Cover

Title

GOLDEN AGE
DETECTIVE STORIES

OTTO
PENZLER,
EDITOR

AMERICAN
MYSTERY
CLASSICS

GOLDEN AGE
DETECTIVE STORIES

INTRODUCTION

ONE of the favorite sports of mystery critics, historians, and scholars is trying to determine when the mystery genre began, who invented it, and what is the first story or novel in the genre. The other favorite occupation is defining what a mystery is in the first place.

I am not eager to get sucked into the first controversy, in which some have claimed the Bible, specifically Cain slaying Abel, as the first murder story, though there’s not much mystery involved. Others point to Shakespeare, notably Macbeth, but murder and puzzlement turn up in other of his plays as well.

The first memorable act of pure detection is often credited to Voltaire, when his character Zadig makes observations of ordinary facts and then infers events that he could not have seen. Although not specifically involved with crimes, his deductions made him the first systematic detective in literature in 1748.

Embracing the notion of observation and deduction in the solution to criminal mysteries, Edgar Allan Poe can claim with great justification the honor of inventing the detective short story in 1841 when he produced “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” William Leggett’s “The Rifle” preceded Poe’s tale by fourteen years and is largely a textbook of observation and deduction, but the author was not as gifted a storyteller as the master and his story quickly faded into obscurity. Most writers of introductions to mystery books are quite content to leave the honor of invention to Mr. Poe.

While more and more bits of what is now regarded as the mystery novel were added to gothic fiction, they finally coalesced in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-1853) to produce a detective, Inspector Bucket, within the confines of a larger novel with greater ambition than producing a detective novel. Wilkie Collins, a close friend to Dickens, soon followed with The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), described by T.S. Eliot as the first, the longest, and the best detective novel ever written.

With the creation of Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (1887) and, more significantly, the short stories that followed in 1891 and after, the detective story was in full bloom and has never again lost its position as a successful and much-loved literary form.

The history of mystery fiction does not have definitive moments, chiseled in granite, that define the exact time when it can be inarguably stated that—aha!—that is the moment, or the author, or the story, that changed literature forever.

Defining what is a mystery is just as elusive as pinpointing its invention. I have customarily described “mystery” as any work of fiction in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is central to the plot or theme of the work. I would not argue against anyone who suggests that this is an extremely expansive view of the genre, as it includes the detective story, crime fiction, psychological suspense, espionage, thriller, noir, police procedural, private eye, and variations and sub-genres of seemingly infinite variety.

It is an imperfect definition, to be sure, as it would necessarily have to include western fiction, which almost invariably includes a crime or crimes but, since it is its own genre (which has its own challenges, both in claiming the date of its creation and in being defined) it can be left aside.

An area where we may come to a little more accuracy and general agreement about its parameters is the Golden Age of detective fiction. Most people glibly define it as books and stories written between the two world wars, and point to the first Agatha Christie novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) as the benchmark novel. Of course, nothing is quite so simple, as it was published two years after the Great War ended and the time frame ignores E. C. Bentley’s masterpiece, Trent’s Last Case (1913). At the other end of the time continuum, many of the Golden Age writers who got their start in the 1920s were still going strong after World War II ended in 1945. Two of the genre’s giants, in fact, Christie and Ellery Queen, were still releasing novels in the 1970s, as was John Dickson Carr, whose first book was published in 1930.

The Golden Age may be considered in the same fashion as we refer to art, which is that we know it when we see it. The time frame, and even the specific sub-genre of the detective story as one of the buckets of water in the deep well of mystery fiction, may be elastic enough that they do not fit little pigeon holes of dates and genre, nor should we care.

Which brings us to American Golden Age Detective Stories, which features virtually all the giants of mystery fiction produced between the world wars. Alas, no Charlie Chan, no Philo Vance, no Mr. Moto, as their authors never wrote short stories featuring those detectives.

This delightful cornucopia of crime does feature Ellery Queen, of whom Anthony Boucher once gushed, “is the American detective story” in a New York Times book review, and Boucher, for whom the World Mystery Convention was unofficially named the Bouchercon, is in these pages, too. So is Mary Roberts Rinehart, who, for about a quarter of a century, was one of the two bestselling authors in America. For aficionados of impossible crimes, you will find Clayton Rawson and his magician detective, the Great Merlini. For charming couples rivalled only by Nick and Nora Charles (who appeared only in a single novel, The Thin Man), we offer Peter and Iris Duluth and Mr. and Mrs. North, who got their name from a bridge hand. Masters of suspense are here, too, with Cornell Woolrich, the Poe of the twentieth century, and Charlotte Armstrong, whose work has inspired outstanding films of suspense. If your like humor, there’s a story by Craig Rice, the first mystery writer to grace the cover of Time magazine, and Stuart Palmer’s Hildegarde Withers, she of the weird and wild hats. Baynard Kendrick, who holds card number one from the Mystery Writers of America, which he co-founded, is here with his blind detective, and so is Mignon G. Eberhart, the Mary Higgins Clark of her era. Iconic detectives? How about Mr. Mycroft, who some seem to think is a pseudonym for Sherlock Holmes who only wants privacy as he keeps bees in Sussex, and Perry Mason, Erle Stanley Gardner’s lawyer detective who is the bestselling American mystery writer of all time.

