West of Guam (5 page)

Ratan is vindictive, insulting, nasty—and as consistently wrong as Arragon. “You have always chosen to oppose me,” Jo rebukes. “It is a mistake to allow personal prejudice to enter matters of this sort, for in so doing you have often neglected important facts” (“The Man from Shanghai,” p. 122). Ultimately, Ratan executes a 180-degree turn and concedes that Jo is “very clever.” He says they should work together more closely. “I might even consider resigning in order to enter and strengthen your private agency.” Jo has the last devastating word. “I fear that the loss to the Force would be too great, Lieutenant” (“The Amber Fan,” p. 109).
⁴

Jo’s m.o. is as crafty as it is ruthless. He practices deceptiveness with gusto; indeed, his sleepy facade, his toneless voice, constitute a wile. Bluffing seldom pays, he admonishes Ratan (“The Man from Shanghai”), yet Jo will often bluff about his knowledge of testimony or evidence and ferret out the murderer or the information he wants, or both. He will lie; he will bargain, but only to his advantage. He will threaten to kill. I cannot resist quoting two fine moments when The Island Detective is in action.

He demands that a corrupted Chinese chauffeur who has driven him into an ambush and near-death outside Honolulu take him to Tan Ying, The Blind Chinese.

“If I take you to the place—they will kill you.”

Jo Gar shrugged. “And if you do
not
take me—
I
will kill you,” he said. “It is a difficult position.”

The driver said: “I am a poor man—”

The Island detective nodded. “Then you have less to live for,” he replied. “Let us start.” (“The Blind Chinese,” p. 45)

Don’t lie—you are dying, Jo reproves a suspect, injured in a sampan explosion on the Pasig, having already promised that “the saints will be kind” if he talks. Santos Costios admits to killing a
calesa
driver, among other deeds. Thereupon, Gar cynically comments to Arragon that Costios only
thinks
he is going to die.

The Filipino was staring at Jo Gar and cursing him in a stronger voice. He was accusing [him] of tricking him. He was not going to die, after all.

Jo Gar interrupted, sighing. “I should have said, you’re not going to die yet,” he corrected. “For the murder of the cales[a] driver—you will die, of course. You are pleased?”

Costios cursed in a weaker tone (“The Caleso Murders,” pp. 101–2).

In another case, Jo directs his client, Lemere, to summon the police. Damn the police! Replies the curio dealer. Damning the police does little good—call them, tell them the truth. “‘They will do interesting things.’” Lemere reluctantly assents and then asks Gar what
he
will do. “ ‘I shall talk and think. Counteracting a bad habit with a good one’ ” (“The Javanese Mask,” p. 54). Clients can be testy. One acidly remarks that he would prefer to ask the questions and have Jo answer them. Tonelessly, The Island Detective reminds Señor Wall that “ ‘it is almost always simpler to ask questions than to answer them’ ” (“The Black Sampan,” p. 97). And clients can be unacceptable: Miss Virginia Crale, for example. “ ‘Hysterical ladies are not pleasing in the tropics … [Her] life has been threatened so often, in her imagination, that her fees bored me beyond their value in cash’ ” (“The Man from Shanghai,” p. 116). In this instance she was right—Jo wrong. She is brutally murdered.

Above all, Jo Gar is stubborn and a fighter, the more so the more his life is threatened. Arragon offers that maybe it would have been wiser if Jo
had
taken a sojourn from Manila.

The Island Detective nodded. “I am like the cock Ramirez had at the Casa Club, two weeks ago,” he said. “You remember—it was almost blind. It didn’t seem to know just where to leap. But it would not be beaten” (“Signals of Storm,” p. 44).

Jo’s turf is Manila and its environs, although he sails to Nagasaki (Kyushu) on one venture, ends up in San Francisco on another, solves one up-country slaying, and one in Baguio (“Silence House”), the summer capital of the Philippines, 150 miles north of Manila, high in the mountains of western Luzon.

