Mark Troy and the Female Private Detective: Trixie Meehan, 1933-1951

Mark Troy is back today with another installment of his series on the female private detective. This time around he covers Honey West. Make sure you check out the earlier installments of this series as well as Mark’s books and website.

Trixie Meehan, 1933-1951

Trixie Meehan and Mike Harris were operatives for the Blaine Detective Agency in sixteen stories by T.T. (Thomas Theodore) Flynn from 1933 to 1951.  They were typical pulp stories, mixing hardboiled heroics, some romance, and outlandish situations.

Mike is a big, tough, wise-cracking redhead, but he is also insightful with a soft spot or two, usually for Trixie. He turns brash and reckless, his anger ratcheting up a notch, when Trixie falls into danger, as she does so often.

Mike narrates the stories so our image of Trixie is filtered through his eyes:

Trixie Meehan stood at my elbow with a leer on her lovely little face. The others probably thought Trixie was smiling. They didn't know the gal. They didn't know Trixie Meehan.

Pert and sweet, soft and cuddly, harmless as a kitten and luscious-looking to all big strong men—that's Trixie if you don't know her.

But if you knew her as Mike knew her, she was a different person.

Trixie was smart, shrewd, fearless and tireless on a case. And her temper would make a scorpion blush and her little tongue could peel the hide off a brass-bound monkey. And when Trixie and I crossed trails on a case, it was usually my hide that took the peeling.

In some of the stories, Trixie and Mike find themselves going undercover as a couple, which produces some fast-paced dialogue ala The Thin Man and Moonlighting. A Nick and Nora Charles, though, they weren't. They were partners in the same agency, sometimes at odds on the same case. Trixie would stand up to Mike and kid him when he was pompous and pull him out of tight spots as any buddy would do. He in turn did the same for her.

Though Trixie depends on Mike whenever there is a fight, she can handle herself when necessary.

He was a bearded, fanatical, challenging figure as Trixie ran in close and pulled the trigger.

Trixie had shot his knee—little Trixie who went to target practice two and three times a week. I'd kidded her about it—and look now.

Little Trixie with her little tongue that could peel Mike’s hide off, saved most of her anger for anyone who tried to hurt Mike. And if he did get hurt, she was solicitous and concerned. Only after she knew he was okay would the hide-peeling begin.

T. T. Flynn, 1902-1979, passed up college to see the world as a merchant seaman and then as a railroad man and a hobo. In 1925, he began writing mysteries and westerns. In 1927, afraid of running out of ideas and inspired by Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic, he took flying lessons which led to his writing air adventure stories. Mike and Trixie were his most popular detectives, but they never appeared in a novel. His other detective was Mr. Maddox, the racetrack detective. He is best known for his western, The Man From Laramie, which was made into a movie starring Jimmy Stewart. Many of his western novels survive and can be found on Amazon.

The Mike and Trixie stories are hard to find. “Brother Murder” (1939) has been reprinted in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (2007) Edited by Otto Penzler. “The Deadly Orchid” (1933) can be found in Hard-Boiled Dames: A Brass-Knuckled Anthology of the Toughest Women From the Classic Pulps (1986) edited by Bernard Drew.

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: Honey West, 1957-1972

Mark Troy is back today with another installment of his series on the female private detective. This time around he covers Honey West. Make sure you check out the earlier installments of this series as well as Mark’s books and website.

Honey West, 1957-1971

I'm H. West, a private eye. The H stands for Honey. I may be female, but I know my business.

Meet Honey West, one of the most successful female private eyes—or private eyeful. She's tough, brainy and sexy, a curvy bombshell with taffy-colored hair, blue eyes, a baby-bottom complexion, and a heart-shaped birthmark on the inside of her right thigh. She is usually armed. The creation of husband and wife team, Forrest (Skip) and Gloria Fickling, writing as G. G. Fickling, Honey appeared in eleven novels from 1957 to 1971.

Skip, a sports writer, and Gloria, a fashion writer, were friends of Richard S. Prather, the creator of Shell Scott, who urged them to write a female private eye. Honey inhabits the same testosterone-charged, Southern California world as Shell. She runs her own agency, which she inherited from her beloved father, Hank West after he was murdered in a Long Beach alley. Finding his killer is what drove her into the business.

The Ficklings modeled Honey on Marilyn Monroe and some critics have described her as the love child of Monroe and Mike Hammer. The stories are hardboiled with lots of gunplay and seamy characters. Honey always carries a gun, usually a small caliber weapon that she can hide easily on her voluptuous body. She knows ". . . as much judo as the Japanese army."

As with Prather, the Ficklings gave the stories a lot of sex-infused zaniness and humor. Honey loses some or all of her clothes in every story, sometimes at the point of a gun.

"Honey West?" a deep voice asked as the office door closed.

"Yes."

"Stand up. Take two steps toward me."

"What is this?" I said, getting to my feet.

"Don't ask questions. Just take off your clothes."

"What?"

"You heard me. You have exactly one minute. Get started!"

Sometimes she loses them by accident as when a huge wave hits her in the Malibu surf and takes her bikini with it. Other times it's plain bad luck as when she gets into a game of strip poker with a man in an effort to find out if he has needle tracks on his arms. Unfortunately for Honey, the cards don't go her way.

We are frequently reminded that Honey is all girl, usually by the leering comments of the men she has to deal with.

"Speaking of bust," Hel said. "Don't you gentlemen agree that our fair captive has a generous amount of the same? What do you do in your spare time, baby? If it's what I think it is, you can count me in any time."

If we don't know what generous means, Honey will tell us.

"I hope I brought the right size bra," he said.

My skirt and slip dropped to the floor. "Thirty eight," I said, trying to focus my eyes in the semi-darkness. "Like the revolver of the same caliber. Is that what you're carrying?"

Whatever men think Honey does in her spare time, she doesn't. For all the banter, there is no graphic sex in the books, hardly any sex at all, in fact, merely innuendo. Though Honey frequently finds herself in compromising situations, she always manages to escape with her virtue intact. She meets many men who could turn her head, but she seldom gets laid. Often it's the men who get laid—laid out with a bullet or a fishing spear, for which she sometimes gets the blame.

The one man who always shows up, sometimes to rescue her, more often to arrest her, is Lieutenant Mark Storm of the Sheriff’s Department. It is implied in the sixth book that they have sex. The two frequently but heads in bouts of mutual exasperation.

"If you had any brains, you'd have married me long ago instead of running around half-cocked and half-naked."

"Lieutenant, I wasn't half-cocked or half-naked when you came in."

Storm is an example of what she is up against.

“You're mixed into this right up to your armpits. Damn you, Honey, for being in this crummy racket, for letting yourself in for capers like this where somebody is either stripping you down or taking wacks at you with a tommy gun. Any sensible woman your age would be married by now with a couple of kids. I figure you and murder are going to end up in the same hole."

Married by now with a couple of kids? She’s only in her twenties at this point, but this was the fifties when being a single, independent, professional woman meant that everybody questioned your motives, or your You don't know how hard it is being a woman looking the way I do.” Would V.I. Warshawski or Sharon McCone put up with the leering and male chauvinism that she endures?

ability, and every man saw you as fair game. Especially when you’re as sexy as Honey. You almost expect her to echo Jessica Rabbit: “

The ninth Honey West story, Bombshell, appeared in 1964. The tenth and eleventh books, Stiff As A Broad, and Honey On Her Tail, appeared in 1971. Between ‘64 and ‘71, private eye fiction suffered a near death and the sexual revolution happened. When we meet Honey again, she has abandoned the eye business for the spy business and is more sexually liberated, jetting around Europe, wearing and losing mod clothes, on the trail of agents of MAD. And, yes, she does finally get some behind-closed-doors action.

In 1965, Honey made the jump to television. She appeared first in an episode of Burke’s Law in which she managed to outwit the chief of police. She got her own series in 1965/1966, becoming the first female lead in a televised crime series. It was produced by Aaron Spelling and starred Ann Francis as Honey.  Spelling gave Francis outfits that emphasized her statuesque figure and good looks, but otherwise dropped the sexual innuendo of the books. In its place, they gave her James Bond gadgetry—listening devices disguised as martini olives or lipstick, gas-bomb earrings, a gas-mask garter belt, and a sleek, Cobra roadster.  She acquired a nosy Aunt Meg and a partner, Sam Bolt, who kept pressuring her to marry him. Her real love was her pet ocelot, Bruce. In nearly every episode, viewers were treated to lithe, blonde Honey tossing large men over her shoulder.

The series lasted one year, thirty episodes. Although popular, it was up against tough competition in the form of Gomer Pyle, USMC. The network declined to renew it for a second season, figuring it was cheaper to import a British series called The Avengers. For her role as Honey West, Ann Francis won a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination. Aaron Spelling went on to do Charlie’s Angels.

Some of the Honey West books can still be found on eBay and Amazon. Honey In The Flesh, the fourth book in the series, is available on Kindle. The entire TV series is available on DVD.

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: Dol Bonner, 1937

Mark Troy is back today with another installment of his series on the female private detective. This time around he covers Dol Bonner. Make sure you check out the earlier installments of this series as well as Mark’s books and website.

Dol Bonner, 1937

One of the few women that famed misogynist, Nero Wolfe, could tolerate was Theodolinda "Dol" Bonner, a California private eye and partner in the Bonner and Raffray detective agency. We first meet Dol in The Hand In The Glove (1937) by Rex Stout. It is the middle of the Depression. Dol is a socialite whose family has fallen on hard times. She runs the agency with her friend, Sylvia Raffray, another young woman, who is the financial backer of the agency. Dol does the investigating and Sylvia handles the finances. Later on, Dol will take on an assistant, Sally Colt and Sylvia will drop out of the agency.

Sylvia is six months shy of twenty-one and Dol, as she reminds Sylvia at one point, is four years older, which gives Dol more wisdom than her friend. Both women are attractive although I find something strange about Dol from the description Stout gives her.

"Hello, Sylvia." That greeting was from Theodolnda Bonner, Dol to a few, from her chair at her desk. The chair might as well have been a stool, for she sat straight without touching the back, as usual. Her curious caramel-colored eyes flashed a glance at her partner and friend from under coal-black lashes—seeming blacker from the cream-tinted transparency of the smooth skin of her rather narrow face.

Is that straight posture something young women learned in those days? Then there’s this. Dol's smooth skin covering her jawbone has a tiny black spot, ". . . not an old-fashioned court plaster decoration, but her natural property and was generally considered a distinction rather than a blemish," which she touches in moments of tension.

Dol has a presence about her that makes people notice her.

Moving, she gave the impression that she was proceeding with the air rather than through it. Unconsciously, seeing her move, or hearing her speak, people settled into their chairs more easily, it was so pleasant to see energy flowing like that with no strain and no interruption of grace.

Dol doesn't care much for men, an attitude that comes out in an argument with Sylvia.

"It must be nice to have a man tell you just what to do." To another person who is in on the conversation, she says, "It will be your turn next to tell her what to do. Stay and admire the virtue of submissiveness." When Sylvia protests that she's not submissive to any man, Dol says, "I don't like men."

Dol's independence streak comes out when she is asked why "a girl of your ability" picked the detective business.

"I know, Martin," Dol sounded patient. "I could have got a job as a stylist or an executive secretary, or started a hat shop or a shopping service. May I just say that I didn't want to? I could add that I wouldn't accept any man as a boss and preferably no woman either, and I made a long list of all the activities I might undertake on my own. They all seemed monotonous or distasteful except two or three and I flipped a coin between detective and landscape design. I had to swallow my pride to take a favor from one man to get a license."

It’s not clear if her dislike of men includes all men in all circumstances, or just those who try to tell her what to do, which would certainly be many. It does not discourage her perennial suitor, a newspaperman named Len Chisholm.

In The Hand In The Glove, Dol discovers a murder and solves it herself, foiling the police. She is not afraid of gunplay and extracts a confession from her suspect at the point of a gun.

The Hand In The Glove is the only novel in which Dol is the protagonist. She plays a major role in the Nero Wolfe novella, Too Many Detectives, and appears in Bad For Business, If Death Ever Slept, Plot It Yourself, and Motherhunt. Wolfe hires her and her agency whenever he thinks the case requires a woman investigator.