Here, then, for our pleasure and edification, our scrutiny and curiosity, our solace and joy, are some examples of the most illustrious writers of the traditional and classic detective story.

OTTO PENZLER

New York, July 2020

THE ENEMY

Charlotte Armstrong

Detective: Mike Russell

ALTHOUGH NOT a household name, in spite of the acclaim given to her by fellow mystery writers and critics, Charlotte Armstrong (1905-1969) enjoyed a long and successful career. She found a highly specialized niche when she wrote frequently about peril to the young and to the elderly, creating stories and novels of suspense that focused on that theme.

In no work is this characterized more graphically than in Mischief (1950), in which a psychopathic hotel babysitter gradually becomes unglued as she contemplates killing her young charge. Filmed as Don’t Bother to Knock (1952), it starred the young and beautiful Marilyn Monroe in a rare villainous role. Directed by Roy Baker, it also starred Richard Widmark, Anne Bancroft, and Elisha Cook, Jr.

Another of Armstrong’s powerful suspense novels to be filmed was The Unsuspected (1946), a controversial novel that was both praised by critics for its writing skill but lambasted for disclosing the identity of the killer almost at the outset. A famous radio narrator steals money from his ward’s inheritance and, when his secretary discovers his thievery, he kills her. More deaths follow before he confesses—on air. It was filmed under the same title and released in 1947 to excellent reviews. Directed by Michael Curtiz, it starred Claude Rains, Joan Caulfield, and Audrey Totter.

During the filming of The Unsuspected, Armstrong and her family permanently moved from New York to California, where she continued to write stores and more than twenty novels, one of which, A Dram of Poison (1956), won the Edgar as the best novel of the year. She also wrote television scripts, including several that were produced by Alfred Hitchcock.

“The Enemy” was originally published in the May 1951 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in The Albatross by Charlotte Armstrong (New York, Coward-McCann, 1957).

The Enemy

By Charlotte Armstrong

THEY SAT late at the lunch table and afterward moved through the dim, cool, high-ceilinged rooms to the Judge’s library where, in their quiet talk, the old man’s past and the young man’s future seemed to telescope and touch. But at twenty minutes after three, on that hot, bright, June Saturday afternoon, the present tense erupted. Out in the quiet street arose the sound of trouble.

Judge Kittinger adjusted his pince-nez, rose, and led the way to his old-fashioned veranda from which they could overlook the tree-roofed intersection of Greenwood Lane and Hannibal Street. Near the steps to the corner house, opposite, there was a surging knot of children and one man. Now, from the house on the Judge’s left, a woman in a blue house dress ran diagonally toward the excitement. And a police car slipped up Hannibal Street, gliding to the curb. One tall officer plunged into the group and threw restraining arms around a screaming boy.

Mike Russell, saying to his host, “Excuse me, sir,” went rapidly across the street. Trouble’s center was the boy, ten or eleven years old, a towheaded boy, with tawny-lashed blue eyes, a straight nose, a fine brow. He was beside himself, writhing in the policeman’s grasp. The woman in the blue dress was yammering at him. “Freddy! Freddy! Freddy!” Her voice simply did not reach his ears.

“You ole stinker! You rotten ole stinker! You ole nut!” All the boy’s heart was in the epithets.

“Now, listen . . .” The cop shook the boy who, helpless in those powerful hands, yet blazed. His fury had stung to crimson the face of the grown man at whom it was directed.

This man, who stood with his back to the house as one besieged, was plump, half-bald, with eyes much magnified by glasses. “Attacked me!” he cried in a high whine. “Rang my bell and absolutely leaped on me!”

Out of the seven or eight small boys clustered around them came overlapping fragments of shrill sentences. It was clear only that they opposed the man. A small woman in a print dress, a man in shorts, whose bare chest was winter-white, stood a little apart, hesitant and distressed. Up on the veranda of the house the screen door was half-open, and a woman seated in a wheelchair peered forth anxiously.

On the green grass, in the shade, perhaps thirty feet away, there lay in death a small brown-and-white dog.

The Judge’s luncheon guest observed all this. When the Judge drew near, there was a lessening of the noise. Judge Kittinger said, “This is Freddy Titus, isn’t it? Mr. Matlin? What’s happened?”