Manila, before World War II, was a place where racial and ethnic slurs and invectives abounded, or so Decolta/Whitfield would have us believe, and I think accurately so.
⁵
Distasteful as such reading may be today—and it is—derogatory remarks in print were perfectly acceptable in the 1930s, whatever the level of publication. We would be unwise to accuse Decolta/Whitfield of racial or ethnic prejudices; he presented Manila and its people as he saw them. In other words, his was an exercise in verisimilitude.
⁶

To be blunt, using Decolta/Whitfield’s language verbatim, Jo Gar is a half-breed; that is he has “ ‘the blood of the Spanish and the Filipino’ ” in his veins (“Diamonds of Death,” p. 90). Some half-dozen times in the
Black Mask
stories this comes up; twice Jo is called a half-breed, with modified adjectives, to his face (“Signals of Storm,” p. 51; “Diamonds of Death,” p. 90); twice Jo is obliquely disparaged (“Death in the Pasig,” pp. 104–105; “The Caleso Murders,” p. 98); twice Jo’s momentary companion is embarrassed because he goes too far. The Island Detective, always polite, handles himself impeccably. On a bridge over the Pasig, he talks about the apparent suicide of Gary Landon with an American, Dean Price, the actual murderer.

“They’ve cut him down. White or—”

The American checked himself; his eyes held a confused expression. Jo Gar said quietly, smiling a little:

“Not brown like myself, Mr. Price. White—like yourself.”

Price reached for a cigar …

“I meant no offense Señor Gar.”

Jo nodded, “it is all very well,” he replied tonelessly. “I imagine the man is dead, just as both of us will be someday” (“Enough Rope,” p. 26)

In “The Javanese Mask,” Lemere mutters angrily about “ ‘damned Chinks and Filipinos,’ ” then checks himself, “realizing that Jo Gar was a half-breed, and that there was Filipino blood in his veins. The Island detective said nothing.” (p. 50)

Paradoxically, Jo is accused of being Pro-American—too much so, for Lieutenant Ratan’s liking. “ ‘You are protecting an American [Markden, his client]. You have always protected them. You like them.’ ” (“The Magician Murder,” p. 92) Jo merely shrugs his narrow shoulders and says that he has not been paid
that
well, doubts he ever will be paid
that
well. But he does like Americans and he will distinguish, astringently, the Asians from them. Markden is a gambler; the Chinese do not trust him “and the Chinese were known as the wisest of the gamblers” (“The Magician Murder,” p. 89) who cover bets on cockfights. He is accused of murdering with a knife a magician, Cardoro the Great, because he did not pay his debts. Observes Gar: “Markden is an American, and he would not kill and then boast about it as a Filipino or a Spaniard might do. He would not hate that much’” (“The Magician Murder,” p. 96). To Jo’s way of thinking, Americans would never strangle a victim with a rope—“ ‘that is not the way of an American in killing,’ ” referring to young Carmen Carejo’s demise (“Red Hemp,” p. 37). Nor would an American use a knife, while “ ‘here in the Islands,’” he explains, “ ‘it is most often the knife” (“The Amber Fan,” p. 101).

His attitude toward the Overseas Chinese in Manila is ambiguous. He is friendly with some shopkeepers, yet can cruelly claim that all fat Chinese look alike and that there are many fat Chinese in Manila. After a knife has been thrown at him outside his office, he ruminates:

Two thoughts were strong—the knife thrower had been a Chinese, and he had thrown very poorly. He had thrown like a Filipino would shoot, missing at even a short distance (“China Man,” p. 94).

On more than one occasion, Chinese are murdered in Jo’s cases, and they can be untrustworthy, wily, and dangerous. This does not prevent his defending them against Ratan’s open scorn and contempt.

Jo Gar said: “Lieutenant—you have learned a motive for the murder? His servant had reason to kill him [Delancey, a curio dealer]?”

Lieutenant Ratan said sneeringly: “Chinese servants do not always need motives for murder. A sudden rage—”

The Island Detective smiled. “You are correct, of course,” he said (“The Javanese Mask,” p. 54).

Lemere, companion and friend of the dead man, tells of the time that Gao, the Chinese house-boy, stole a carved Igorot spoon of little value.

Jo said slowly: “The Chinese are usually quite honest. … They give the least trouble—”

The police lieutenant said sharply: “There are some forty Chinese serving terms in Bilibid prison, Señor Gar.”

The Island detective bowed slightly. “You are undoubtedly correct, Lieutenant,” he stated. (“The Javanese Mask,” p. 55).

Ratan is insatiable in his desire to pin the murder of Delancey on Gao. He implies that he might also have stolen the wooden Javanese dance mask “ ‘to show his contempt—the Chinese are strange people.’” Jo Gar chuckles and says, “ ‘And the Manila police are strange people, also. Very strange’ ” (“The Javanese Mask,” p. 55).

Then there are the women of the islands as Jo sees them. He has as little interest in them as he does in his Western women clients, for he leads an utterly sexless existence. The native women are susceptible, deceptive, sometimes murderous; and Gar is less than complimentary about their physical attractiveness. He just doesn’t care for them. In “Red Hemp” he asks Carejo for a picture of his missing daughter, Carmen.

