by Otto Penzler
Rogue: Boston Blackie
Boston Blackie’s Code
JACK BOYLE
JACK BOYLE (1881–1928) wrote only one book about Boston Blackie, but the character resonated enough to inspire around ten silent films about him, followed by fourteen “B” movies made by Columbia from 1941 to 1949, all starring Chester Morris, who played him as much a detective as a criminal employing his unique skills, just outside the law, to bring about justice. The success of the films led to two radio series, one starring Morris and the second Richard Kollmar (1944–1950), and a television series (1951–1953) starring Kent Taylor.
In his introduction to Boston Blackie (1919), the author wrote about the ex-convict and cracksman, “To the police and the world he is a professional crook, a skilled and daring safe cracker, an incorrigible criminal made doubly dangerous by intellect….But to me,…‘Blackie’ is something more—a man with more than a spark of the Divine Spirit that lies hidden in the heart of even the worst of men. University graduate, scholar and gentleman, the ‘Blackie’ I know is a man of many inconsistencies and a strangely twisted code of morals.”
Blackie does not consider himself a criminal; he is a combatant who has declared war on society. He is married to a pretty girl named Mary, his “best loved pal and sole confidante,” who knows what he does and joins in his exploits.
Curiously, Blackie lives and works in San Francisco; Boston has nothing to do with the book and is never mentioned, just as it never served as a background in any of the films.
“Boston Blackie’s Code” was first published in Boston Blackie (New York, H. K. Fly, 1919).
BOSTON BLACKIE’S CODE
Jack Boyle
HER THROAT TIGHTENED in an aching pain as her eye fell on the thin gold band that encircled a slender finger. Martin Wilmerding had stooped to kiss that hand and ring on the day it first was placed there.
“Dear little wife,” he had said, “that ring is the symbol of a bond that never will be broken by me. Throughout all the years before us, whenever I see it, this hour will return, bringing back all the love and devotion that is in my heart now.”
Recollection of the long-forgotten words swept her with a sudden revulsion of feeling, and she sprang to her feet. In that instant she realized for the first time why she had come to love Don Lavalle. It was because in his fresh, ardent, impulsive devotion he was so like the Martin Wilmerding who had kissed her hand and ring with a vow of lifetime fealty that had left her clinging to him in tearful ecstasy.
“Don,” she said, “if you really love me, go—now, now.”
Lavalle’s arms, eagerly outstretched toward her, dropped to his side. It was not the answer he had awaited so confidently. A vague resentment against her tinged his disappointment with new bitterness.
“That is final, is it, Marian?” he asked.
“Yes, yes. Don’t make it harder for me. Please go,” she cried almost hysterically.
He slipped into his overcoat.
“Perhaps you will tell me why,” he suggested with increasing asperity.
“Because of the boy and this,” the woman said brokenly, laying a finger on her wedding-ring.
“Nonsense,” he cried angrily. “What tie does that ring represent that Martin Wilmerding has not violated a hundred times? You have been faithful to it, we know, even though you admit you care for me. But has he? I have not the pleasure of your husband’s acquaintance, but no man ever neglected a wife like you without a reason.”
“Go, please, quickly,” she pleaded, shivering.
“I will,” he said, instinctively avoiding the blunder of combating her decision with argument.
He caught her in his arms, and stooping quickly, kissed her on the lips. She reeled away from him, sobbing.
“Our first and last kiss. Good-by, Marian,” he said gently, and left the room.
She followed, clutching at the walls for support as she watched him from the doorway. He adjusted his muffler and caught up his hat without a backward glance, and she pressed her two hands to her lips to choke back a cry. Then as he opened the outer door, the crushing misery of her loneliness swept over her, overpowering self-restraint and resolution.
“Don, oh, Don!” she pleaded, stumbling toward him with outstretched arms.
In a second he was at her side, and she was crying against his breast.
“I can’t let you go,” she sobbed. “I tried, but I can’t. Take me, Don. I will do as you wish.”
From his hiding-place Blackie saw them re-enter the room. The woman stopped by the fireplace, drew off her wedding-ring and after holding it a second between shaking fingers, dropped it into the ashes.
“Dead and gone!” she said. “Dead as the love of the man who put it on my finger.”