The man’s head jerked. “I,” he said, “did nothing to the dog. Why would I trouble to hurt the boy’s dog? I try—you know this, Judge—I try to live in peace here. But these kids are terrors! They’ve made this block a perfect hell for me and my family.” The man’s voice shook. “My wife, who is not strong . . . My stepdaughter, who is a cripple . . . These kids are no better than a slum gang. They are vicious! That boy rang my bell and attacked . . .! I’ll have him up for assault! I . . .”

The Judge’s face was old ivory and he was aloof behind it.

On the porch a girl pushed past the woman in the chair, a girl who walked with a lurching gait.

Mike Russell asked, quietly, “Why do the boys say it was you, Mr. Matlin, who hurt the dog?”

The kids chorused. “He’s an ole mean . . .” “He’s a nut . . .” “Just because . . .” “. . . took Clive’s bat and . . .” “. . . chases us . . .” “. . . tries to put everything on us . . .” “. . . told my mother lies . . .” “. . . just because . . .”

He is our enemy, they were saying; he is our enemy.

“They . . .” began Matlin, his threat thick with anger.

“Hold it a minute.” The second cop, the thin one, walked toward where the dog was lying.

“Somebody,” said Mike Russell in a low voice, “must do something for the boy.”

The Judge looked down at the frantic child. He said, gently, “I am as sorry as I can be, Freddy . . .” But in his old heart there was too much known, and too many little dogs he remembered that had already died, and even if he were as sorry as he could be, he couldn’t be sorry enough. The boy’s eyes turned, rejected, returned. To the enemy.

Russell moved near the woman in blue, who pertained to this boy somehow. “His mother?”

“His folks are away. I’m there to take care of him,” she snapped, as if she felt herself put upon by a crisis she had not contracted to face.

“Can they be reached?”

“No,” she said decisively.

The young man put his stranger’s hand on the boy’s rigid little shoulder. But he too was rejected. Freddy’s eyes, brilliant with hatred, clung to the enemy. Hatred doesn’t cry.

“Listen,” said the tall cop, “if you could hang onto him for a minute . . .”

“Not I . . .” said Russell.

The thin cop came back. “Looks like the dog got poison. When was he found?”

“Just now,” the kids said.

“Where? There?”

“Up Hannibal Street. Right on the edge of ole Matlin’s back lot.”

“Edge of my lot!” Matlin’s color freshened again. “On the sidewalk, why don’t you say? Why don’t you tell the truth?”

“We are! We don’t tell lies!”

“Quiet, you guys,” the cop said. “Pipe down, now.”

“Heaven’s my witness, I wasn’t even here!” cried Matlin. “I played nine holes of golf today. I didn’t get home until . . . May?” he called over his shoulder. “What time did I come in?”

The girl on the porch came slowly down, moving awkwardly on her uneven legs. She was in her twenties, no child. Nor was she a woman. She said in a blurting manner, “About three o’clock, Daddy Earl. But the dog was dead.”

“What’s that, Miss?”

“This is my step-daughter . . .”

“The dog was dead,” the girl said, “before he came home. I saw it from upstairs, before three o’clock. Lying by the sidewalk.”

“You drove in from Hannibal Street, Mr. Matlin? Looks like you’d have seen the dog.”

Matlin said with nervous thoughtfulness, “I don’t know. My mind . . . Yes, I . . .”

“He’s telling a lie!”

“Freddy!”

“Listen to that,” said May Matlin, “will you?”

“She’s a liar, too!”

The cop shook Freddy. Mr. Matlin made a sound of helpless exasperation. He said to the girl, “Go keep your mother inside, May.” He raised his arm as if to wave. “It’s all right, honey,” he called to the woman in the chair, with a false cheeriness that grated on the ear. “There’s nothing to worry about, now.”

Freddy’s jaw shifted and young Russell’s watching eyes winced. The girl began to lurch back to the house.

“It was my wife who put in the call,” Matlin said. “After all, they were on me like a pack of wolves. Now, I . . . I understand that the boy’s upset. But all the same, he cannot . . . He must learn . . . I will not have . . . I have enough to contend with, without this malice, this unwarranted antagonism, this persecution . . .”

Freddy’s eyes were unwinking.

“It has got to stop!” said Matlin almost hysterically.

“Yes,” murmured Mike Russell, “I should think so.” Judge Kittinger’s white head, nodding, agreed.

“We’ve heard about quite a few dog-poisoning cases over the line in Redfern,” said the thin cop with professional calm. “None here.”

The man in the shorts hitched them up, looking shocked. “Who’d do a thing like that?”

