Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s Read online

  Classic American

  CRIME FICTION

  OF THE

  1920s

  The House Without a Key by Earl Derr Biggers

  The Benson Murder Case by S. S. Van Dine

  The Roman Hat Mystery by Ellery Queen

  Little Caesar by W. R. Burnett

  EDITED WITH NOTES AND A FOREWORD BY

  LESLIE S . KLINGER

  To Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

  who kindled my love of mysteries

  Contents

  Introduction by Otto Penzler

  Foreword by Leslie S. Klinger

  A Note on the Texts

  The House Without a Key by Earl Derr Biggers (1925)

  APPENDIX: THE HOUSE WITHOUT A KEY ON FILM

  The Benson Murder Case by S. S. Van Dine (1926)

  APPENDIX: S. S. VAN DINE SETS DOWN TWENTY RULES FOR DETECTIVE STORIES

  The Roman Hat Mystery by Ellery Queen (1929)

  Little Caesar by W. R. Burnett (1929)

  APPENDIX: INTRODUCTION BY W. R. BURNETT

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  by Otto Penzler

  Like so many fortunate others, my introduction to the world of mystery fiction was Sherlock Holmes.

  When I was ten years old and in grammar school, there was a class called “Library” for which teachers would herd their charges to the magical room that was filled with books. For the first half hour, the librarian would talk to us about how to handle books properly and inculcate us with the notion that reading was invaluable in opening doors of knowledge and wonder. For the second half hour, we were allowed to read any book that caught our fancy.

  Some now long-forgotten anthology caught my eye and so did the story it contained, thrillingly titled “The Adventure of the Red-Headed League,” which was irresistible. I was entranced for that half hour but, just as an explanation was about to reveal what all this encyclopedia copying was about, the class ended. I had to wait a full week until the next class to know what Sherlock Holmes had deduced—a week filled with my own relentless attempts to solve the mystery.

  Having majored in English at the University of Michigan, I returned to New York with a desire to read for fun and to not hurt my head anymore, as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and their ilk had been doing, so, remembering that captivating story, I got a copy of the Holy Grail, a.k.a. The Complete Sherlock Holmes, which launched a lifetime of fascination, not to mention a career, with detective, crime, mystery, and suspense fiction. Leslie S. Klinger, my learned colleague, longtime friend, and editor of this omnibus, is also a devoted Sherlockian who produced one of the most important books in the long history of Sherlock Holmes scholarship, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, for which he won the prestigious Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

  With normal eight-hour workdays (unlike now, when they never end), I had plenty of time to read and dove wholeheartedly into books by the famous names of this wide genre: Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen, S. S. Van Dine, John Dickson Carr, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and eventually many others, some renowned but others little-known.

  There are many reasons to read mystery fiction, not least of which is trying to figure out the puzzle before the author (through his detective character) explains it all. Although I loved the puzzle element, I was pathetic at trying to figure it out, always gullibly convinced that the most obvious suspect was indeed the murderer and utterly stupefied when the least likely person turned out to be the culprit.

  Puzzles, however, were only part of the joy of becoming immersed in a mystery novel. Authors spent a good deal of time and care in creating interesting detectives, as well as unusual, creepy, lovable, eccentric, loathsome, or intriguing secondary characters who served as sidekicks, police, or suspects.

  Additionally, it was not uncommon to learn something. Tidbits of knowledge might come in the form of an unfamiliar background for a story, a lecture by one of the more pedantic characters, or merely a line of dialogue in which an occasional factoid is dropped in passing.

  The books featured in this extraordinary omnibus serve as superb examples of why the mystery novel is endlessly pleasing to untold millions of readers. After all, Agatha Christie’s books alone have sold more than two billion copies (yes, billion), and Sherlock Holmes has been translated into more languages than William Shakespeare.

  Charlie Chan was one of the first fictional characters of East Asian descent to be portrayed favorably and as a fully developed entity. It had been common for Chinese figures to be treated as either insignificant servants or workmen with no role in plot development, or as villains, particularly after the Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the nineteenth century. Dr. Fu Manchu is the most famous name of the “Yellow Peril” thriller category, but there were many others in English literature and in American pulp magazines.