“My ring will replace it,” said Lavalle tenderly, but with triumph in his eyes. “Wilmerding will want a divorce. He shall have it, and then you’ll wear the wedding-ring of the man who loves you and whom you love—the only ring in the world that shouldn’t be broken.”
“Don, promise me that you will never leave me alone,” she pleaded falteringly. “I don’t ever want a chance to think, to reflect, to regret. I only want to be with you—and forget everything else in the world. Promise me.”
“Love like mine knows no such word as separation,” he answered. “From this hour we will never be apart. Don’t fear regrets, Marian. There will be none.”
“My boy,” she suggested, “he will go with us. Poor little Martin! I wouldn’t leave him behind fatherless and motherless.”
“Of course not,” he agreed. “And now you must get a few necessaries together quickly—just the things you will require on the steamer. You can get all you need when we reach Honolulu, but there is no time for anything now, for under the circumstances it is best that we go aboard the steamer before morning. Can you be ready in an hour?”
“In an hour!” she cried in surprise. “Yes, I can, but—but—how can we go aboard the steamer tonight? We can’t, Don. Your passage is booked, but not mine.”
“My passage is booked for Don Lavalle and wife,” he informed her smilingly.
She turned away her head to hide the flush that colored her face.
“You were so sure as that!” she murmured, with a strangely new sense of disappointment.
“Yes,” Lavalle answered, “for I knew love like mine could not fail to win yours. Will you pack a single trunk while I run back to my hotel and get my own things together? I can be back in an hour or less. Will you be ready?”
“Yes, I will be ready,” she promised wearily. “I will only take a few things. I want nothing that my—husband ever gave me. I shall only take a few of my own things and the jewels in the safe that were in Mother’s collection. They are my own, and they’re very valuable, Don. It will not be safe to risk packing them in my baggage. I’ll get them now and give them to you to keep until we can leave them in the purser’s safe tomorrow. Be very careful of them, Don. They couldn’t be replaced for a fortune.”
Boston Blackie saw her hurry to the wall—saw the sliding door roll back; with a quickly indrawn breath, he watched the woman fumble nervously with the combination-dial. The safe-door swung open, and she rapidly sorted out a half-dozen jewel-cases and re-closed the safe.
“Here they are, Don,” she said, handing the gems to Lavalle. “I have taken only those that came from my own people. And now you must leave me. I must pack, and I can’t call the servants under these circumstances. I must get the boy up and ready; and also,”—she hesitated a second and then added—“I must write a note to Mr. Wilmerding telling him what I have done and why.”
“Don’t mail it until we are at the dock,” warned the man. “Where is he—at his club or out of town?”
“He’s at the Del Monte Hotel near Monterey—or was,” she answered. “The letter won’t reach him till tomorrow night.”
“And tomorrow night we will be far out of sight of land,” Lavalle cried. “That is as it should be. I am glad I neve
r met him, for now I need never do so.”
He stuffed the jewel-cases into his overcoat.
“I’ll be back in my car in an hour,” he warned. “Hurry, Marian, my love. Each minute until I am with you again will be a day.”
He caught up his hat and ran down the steps to the street, where his car stood at the curbstone.
As the door closed behind him, Marian Wilmerding sank into a chair and clutched her throat to stifle choking sobs. Intuitive womanly fear of what she was to do paralyzed her. For many minutes she lay shaking convulsively as she tried to overcome the dread that chilled her heart. Then the dismal atmosphere of the masterless home began to oppress her with a sense of wretched loneliness.
She rose and with hard, reckless eyes shining hotly from behind wet lashes, ran upstairs to pack.
As Donald Lavalle threw open the door of his empty car, a man who had slipped behind him around the corner of the Wilmerding residence stepped to his side.
“I’m sorry to have to trouble you for my wife’s jewels, Lavalle,” he said.
The triumphant smile on Lavalle’s face faded, and he shrank back in speechless consternation.
“Your wife’s jewels!” he ejaculated, trying to recover from the shock of the utterly unexpected interruption. “You are—”
“Yes, I am Martin Wilmerding; and the happy chance that brought me home tonight also gave me the pleasure of listening from the window-seat of the living-room to your interesting tete-a-tete with my wife.”
