in the early days of his career and mine. None had the dash and wit of the reporters and advertising executives I flirted and danced with in the great jazz days of Chicago.
I cannot say when or how the idea for the story of Laura came into my mind, but do recall that a murder-romance about a detective who falls in love with a murder victim kept me awake many nights. The idea was not new. Several writers had tried unsuccessfully to solve the problem. I can’t remember what triggered my solution: that the girl was not dead but mistakenly identified. This gave shape to the story of the man who, investigating her murder, is fascinated by the dead woman; comes to know her as he has never known a living girl; discovers her charm through intimacy with what she has left behind, her apartment, her wardrobe, her scents and cosmetics, her checkbook and diary, her taste in books, music, and sports, the bottles on her bar, the friends she entertained, the men who loved her. It was to be the tale of a man yearning for a woman he has never met and believes he can never know.
What sort of man would he be? Not psychotic certainly, nor the swaggering hard-boiled private eye of popular mystery stories. Quick, easy satisfaction would be that fellow’s dish, pushovers with large exposed breasts his ideals. He would never waste time in daydreams. (If he did his creators neglected to mention the fact.) Nor would my romantic detective fit the pattern of the persevering, stolid public servant, nor the impassive genius of deduction.
This is where the prejudice came in. I did not like detectives. I knew they were necessary in modern society, but I loathed men who spied for money. It seemed preposterous for me to make a hero out of such a fellow. In few, if any, of the early “originals” I wrote for the movies was the murder solved by a professional sleuth. Until the problem arose in the writing of Laura, I had never glorified a detective. In the first two drafts the character remained a dummy. It was only when I made notes for the following dialogue between Laura and McPherson that he came alive: