From the magnificently massive archive…
Successful
novelist and gun collector Larmar Jordan lives in a lavish fourteenth floor
Arday Apartments suite with his wife Lucia, his live-in secretary Paul Hirst, a
cocker spaniel named Winnie, and domestic servants. In attendance at a cocktail
party in the suite are Larmar’s literary agent Sarah Hanley, newspaper reporter
Bob Morse, and Sybella Ford, accompanied by her fiancée Captain Duncan Maclain.
Having attained
his rank twenty years earlier during World War I while an intelligence officer,
and blinded during that conflict, Maclain overcame his handicap—and benefited
from it by heightening his other senses—to take on the unlikely profession,
along with partner Spud Savage, of private investigator.
When Troy
Singleton, a woman with whom Jordan has been intimately involved, is shot to
death in the author’s study with one of the firearms from his esoteric
collection, Jordan is the immediate and arrested suspect. Although New York
Homicide detectives Inspector Davis and Sergeant Archer, with whom Maclain has
contended before, consider it an open-and-shut case, not least because of a
neighboring witness, Mrs. Oliver, Maclain agrees to undertake Lucia’s
investigation of her husband’s predicament. What he unearths reveals a great
deal more than the police have suspected.
In addition to
some of the aforementioned people, Maclain has to deal with as sources of
information and/or as suspects Ellis Brown Mitchell, firearms expert who is
cataloguing Jordan’s collection; Jess Ferguson, Jordan’s attorney; a menacing
and motivated individual named Martin Gallagher; and very successful aircraft
manufacturer Daniel Pine.
A generally
well-written detective story with a good sense of character, Death Knell has
occasional arguable stylistic lapses wherein descriptions of Maclain’s
abilities are reminiscent of descriptions of pulp “super” heroes like The
Shadow, Doc Savage, and others of that ilk. The novel combines the qualities of
the traditional whodunit with some of the action and suspense of the hardboiled
school.
Those old enough
to remember the short-lived TV series Longstreet might recall its blind
insurance investigator portrayed by James Franciscus. Mike Longstreet wasn’t
Duncan Maclain, but the program—and thus his character—was credited to Kendrick
as creator. In 1938 and the early1940s, there were several movies starring the
miscast Edward Arnold (miscast physically, that is, based upon descriptions in
the books) as Maclain, among them “Eyes in the Night” which, as of this
writing, is available at YouTube.
Although my teenage reading about mystery series informed me of the Duncan Maclain novels, it wasn’t until paperback editions were reissued following the advent of the Longstreet program in 1971 that I actually got to read several of them. It is a worthwhile series of detective novels which merits resurrection for 21st Century readers.
Barry Ergang ©2018, 2023
Among his other works, Derringer Award-winner Barry Ergang’s
locked-room novelette, The Play of Light and Shadow, can be found in eBook formats at Smashwords.com and Amazon.com
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