A gun flashed into Boston Blackie’s hand and was jabbed sharply into Lavalle’s ribs.
“Give me Marian’s jewels,” the pseudo-husband cried. “Hand them over before I blow your heart out. That’s what I ought to do—and I may, anyway.”
Lavalle handed over the cases that contained the Wilmerding collection of gems.
“Now,” continued his captor, “I want a word with you.”
A gun was thrust so savagely into Lavalle’s face that it left a long red bruise.
“I have heard all you said tonight. I know all your plans for stealing away my wife,” the inexorable voice continued, “and I’ve just a word of warning for you. You are dealing with a man, not a woman, from now on; and if you phone, write, telegraph, or ever again communicate in any way with Marian, I’ll blow your worthless brains out if I have to follow you round the world to do it. Do you get that, Mr. Don Lavalle?”
“I understand you,” said Lavalle helplessly.
Again the gun-muzzle bruised the flesh of his cheek.
“And as a last and kindly warning, Lavalle,” Blackie continued, “I suggest that you take extreme precautions to see that you do not miss the Manchuria when she sails in the morning; because if you are not on board, you won’t live to see another sunset if I have to kill you in your own club. Will you sail or die?”
“I’ll sail,” said Lavalle.
“Very well. That’s about all that requires words between us, I believe. Go, and remember your life is in your own hands. One word of any kind to Marian, and you forfeit it. I don’t know why I don’t kill you now. I would if it were not for the scandal all this would cause when it came out before the jury that would acquit me. Now go.”
Lavalle pressed the button that started the motor as Boston Blackie stepped back from his side.
“I’ve just one word I want to say to you, Wilmerding,” Lavalle began, his foot on the clutch. “It’s this: You have only yourself to blame. Don’t accuse Marian. You forced her into the situation you discovered this evening, by your neglect of the finest little woman I ever met. I was forced into it by a love I admit frankly. Don’t blame Marian for what you yourself have caused. I won’t ever see or communicate with her again.”
“That’s the most decent speech I’ve heard from your lips tonight,” said the man beside the car, dropping his gun back into an outside pocket. “I don’t blame her. I’ve learned many important facts tonight—one of which is that the right place for a man is in his own home with his own wife. I’m going to remember that; and the wedding-ring that was dropped into the ashes tonight is going back on the finger it fits. Good night.”
Lavalle without a word threw in the clutch, and his car sped away and was enveloped and hidden by the fog.
Halfway down the block, Boston Blackie came to another car standing at the curb with a well-muffled chauffeur sitting behind the wheel. As he climbed in, the driver, Mary, uttered a low, thankful cry.
“No trouble. I have the jewels here—feel the packages; and a whole lot happened,” said Blackie with deep satisfaction. “I’ve a new story to tell you when we get home, Mary. It’s the story of a big burglar named Blackie and a little boy named Martin Wilmerding and a still littler woolly dog named Rex, and a woman who guessed wrong. I think it will interest you. Let’s go. I have several things to do before we go home.”
When they reached the downtown district, Blackie had Mary drive him to the Palace Hotel. There he sought out the night stenographer.
“Will you take a telegram for me, please,” he said. Then he dictated:
“ ‘To Martin Wilmerding, Del Monte Hotel, Monterey:
“ ‘The boy needs you. I do too. Please come.
“ ‘Marian.’ ”
Though there was a telegraph-office in the hotel, he summoned a messenger-boy from a saloon and sent the message.
Then he went to another hotel and found a second stenographer, to whom he dictated a second message.
“ ‘Mrs. Marian Wilmerding, 3420 Broadway, San Francisco:
“ ‘The packages you gave me were what I really wanted. Thank you and good-by.
“ ‘D. L.’ ”
Summoning another boy, he sent the second message from a different telegraph office.
“Those telegrams, and how they came to be sent, will be a mystery in the Wilmerding home to the end of time,” he thought, deeply contented.
“Let’s go home, Mary,” he said then, returning to his car and climbing in. “I think I’ve finished my night’s work, and I don’t believe I’ve done such a bad job either.”
He was silent for a moment.
“I’ve given a wife to a husband,” he said half to himself. “I’ve given a father to a child; I’ve given a mother the right to look her son in the face without shame; and I’ve played square with the gamest little pal I ever want to know, Martin Wilmerding, Jr., and his dog, Rex. And for my pay I’ve taken the Wilmerding jewel-collection. I wonder who’s the debtor.”
