For this final Friday
in July, I thought I would run again the below review which first ran in May of
2013 here. It was probably way too hot then too. The full list of books that
may or may not cool you off, but just might distract you from the heat can be
found over at the wonderful blog of Patti
Abbott. I also remind you of the fact that these are the final few days of
the current Smashwords sale where I and far more famous and prolific authors
such as Barry Ergang, Kaye George, and others, have books for sale. Whatever
you choose to read or watch, stay cool and hydrated. Dallas Cowboys have started training camp so
our long national nightmare is almost over as the NFL returns….
BRASS KNUCKLES: The Oliver Quade, Human Encyclopedia Stories (1966)
by Frank Gruber
Reviewed by Barry
Ergang
Frank Gruber had a fondness for itinerant book salesmen who
stumble into murderous situations. His best-known series of novels features
Johnny Fletcher and his partner Sam Cragg. Fletcher pitches the book Every Man a Samson while the muscular
Cragg, who maintains he's the strongest man in the world, shows off his
physique to the audience. For the pulp magazines Gruber created Oliver Quade,
the Human Encyclopedia, ten of whose adventures are collected in Brass Knuckles. (One was published in Thrilling Detective. The rest appeared
in the legendary Black Mask.) Quade
pitches the one-volume The Compendium of
Human Knowledge, which he sells for only two ninety-five. Declaring himself
possessed of "the greatest brain in the United States, possibly the
greatest in the world," he maintains that "I know the answers to all
questions." Over fifteen years, he has read a twenty-four volume set of
the Encyclopedia Americana four times.
"I've an unusual memory," he tells a woman in one of the stories. "I
remember everything I read and therefore I know everything that's in the
encyclopedia." The odd bits of knowledge he's picked up often aid in the
solutions of the murders he has the convenient habit of stumbling upon.
The book opens with a lengthy, fascinating foreword,
"The Life and Times of the Pulp Story," in which Gruber reminisces
about how he struggled to break into writing for the pulps, and about the early
failures and eventual successes, large and small, he experienced. It includes
an eleven-point formula he claims is a "foolproof" method for
plotting a salable mystery story. Although I enjoyed them, I'm not convinced
all of the stories that follow exemplify it.
In the first and shortest story in the collection, "Ask
Me Another," Oliver Quade and Charlie Boston are on the verge of being
locked out of their hotel room because they owe three weeks' rent. But Quade figures
they can raise the money by pitching the Compendium
of Human Knowledge to the attendees of the Great Chicago Auditorium Poultry
Show. Neither he nor Boston
expects to encounter murder.
At the kennel show in Westfield,
New York, the last thing Quade
and Boston
expect to find in their booth is the corpse of one Wesley Peters. Even more
confusing is the willingness of several people in attendance to confess to shooting
him. Before long, Quade tangles with the local police chief, a renowned private
detective named Christopher Buck, a gangster just out of prison, and has
another corpse to account for in "Dog Show Murder."
"Funny Man" takes Quade and Boston to Hollywood, where Quade is hired by Slocum
Studios head man Tommy Slocum to dub the voice of cartoon character Desmond
Dogg, since the actor who usually voices the character has laryngitis. Coming
out of Slocum's office, Quade encounters his old adversary, self-declared
"world's greatest" private detective Christopher Buck. Buck assumes
Quade is working as an investigator and wants to know what he knows. Conversely,
Quade wants to know the same about Buck. When studio executive Stanley Maynard,
Buck's client, is found murdered, the amateur and professional sleuths compete
to discover the killer's identity.
Still in Hollywood
and staying at an expensive hotel, Quade and Boston owe more than four hundred dollars for
rent, meals, and incidental charges—money they don't have. The hotel manager
confronts them in the dining room and tells them they have until six p.m. to come up with the cash or
he'll have them arrested for intent to defraud. Having overheard, another diner
named George Grimshaw offers them twenty dollars to deliver a letter to a
Martin Lund. They accept, not worried about the two thugs who want to relieve
them of the letter. They find Lund
but can't give him the letter because he's been murdered. So Quade opens the
envelope, finds another envelope inside and a note from Grimshaw telling Lund to meet him at the
track. Thus, it's "Oliver Quade at the Races," where Grimshaw is also
murdered and Quade must use his wits and wiles to get to the bottom of things—and pay the hotel bill.
A small passenger plane makes a "Forced Landing"
in a snow-covered clearing in northern Wisconsin.