  On the other hand, Earl Derr Biggers portrayed Chan as the smartest guy in the room and humanized him by giving him a family and allowing him to mention his children—mainly by referring to them with numbers (“number three son”) rather than names. The detective also was made more palatable and somewhat less alien to xenophobic readers by being located in Hawaii rather than in China, the secret kingdom, itself. It was in Hawaii, by the way, where Biggers met a real-life Honolulu policeman named Chang Apana, on whom he based his creation.

  For an education in arcane subjects, one couldn’t beat the show-offy pedantry of S. S. Van Dine’s Philo Vance, who thought nothing of injecting mind-numbing monologues on such subjects as art, music, religion, and philosophy into the middle of a murder investigation. The Vance novels were such a rage in the 1920s and ’30s that they were national bestsellers, though (like me) the public soon tired of the affectations of the detective, and sales of the later books did not match those of the first half-dozen. If the novels had been published with the helpful and often fascinating annotations made by Klinger in this omnibus, it strikes me as likely that readers would have maintained their devotion to the series. It is possible to accept being talked down to for only so long until trying to comprehend Latin phrases or glossing over references to obscure artists and authors becomes tiresome. The clarity of Klinger’s footnotes would certainly have aided in translations and placing people and objects in context, making the reading experience far more user-friendly.

  Still, the books enjoyed so much affection and dedication from readers that they inspired a remarkable succession of motion pictures featuring such major actors of the time as William Powell (in four films), Basil Rathbone, Warren William, Paul Lukas, and Edmund Lowe, among others, between 1929 and 1947. There were more films (sixteen) than books (twelve), as Van Dine died before doing the final rewrite of the last volume, The Winter Murder Case (1939).

  The staggering success of the Vance novels inspired two Brooklyn cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, writing under the pseudonym Ellery Queen, to emulate the character when they decided to write a detective novel. Attracted by a $7,500 first prize in a mystery-writing contest sponsored by McClure’s magazine, they submitted The Roman Hat Mystery in 1928 and won, but, just before receiving the award, the magazine went bankrupt and its assets were assumed by Smart Set, which gave the prize to a different novel that it thought would have more appeal to female readers. Fortunately, Frederick A. Stokes, a New York publishing house, took the book and launched one of the most important
careers in the history of mystery fiction.

  In a brilliant commercial move, the authors decided to use the Ellery Queen name for their character as well as their byline, reasoning that readers might be less likely to forget the name of the author when it kept popping up in the book. A further explanation of the origins of the name may be found in one of Klinger’s extensive and valuable annotations to The Roman Hat Mystery. After closely basing elements of their detective on Vance, making Queen just as erudite and pompous, the authors soon found their own voice and produced novels that were more modern and appealing, most notably in Calamity Town (1942), in which Ellery falls in love, solves a complex crime, and explores, in depth, a small town’s mores and attitudes.

  Few novels of the American “Golden Age” of mystery fiction (the two decades between the world wars) had the impact on the public that W. R. Burnett’s Little Caesar. It wasn’t the first novel about organized crime but its naturalistic style, with the story told largely in first person by Cesare Bandello, the tough Chicago gangster known as Rico, instantly gripped readers, making it a national bestseller. It also inspired what is generally recognized as the first film to portray the Prohibition era and the lives of the hoodlums who helped define it. The motion picture starred Edward G. Robinson, rocketing him to fame and opening the floodgates for countless cinematic dramatizations of the Chicago underworld.

  Little Caesar is an outlier in this collection as it is not a detective novel. Burnett’s book belongs in this omnibus because the mystery story encompasses many sub-genres, and it’s good to see it made available to readers who mainly know it from its frequent appearances on late night cable showings. For no other book are Klinger’s meticulous annotations more valuable than for Little Caesar, as so much of Burnett’s fiction is based on real-life characters and events. It is a novel that I have long admired for its non-stop action, and a quick look at the first few pages of annotations compelled me to read it again with renewed pleasure.

  As an overview of American mystery fiction of the 1920s, this wide-ranging anthology is peerless in providing readers with a bountiful selection of the most loved books of their time, incalculably enhanced by the scholarship of the deftly produced annotations.

  Foreword

  by Leslie S. Klinger

  Crime writing in America did not begin with Edgar Allan Poe. Unexpectedly, it began in a church. In early New England, hangings were the most popular public events, drawing crowds that reportedly numbered well into the thousands. These audiences did not go unnoticed by the region’s moral spokesmen, and, recognizing the mass appeal, clergymen typically delivered sermons dealing with the pending executions, spinning stories of the criminals’ reprehensible journeys and warning of the temptations that led to their crimes. Not only were these sermons well-attended, many were printed and achieved greater audiences as publications.