Dol has a similar impact on Archie Goodwin as she does on Wolfe. In Too Many Detectives Archie begins his report by saying he is against female detectives on principle. But at the end of Motherhunt he states that Dol and her assistant Sally have made him change his attitude about female detectives.

One novel and a half dozen appearances is not much of a legacy. Dol Bonner is notable because the publication of The Hand In The Glove in 1937, the same year as the first Bertha Cool novel, makes her one of the first women detectives to appear as a protagonist in a novel. 1937 was also three years after the first Nero Wolfe novel, Fer De Lance, at the start of Rex Stout’s long career. Stout was still experimenting with detectives. He does not develop Dol Bonner the way he developed Nero Wolfe, but we can only speculate what he might have done if Wolfe had not been so successful. Would he have devoted more stories to Dol?

The Hand In The Glove can still be found online, in bookstores and libraries. Since it’s original printing in 1937, it has had seven editions, most recently in 2011.  It was made into a television movie by NBC in 1992 titled Lady Against The Odds starring Crystal Bernard as Dol Bonner.

REMINDER---- Writers in the central Texas area might be interested in a workshop on "Women and Crime", Saturday, September 5, in College Station, Texas. More information here: http://www.meetup.com/Brazos-Writers-of-Bryan-College-Station/events/223360417/

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: Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, 1939-1970

Mark Troy is back today with another installment of his series on the female private detective. I am learning a lot as I had no idea about any of this. From what I am hearing off list from folks who do not want to post a comment on these blogs, the same is true for many of you. 

Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, 1939-1970

 

You have to like a dame who comes up with expressions such as "Well can me for a sardine" and "Well peel me for a grape." These are some of the many "coolisms" that pepper the speech of extra-large, penny-pinching widow, Bertha Cool created by Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A, Fair. Bertha ran B. Cool Confidential Investigations in Los Angeles.

The first novel in the series. The Bigger They Come, was published in 1939. The final one. All Grass Isn't Green was published in 1970, the year of Gardner's death. There were twenty-nine books in all. The series lasted thirty-one years, making Bertha the longest running female private eye until passed by Sharon McCone in 2008.

Bertha is white-haired and hefty, weighing up to 250 pounds in some stories. She is not pleasant to look at or to be around unless she is coddling up to a client who is offering money. Berth does love money and she is not above soaking her clients for all she can get. She is corrupt and dishonest, and willing to break the law. In the first book, she takes on a diminutive, disbarred partner, Donald Lam, who remains with her through the entire series. Lam stands about five feet. He has a penchant for bending and twisting the law where Bertha out-and-out breaks it. As Bertha says, "He's a little runt, but he's brainy." For his part, Lam sees Bertha as "a big spool of barbed wire."

Together Cool and Lam make up one of the most mis-matched detective duos since Violet McDade and Nevada Alverado. Gardner was friends with Cleve Adams, the creator of Violet and Nevada, so the similarities are probably more than coincidental.

At the heart of the relationship between these two characters is their constant bickering. They bicker about everything. They bicker about money and Bertha's greedy, penny-pinching ways. They bicker about Donald's taste in women. Bertha thinks he falls too easily for the pretty ones. They bicker about Donald's tendency to keep her in the dark as the cases develop.

In Spill the Jackpot (1941) Lam quits his job because he has lost his heart to a woman and plans to run away with her. Bertha won't hear of it. She tells him he's not in love. “You’ve just fallen for some little trollop who’s given you the come-hither eye. My God, if you knew as much about women as I do, you’d never even think of marrying one.”

Gardner's plots are mind-spinning in their intricacy. He favored dialogue and action over characterization. He stressed "speed, situation, and suspense" in his writing and that's what you get in the Bertha Cool and Donald Lam stories. The storylines are so twisted and tangled that the reader marvels at Gardner's ability to keep it all straight. Some of the twists and tangles are created by Bertha and Donald themselves who are constantly scheming and conniving to manipulate situations so that their sense of justice is satisfied. Even Lam's quitting his job in Jackpot turns out to be a contrivance that breaks open the case.