Rogue: The Gray Seal
The Gray Seal
FRANK L. PACKARD
A POPULAR WRITER OF ADVENTURE fiction who was born in Canada of American parents, Frank Lucius Packard (1877–1942) made numerous trips to the Far East and elsewhere in search of adventure material, resulting in such popular works as Two Stolen Idols (1927), Shanghai Jim (1928), and The Dragon’s Jaws (1937). His greatest success, however, came with the Jimmie Dale series, which sold more than two million copies.
Dale, like his namesake, O. Henry’s Jimmy Valentine, is a safecracker who learned the skill from his father’s safe-manufacturing business. A wealthy member of one of New York’s most exclusive clubs, Dale leads a quadruple life. He is the Gray Seal, the mysterious thief who leaves his mark, a gray seal, at the scene of his crimes; Larry the Bat, a member of the city’s underworld; Smarlinghue, a fallen artist; and Jimmie Dale, part of New York’s social elite. In the Raffles tradition of so many other cracksmen in literature, Dale’s burglaries are illegal, of course, but they are benevolently committed in order to right wrongs and they involve no violence. There are five books in the series, beginning with The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1917) and concluding with Jimmie Dale and the Missing Hour (1935). Seven films were made from Packard’s novels and short stories, most notably The Miracle Man (1932) starring Sylvia Sidney and Chester Morris; the story of another character, a con man, was released as a silent picture in 1919. Several two-reel silent films, starring E. K. Lincoln as Jimmie Dale, were based on short stories published
in The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1917).
“The Gray Seal” was originally published in People’s Ideal Fiction Magazine in 1914; it was first collected in The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (New York, George H. Doran, 1917).
THE GRAY SEAL
Frank L. Packard
AMONG NEW YORK’S fashionable and ultra-exclusive clubs, the St. James stood an acknowledged leader—more men, perhaps, cast an envious eye at its portals, of modest and unassuming taste, as they passed by on Fifth Avenue, than they did at any other club upon the long list that the city boasts. True, there were more expensive clubs upon whose membership roll scintillated more stars of New York’s social set, but the St. James was distinctive. It guaranteed a man, so to speak—that is, it guaranteed a man to be innately a gentleman. It required money, it is true, to keep up one’s membership, but there were many members who were not wealthy, as wealth is measured nowadays—there were many, even, who were pressed sometimes to meet their dues and their house accounts, but the accounts were invariably promptly paid. No man, once in, could ever afford, or ever had the desire, to resign from the St. James Club. Its membership was cosmopolitan; men of every walk in life passed in and out of its doors, professional men and business men, physicians, artists, merchants, authors, engineers, each stamped with the “hall mark” of the St. James, an innate gentleman. To receive a two weeks’ out-of-town visitor’s card to the St. James was something to speak about, and men from Chicago, St. Louis, or San Francisco spoke of it with a sort of holier-than-thou air to fellow members of their own exclusive clubs, at home again.
Is there any doubt that Jimmie Dale was a gentleman—an innate gentleman? Jimmie Dale’s father had been a member of the St. James Club, and one of the largest safe manufacturers of the United States, a prosperous, wealthy man, and at Jimmie Dale’s birth he had proposed his son’s name for membership. It took some time to get into the St. James; there was a long waiting list that neither money, influence, nor pull could alter by so much as one iota. Men proposed their sons’ names for membership when they were born as religiously as they entered them upon the city’s birth register. At twenty-one Jimmie Dale was elected to membership; and, incidentally, that same year, graduated from Harvard. It was Mr. Dale’s desire that his son should enter the business and learn it from the ground up, and Jimmie Dale, for four years thereafter, had followed his father’s wishes. Then his father died. Jimmie Dale had leanings toward more artistic pursuits than business. He was credited with sketching a little, writing a little; and he was credited with having received a very snug amount from the combine to which he sold out his safe-manufacturing interests. He lived a bachelor life—his mother had been dead many years—in the house that his father had left him on Riverside Drive, kept a car or two and enough servants to run his menage smoothly, and serve a dinner exquisitely when he felt hospitably inclined.