Mark Troy and the Female Private Detective: Grace "Redsie" Culver (1934 -1937)

In recent weeks, Texas author Mark Troy has considered Carrie Cashin and Sarah Watson for his series on the Female Private Detective. This time around Grace "Redsie" Culver is his subject.

 Grace "Redsie" Culver (1934 -1937)

Sometimes secretary, sometimes operative, Grace Culver worked for "Big Tim" Noonan of the Noonan Detective Agency. Written by Roswell Brown, she appeared in twenty issues of The Shadow Magazine from 1934 to 1937.  She is young, single, and attractive. Her dominant features are her red hair and sherry-colored eyes, which the reader is frequently reminded of. She is known as "Red" or "Redsie" to Big Tim.

Grace is smart, competent, brave and independent, though perhaps shading into recklessness at times. In the first story we learn that gangsters killed her father, but they could not kill the "detective spirit" which was part of the Culver blood. Whatever "detective spirit" is, it gets Redsie into a lot of cases up to her neck, and at some point it gets a lot of guns pointed at her. Sometimes she waxes philosophically about it.

"Grace always had known that Death played tag with her profession. Her own father had gone out that way, fighting, with his boots on. She might have been content to follow him."

Content she's not. It's the thrill of the chase that motivates her to leave her newspaper job and join Big Tim's outfit.

"The tracking of malefactors, the swift action of cornering them and the thrill of  bringing them in for justice, were as much in her blood as is speed in that of a finely-bred race horse."

If the Culver blood drags her into trouble, it also drags Big Tim and her colleague Jerry Riker along with her. Sometimes one or both of them has to save her, but only after she's solved the case. At other times, Grace does the saving of Tim and Jerry.

The stories are more medium-boiled than hard-boiled. There is plenty of action and violence, but little of the cynicism one expects from a hard-boiled story.

Grace doesn't always carry a gun, but everybody else seems to. When she finds herself in a predicament, she has to resort to whatever weapons happen to be handy—paperweight, kitchen knife, pan of hot grease, even a lipstick tube. More than likely, however, she will get her hands on a gun as the action escalates, and she will use it effectively.

Red takes as good as she gets. She gets punched, kicked, knocked out and tied up when she is not getting shot at. She leaps onto speeding cars or drives them, herself, in wild chases.

Grace has a fondness for double chocolate sodas and for the landlady from whom she rents a room, Maggie Moody. Jerry Riker wishes for some fondness from her, but she seems oblivious to Jerry's advances. To his credit, he never gives up trying to get her out on a date.

"Jerry saw an opening and dove into it. They came few and far between with a fast -action girl like "Big Tim" Noonan's red-headed aider-and-abetter. But from long habit, young Riker kept on trying." Just when it seems she might give in, the phone rings with another case.

The stories are competently written and still hold up well in spite of the years. Roswell Brown was a pseudonym for Jean Francis Webb who contributed plenty of stories in a variety of genres. He wrote gothic romance novels under a woman's name. There is some speculation that Webb might be a woman, though the consensus seems to be that he was male.

The Grace Culver stories, as with most stories from that era, are hard to find. However, six of them have been compiled into an ebook, Fox Red, by D.E. Cunningham. It is available for purchase from the Barnes & Noble Nook Store (ISBN: 1588737130)

Mark Troy ©2015

Mark Troy is the author of The Splintered Paddle, The Rules, Pilikia Is My Business and Game Face.  His website is at http://marktroymysterywriter.com

Mark Troy and the Female Private Detective: Carrie Cashin (1937-1943)

Please welcome friend and author Mark Troy to the blog. On the 1^st and 3^rd Wednesday each month Mark will bring another perspective on mysteries here. Something that is good for all of us as the mystery field is a wide one with a rich and deep history. I am looking forward to these posts…

Carrie Cashin, 1937 - 1943

The early 1970's saw a big change in hard-boiled private eye fiction when women PIs entered the field.

Right?

Wrong!

Hard-boiled Janes have walked the mean streets nearly as long as hard boiled Dicks and have acquitted themselves just as well as their brothers.  So it comes as a surprise when a commentator such as John Semley, writing in the New York Times, "The Death Of The Private Eye" makes no mention of women except as femme fatales and minxes. In his view, "The hard-boiled gumshoes were men . . . "

So in upcoming posts we'll give the Janes their due. First up is Carrie Cashin.

Carrie Cashin was the creation of Theodore Tinsley, a prolific author of crime and western fiction. She appeared in forty-four stories from 1937 to 1943 in Crime Busters and Street and Smith's Mystery Magazine. Her appearance on the cover of Crime Busters was enough to spike sales of that issue and Street and Smith came very close to giving her a magazine of her own.

Carrie began as a department store detective, but then started her own agency, the Cash and Carry Agency. She ran it on the sound principle of payment up front, cash only. The agency's motto: "You pay, we deliver." Deliver, she does. She is so successful, she can charge a whopping fee of a thousand dollars for her services.

In the best hard-boiled tradition, Carrie does not let little things, like the law, get in the way of her mission. Breaking and entering, robbery and kidnapping are all part of her skill set. Carrie is not one to enter a door when a window will do. Her weapons are a small gun, which she carries in a thigh holster, and a purse with a secret compartment.

In her first story, "White Elephant," 1937, we find her on a ledge outside a 15th floor hotel room, ready to break in and recover (steal?) a stolen elephant amulet. Recover it she does, but returning to her own room she finds her client dead, killed with her nail file, and the police at the door. Out the window and over the roof she goes, down into the subway where she dodges a train and makes it back to her office.

Carrie's stories are breathless adventures. She rushes here and there, encountering bodies and leaving some herself. She's not all brawn and athleticism, however. She solves the crimes with her brains and wins hearts with her "softly rounded beauty."

Carrie is aided in her exploits by a good-looking, but somewhat dense, "He doesn't know a clue when he sees one," guy named Aleck "Handsome Aleck" Burton. Aleck fronts for the agency because Carrie believes most people are biased against female detectives. Shades of Remington Steele! When a client comes in, Carrie takes the role of a secretary, taking notes and asking the probing questions — for clarification, of course.  Don't expect Handsome Aleck to come to Carrie's rescue or get her out of jams. This is Carrie's show all the way.

She finds the clues, tackles the bad guys, and delivers justice on her own.

Carrie's stories are hard to find. When issues of Crime Busters pop up on eBay, they usually fetch $200 or more. Your best bet is to sample her exploits in Hard-boiled dames: Stories featuring women detectives, reporters, adventurers, and criminals from the pulp fiction magazines of the 1930s, edited by Bernard A. Drew, St. Martin's, 1986. It's worth a visit to your local library.

Mark Troy ©2015

Mark Troy is the author of The Splintered Paddle, The Rules, Pilikia Is My Business and Game Face.  His website is at http://marktroymysterywriter.com