A boy said, boldly, “Ole Matlin would.” He had an underslung jaw and wore spectacles on his snub nose. “I’m Phil Bourchard,” he said to the cop. He had courage.

“We jist know,” said another. “I’m Ernie Allen.” Partisanship radiated from his whole thin body. “Ole Matlin doesn’t want anybody on his ole property.”

“Sure.” “He doesn’t want anybody on his ole property.” “It was ole Matlin.”

“It was. It was,” said Freddy Titus.

“Freddy,” said the housekeeper in blue, “now, you better be still. I’ll tell your Dad.” It was a meaningless fumble for control. The boy didn’t even hear it.

Judge Kittinger tried, patiently. “You can’t accuse without cause, Freddy.”

“Bones didn’t hurt his ole property. Bones wouldn’t hurt anything. Ole Matlin did it.”

“You lying little devil!”

“He’s a liar!”

The cop gave Freddy another shake. “You kids found him, eh?”

“We were up at Bourchard’s and were going down to the Titus house.”

“And he was dead,” said Freddy.

“I know nothing about it,” said Matlin icily. “Nothing at all.”

The cop, standing between, said wearily, “Any of you people see what coulda happened?”

“I was sitting in my backyard,” said the man in shorts. “I’m Daugherty, next door, up Hannibal Street. Didn’t see a thing.”

The small woman in a print dress spoke up. “I am Mrs. Page. I live across the corner, Officer. I believe I did see a strange man go into Mr. Matlin’s driveway this morning.”

“When was this, Ma’am?”

“About eleven o’clock. He was poorly dressed. He walked up the drive and around the garage.”

“Didn’t go to the house?”

“No. He was only there a minute. I believe he was carrying something. He was rather furtive. And very poorly dressed, almost like a tramp.”

There was a certain relaxing, among the elders. “Ah, the tramp,” said Mike Russell. “The good old reliable tramp. Are you sure, Mrs. Page? It’s very unlikely . . . .”

But she bristled. “Do you think I am lying?”

Russell’s lips parted, but he felt the Judge’s hand on his arm. “This is my guest, Mr. Russell . . . Freddy.” The Judge’s voice was gentle. “Let him go, Officer. I’m sure he understands, now. Mr. Matlin was not even at home, Freddy. It’s possible that this . . . er . . . stranger . . . Or it may have been an accident . . .”

“Wasn’t a tramp. Wasn’t an accident.”

“You can’t know that, boy,” said the Judge, somewhat sharply. Freddy said nothing. As the officer slowly released his grasp, the boy took a free step, backwards, and the other boys surged to surround him. There stood the enemy, the monster who killed and lied, and the grown-ups with their reasonable doubts were on the monster’s side. But the boys knew what Freddy knew. They stood together.

“Somebody,” murmured the Judge’s guest, “somebody’s got to help the boy.” And the Judge sighed.

The cops went up Hannibal Street, toward Matlin’s back lot, with Mr. Daugherty. Matlin lingered at the corner talking to Mrs. Page. In the front window of Matlin’s house the curtain fell across the glass.

Mike Russell sidled up to the housekeeper. “Any uncles or aunts here in town? A grandmother?”

“No,” she said, shortly.

“Brothers or sisters, Mrs. . . .?”

“Miz Somers. No, he’s the only one. Only reason they didn’t take him along was it’s the last week of school and he didn’t want to miss.”

Mike Russell’s brown eyes suggested the soft texture of velvet, and they were deeply distressed. She slid away from their appeal. “He’ll just have to take it, I guess, like everybody else,” Mrs. Somers said. “These things happen.”

He was listening intently. “Don’t you care for dogs?”

“I don’t mind a dog,” she said. She arched her neck. She was going to call to the boy.

“Wait. Tell me, does the family go to church? Is there a pastor or a priest who knows the boy?”

“They don’t go, far as I ever saw.” She looked at him as if he were an eccentric.

“Then school. He has a teacher. What grade?”

“Sixth grade,” she said. “Miss Dana. Oh, he’ll be okay.” Her voice grew loud, to reach the boy and hint to him. “He’s a big boy.”

Russell said, desperately, “Is there no way to telephone his parents?”

“They’re on the road. They’ll be in some time tomorrow. That’s all I know.” She was annoyed. “I’ll take care of him. That’s why I’m here.” She raised her voice and this time it was arch and seductive. “Freddy, better come wash your face. I know where there’s some chocolate cookies.”

The velvet left the young man’s eyes. Hard as buttons, they gazed for a moment at the woman. Then he whipped around and left her. He walked over to where the kids had drifted, near the little dead creature on the grass. He said softly, “Bones had his own doctor, Freddy? Tell me his name?” The boy’s eyes flickered. “We must know what it was that he took. A doctor can tell. I think his own doctor would be best, don’t you?”

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!