Some reviewers have said that Gardner gave his best writing to Bertha.  Had Bertha been given a TV series like her literary sibling, Perry Mason, she might hold a higher place in the public consciousness. A TV pilot was made and aired on CBS in 1958. It starred Benay Venuta as Bertha and Billy Pearson as Donald Lam, but it never developed into a series.

The Bertha Cool books are easy to find. Used copies can be found on Amazon and in used bookstores. Some are available on Kindle. One of the books, Top of the Heap, has been republished by Hard Case Crime.

Writers in the central Texas area might be interested in a workshop on "Women and Crime", Saturday, September 5, in College Station, Texas. More information here: http://www.meetup.com/Brazos-Writers-of-Bryan-College-Station/events/223360417/

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: Violet McDade and Nevada Alvarado, 1935-1938

Texas author Mark Troy is back today with his ongoing series on the female private detective. In this case, two female private detectives active in the thirties...

 

Violet McDade and Nevada Alvarado, 1935-1938

Before Rizzoli and Isles, before Cagney and Lacey, were McDade and Alvarado. Violet McDade and Nevada Alvarado were a pair of private investigators, partners in the McDade and Alvarado Agency. A greater mismatch of partners you have never seen. Violet was a former circus fat lady, weighing between 300 and 400 pounds. Nevada was a slim, dark-haired beauty who served as her partner's Watson, chronicling Violet's accomplishments in fourteen stories in Clues, Detective Stories beginning in 1935.

Cleve Adams who went on to give us Rex McBride, John J. Shannon, and Bill Rye, all popular hard-boiled heroes in the 1940s, penned the stories. Violet and Nevada were his first pulp series characters. The stories have the hard-boiled elements that characterized his later works.

Both Violet and Nevada are hard drinking, gun-toting women. Violet carries a pair of .45s in her voluminous sleeves and Nevada carries a .32 in a holster above her knee. The solutions to their cases are brought about as much by chases and fighting as deduction. Here, though, their styles differ. Where Nevada will open doors with a smile, Violet will knock them open with her fist. Men fare no better. When Violet hits a man, he stays hit. Here is Nevada describing one such encounter: "Violet hit him. Not hard, just a backhanded sweep across the room."

Violet is at least as tough as any of her adversaries, but more cunning and morally flexible. She's not at all shy about using her guns or fists or anything handy to get information out of the bad guys. Nevada is no slouch either in the action department. She drives fast (though Violet drives faster) and brings her gun into play as quickly as her partner.

The relationship between Violet and Nevada has been called by Ron Goulart (The Dime Detectives, 1988) as "teasing racism." Violet often calls Nevada "Mex." Nevada, for her part, is capable of giving back. She sometimes describes her partner to the reader as "elephant." At one point, she responds directly to Violet. "You—you lout! My family dates back beyond the conquistadors and the Spanish grants. Where did you come from? A circus tent!"

Nevertheless, the two have a fondness for each other. When they are both at the mercy of some bad guys who are about to torture them to find out what they know, Violet asks for one favor, that they don't work on her partner. "Let him play with me if he's just gotta play, but rub her out kinda easy will you?" To which Nevada says, "Save your breath. If you can take it, I can." Needless to say, the torture doesn't happen and the duo make their escape by busting their way out of a burning building and stealing the fire chief's car.

Adams was a prominent figure among California writers, counting as friends Raymond Chandler and Earl Stanley Gardner. He organized a group of about twenty young writers calling themselves The Fictioneers and served as a mentor until the group broke up with the advent of World War II.

A few McDade/Alvarado stories can be found with some diligent searching. You can read one here: http://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/2014/07/forgotten-femme-fatales-cleve-f-adams.html. You can also find one reprinted in Hard-boiled dames, edited by Bernard A. Drew, St. Martin's, 1986. The series ended in 1938, a year before Earl Stanley Gardner introduced Bertha Cool, who was likely influenced by Violet McDade.

Writers in the central Texas area might be interested in a workshop on "Women and Crime", Saturday, September 5, in College Station, Texas. More information here: http://www.meetup.com/Brazos-Writers-of-Bryan-College-Station/events/223360417/

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: 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