It was a clear snapshot; it showed a dark-haired, slender girl of about eighteen. She was rather pretty, in a way of the islands, which was not a lasting way. She had large eyes and a rather thin face (p. 34).

In “Signals of Storm,” the Island Detective interviews Rosa Castrone, who, it later turns out, is an accomplice in the kidnapping of Sam Ying, a wealthy, corrupt Chinese.

[She] was a plump girl of perhaps twenty. She had blue eyes and blonde hair, but she was not the true Spanish type. She was half Filipino; her lips were too thick and her features too big (p. 45).

The nameless chambermaid in “The Siamese Cat” is involved in two murders. “She was dark haired, medium in size. She was good looking for a Filipino girl, slenderer than most of them. Her English was very good” (p. 37). When she is cornered, she spats obscenities at Jo “in a half Spanish, half Filipino dialect” (p. 38). Another nameless Island woman impersonates behind a veil the supposedly grieving widow, Clara Landon. Jo unceremoniously tears off the veil. “She was a
mestiz[a],
mostly Filipino. But Spanish or Anglo-Saxon blood had given her skin a white tint. She was small, very thin” (“Enough Rope,” p. 32). Jo threatens her with Bilibid Prison if she doesn’t talk, and points out that many prisoners die there. She confesses.

But enough of this.

Lieutenant Ratan gives
his
solution to John Mallison’s violent end in “China Man.” Naturally, he is dead wrong, by now a familiar bit, but Gar is polite and patient with the man he knows hates him.

Jo Gar nodded. “It appears to be very simple,” he agreed.

The police lieutenant smiled broadly. “Very,” he agreed. “You waste your time, Señor Gar.”

The Island detective shook his head (pp. 98–99).

To Jo Gar, like any good detective, nothing is ever as it appears. “Things,” are never as they appear. In the teeth of seeming evidence, he will pursue a case with dogged tenacity until he solves it—correctly. Admittedly, too much of his legwork and sleuthing is accomplished outside the boundaries of a story; at the end, therefore, the reader is suddenly “handed” data out of reach to him. This is decidedly a weakness in the series.

Another failing is what I call the “shoot-out” ending when Jo unlimbers his .45 from his hip-pocket or his side-pocket and goes into action; but even as I say this, I realize that the Code of the Pulps, e.g.,
Black Mask,
dictated such a zip-bang, crash-bam finale. In a word, dear readers, it was
de rigueur.
Decolta/Whitfield knew The Code; he was not stupid.

Somehow these weaknesses are not bothersome. Nor is Jo’s bluffing. Nor his unerring hunches. He is too fascinating a man to be the butt of such quibbling.

After Jo’s wrap-up of Benjamin Rannis’s murder, Juan Aragon has a word or two.

“Death in the Pasig,” he said slowly, “is always difficult.” He smiled at Jo. “Not being a fool, I congratulate you.”

Jo Gar fanned himself slowly with his pith helmet. He smiled in return.

“Perhaps I had the better opportunity,” he said quietly. “But not being too modest—I am pleased” (“Death in the Pasig,” p. 111).

And so is the honest reader pleased. Pleased by him, pleased by his bearing and his conduct, pleased by his adventures.

Sixteen of them stand by themselves and range from death on a U.S. Army transport (“West of Guam”) to death in an airplane (“Climbing Death”). More likely than not, murders happen off-stage or before a story commences. Knifings—Decolta/Whitfield has a thing about knives—shootings, and stranglings are favored, not to mention five suicides by the guilty ones, not to mention the five “humans”—one of Decolta/Whitfield’s pet words—Jo either kills or wounds.

There are two serials made up of eight segments total. The first, and less interesting, is a tandem, “Nagasaki Bound” and “Nagasaki Knives.” Here the diminutive Jo tracks down both the murderers of Randonn, a wealthy Englishman, and his valuable pearls which Howker and Deming have heisted. Hard-boiled action is handled very well by Decolta/Whitfield.

Jo’s longest and most violent caper (a sextet) takes him from the blood-spattered streets of Manila to the suburbs of San Francisco as he chases stolen diamonds and the killers of Juan Arragon.
⁷
The story deserves a re-telling, for it is the high point of Decolta/Whitfield’s series in
Black Mask.
Some of his best tough-guy style flashes time and again, and there are narrative passages and dialogue set pieces which compare with the finest in Hammett, Paul Cain, and Chandler.