Gun in Cheek (13 page)

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 Jessica 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!")

Murder Goes South
, by Amelia Reynolds Long. Woman mystery writer Peter Piper solves a series of antebellum slaughters in Louisiana and in the process, uncovers more misinformation than you ever wanted to know about voodoo and cypress swamps. This is so full of Stepin Fetchit blacks and thinly veiled racism that it easily wins the Most Objectionable Phoenix Mystery award.

The Case of the Little Green Men
, by Mack Reynolds. In which members of a science-fiction fan club are being terrorized and/or murdered by—it is alleged—little green men who have landed on earth. The hero, a jaded private eye, takes the case, reads a little science fiction to acquaint himself with the background, becomes hooked, and—it is inferred—immediately subscribes to every magazine in the field. He also solves the case, and it should surprise no one to learn that it was not little green men after all but a cunning human being who perpetrated the crimes.

Carl Shannon's
Lady, That's My Skull
. The opening paragraphs of this one reads as follows: "The desk calendar said March twenty-fourth. It could have said any other day and the same thing might have happened. That is, I could have become mixed up with the painted skull. Still, if I had just skipped March twenty-fourth—say been on a big party and not sobered up—maybe I would have missed a lot of unpleasant things. Well, I didn't miss March twenty-fourth, so I didn't miss the damned skull or the trail of violence along which it gyrated." What happens after that involves the skull, which the lawyer-narrator finds in a pawnshop and which bears not only the letters of his old fraternity but the fingerprints of a gangster supposedly dead for years; a murder, a twenty-thousand-dollar necklace, a Chinese valet named Chan, and a watering hole called the Donkey Room wherein the hero makes an ass of himself-naturally).

All the Phoenix mysteries heretofore discussed are either minor classics or near-misses; none quite achieves the unqualified classic status of two others, both published in 1941:
Murder at Horsethief
by James O'Hanlon and
Death Down East
by Hayden Norwood. These two mysteries are totally unlike each other, and yet each in its own way epitomizes the Phoenix mystique.

The first,
Murder at Horsethief
, is the masterwork of former Hollywood scriptwriter and self-styled humorist O'Hanlon. It took him four other novels (three for Phoenix Press, one of which deals with a racehorse named Disaster that eats potted geraniums) to reach the lofty heights of
Murder at Horsethief
. It may be conjectured that the reason O'Hanlon wrote no more mystery novels after this one is that he knew he had reached the limit of his talent and would be unable to surpass himself. Few writers can lay claim, after all, to more than one classic in a lifetime.

Set in an Arizona desert town near which gold has been discovered (again) in 1940, it concerns itself with a crooked saloon owner who was once a mobster in Los Angeles, a group of entertainers known as Frankie Sparrow and his Seven Canaries, a Mexican who is almost hanged by a group of drunken miners after, being falsely accused of murder, a tribe of Malooga Indians who live in the nearby mountains and say clever things like "How" and "Ugh," a group of vigilantes who wear flour-sack hoods and call themselves the Haunts of Horsethief, and the inimitable detective team of Jason and Pat Cordry, who were once extras in Hollywood but who are full-fledged stars in the firmament of southern California lunatics.

The plot (or lack of one) is only one of the reasons that
Murder at Horsethief
is a tour de force. Another is that what O'Hanlon considers funny generally isn't, but most everything else is. O'Hanlon, you see, delighted in concocting phonetic and idiomatic dialogue. Everybody, including Jason and Pat, drops his g's and says "ain't" and butchers the English language in all sorts of fascinating ways.

Some sample Western-miner dialogue: "In a coupla minnuts, Gents, yer gonna see with yer own eyes whut brand o' law we tends t' practice in Horsethief! Whut happens t' this heah Mex is gonna happen t' any white-livered coyote who gits notions 'bout ashootin' decent citizens in anythin' but a faih and squaih fight!"

Some sample Indian dialogue: "Come catchum smoke. Chetterfiel ceegret. Come back byeumbye aftah braves makum powwow wit' Lomitaha."