One passenger is dead, the result of flying glass from a shattered window. The
pilot is dead, too—from a bullet wound. Around the same time, Oliver Quade and
Charlie Boston are driving through the area on their way to Duluth when the car runs over an animal that
turns out to be a silver fox, a creature whose pelt is very valuable. When their
car won't start, they have to start walking. Eventually they come to a house
owned by fox breeder Karl Becker. Not long after they arrive, the airplane's
co-pilot staggers in and tells them of the crash. They set out to find and
bring back the remaining passengers. That's only the beginning of an adventure
that includes a pair of profit-minded fugitive kidnappers, another murder, and
plenty of action.
In "Death Sits Down," Quade, sans Boston, goes to the Bartlett Cash Register Company's recreation
room to launch into his sales pitch, not knowing the employees are about to go
on strike and prevent anyone from entering or leaving the building. Among those
in it is a vicious murderer who doesn't intend to let anyone hinder the scheme
he's hatched. The author does a good job of building the tension in this
fast-paced story.
"Words and Music" opens with Quade and Boston "in the
dough" for a change, and relaxing in the cocktail lounge of New York City's Midtown
Hotel, where they have rooms. They're approached by a drunk named Billy Bond
who says he's a song writer, claims "I wrote the best little damn song
that's been written in this damn town in the las' five years." He then
hands sheet music to the lounge's piano player, tells the man to play, and sings
the lyrics himself. After a pause during which he gulps some beer, violent
convulsions seize him and he falls into Quade's arms—dead. The police are
summoned, and Quade describes a man he saw switch glasses with Bond. The police
detective recognizes the description as belonging to a deranged chemist named
Soup Spooner, so named for providing nitroglycerine to safecrackers. Quade
can't resist investigating, despite Boston's
objections, and plunges into the world of music publishing rackets. Spooner is
still out there, setting an insidious and deadly trap.
The second shortest story in the book, "State Fair
Murder" takes Quade and Boston
to the titular location in Minnesota.
Quade has barely launched into his pitch when a man in the crowd falls into
him, the victim of a poisoned dart in his back. As usual, despite Boston's protests, Quade
can't resist playing detective in a case dealing with conflicts within a
publishing company.
Among the "how-to" advice often given to both
beginning and experienced writers is never open a story with a description of
the weather. But in "Rain, the Killer," Frank Gruber does exactly
that—and very effectively. This is, for me, the most exciting story in the book,
so I don't want to give too much away. Suffice it to say that it's a take on
the isolated, impassable locale that puts Quade (who once again is without
Charlie Boston), the members of a wealthy household, and a sheriff and his
deputy in dire peril from the weather and a particularly brutal murderer, one
of whose crimes is depicted somewhat graphically. A whodunit, it does not play
fair with the reader, but the tense and exciting situation that befalls the
cast of characters more than makes up for it. The only element in the story
that is somewhat dubious by modern standards is the psychology of the murderer.
In another story that omits Charlie Boston, Quade finagles
his way into the barn Reggie Ragsdale converted into an arena on his Long Island estate in which to hold cockfights. "Long Island didn't see many cocking mains. Cocking wasn't
a gentleman's sport like horse racing and fox hunting In fact, many of Long Island's blue-bloods had shaken their heads when
young Ragsdale took up cock fighting. But they had eagerly accepted invitations
to the Ragsdale estate to witness the great cocking main between Ragsdale's
birds and the best of the Old South, the feathered warriors of George
Treadwell." When Treadwell is murdered, Quade as a gate-crasher becomes a
prime suspect and has to solve the crime himself. "Death at the Main" is sort
of fairly-clued, if one allows for an obscure bit of lore that provides the
solution.
Were he writing today, Frank Gruber would be designated a
minimalist, so stripped-down was his style. The physical descriptions of
characters in these stories are always very brief and sometimes non-existent,
and the people themselves are largely dimensionless names on the page. There is
no sense of place of the kind one finds in, say, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond
Chandler and, except in "Rain, the Killer," no real sense of
atmosphere. I would not rate Gruber as one of the top-tier writers who honed
their skills in the pulps, but he could nevertheless tell a story effectively,
as the tales in Brass Knuckles
demonstrate. They aren't serious literature to be pored over and explicated;
they're fast-reading fluff meant strictly for entertainment. Regarded in that
light, they're recommended.
Barry Ergang ©2013, 2018
Some of Derringer
Award-winner Barry Ergang’s work is available at Amazon and Smashwords. The latter site is running its annual sale through the month of
July. Barry and Kevin Tipple are
among the participating authors, so take advantage of their reduced prices.
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