  Although the first published “execution” sermons appeared as pamphlets, later works included confessions or warnings by the condemned criminals, records of the conversations between the ministers and the convicted, and factual backgrounds for the crimes. More than twenty volumes were published between 1686 and 1726. The most prolific author of these volumes was Cotton Mather. Mather and his fellow preachers recognized that the public craved far more than theological doctrine—there was a ready audience for accounts of criminals and their crimes. As the trade passed beyond the hands of the clergy after 1730, the published histories included three principal types of narratives: tales of criminal conversions, in which stories of repenting sinners wrung the hearts of the reader; gallows accounts, providing accounts of the hangings, usually replete with the histories of the condemned, for those who could not attend in person; and trial transcripts, with detailed records of the testimony of the corroborating witnesses. Though these forms had their antecedents in England, American entrepreneurs made an industry of such publications, usually in the form of “broadsides,” cheap (typically, one penny) publications with extensive audiences and limited shelf life.

  Historian Daniel Cohen observes that “[a]n inevitable result of that process was a gradual loosening of the link between crime literature and social reality.”1 By the late eighteenth century, the line between fact and fiction—and indeed, the moral message—was blurring, even vanishing. Many of the popular pamphlets of the day dealt with alleged miscarriages of justice. But as the nineteenth century began, American sensibilities moved away from the “execution broadsides” and turned to the penny press. This is not to say that the public lost interest in stories of crimes and criminals. In fact, the public wanted more, and the extended tales of robbers, murderers, and assorted scoundrels found in the cheap novels of the first half of the nineteenth century were the first signs of the flood of crime fiction that was to seize the attention of American readers.

  In England, William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794)—a foundational work for Frankenstein, not coincidentally written by Godwin’s daughter Mary Shelley—influenced an entire generation of writers, extending the early traditions of the Gothic novel to veer in the direction of crime fiction. Godwin’s story of the relentless hunt for the criminal by the victim/accuser and the intensive study of the psychology of pursuer and pursued can be seen as influencing works as disparate as Les Misérables (1862) and Moby Dick (1851). In America, Godwin was an inspiration to Charles Brockden Brown, whose novels published between 1798 and 1801, including Wieland (1798) and Ormond (1799), featured sensational violence, intense drama, and complexity. While none of Brown’s novels are explicitly “mysteries” and are often dismissed as merely “Gothic,” they focus on extraordinary incidents and the passions that drive the protagonists, with less emphasis on the supernatural than was the fashion.

  By the 1830s, the “dime novel,” or “penny dreadful,” as it was known in England, flooded the literary markets. These serials, which cost a shilling, offered a less-expensive alternative to mainstream fictional partworks, such as those by Charles Dickens. By the 1850s the prime audience for serial stories was young male readers. Although many of the stories were reprints or rewrites of Gothic thrillers, some were about famous criminals, such as Sweeney Todd and Spring-Heeled Jack, or had lurid titles like “The boy detective; or, The crimes of London” (1866), “The dance of death; or, The hangman’s plot. A thrilling romance of two cities” (1866, written by Brownlow, “Detective,” and Tuevoleur, “Sergeant of the French Police”), or a series like “Lives of the most notorious highwaymen, footpads and murderers” (1836–37). Highwaymen were often the lead characters. Black Bess or the Knight of the Road (1863), recounting the fictional exploits of real-life highwayman Dick Turpin, ran to 254 episodes.

  While crime fiction—albeit in this crude form—was finding an enormous audience, the Industrial Revolution and the growth of the railroads and the cities served by them led to the formation of official forces to combat a perceived tide of criminals. The first modern police force came into existence in 1667, in Paris under King Louis XIV. A French national civilian police force was organized in 1812 and formalized a year later. The first formal British police force was the Bow Street Runners, founded by magistrate Henry Fielding in 1753, though the organization was quite small until Sir Robert Peel championed the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829. In America, where settlement of the wilderness continued long after it ceased to be a significant factor in English civilization and “frontiersmen” were expected to defend their own communities, the first police force was not established until 1838, in the city of Boston. This was followed by New York City in 1845, St. Louis in 1846, and Chicago in 1854, for example.

  It is not surprising, then, that stories of the detection of crime did not begin until the nineteenth century, with the rise of the professional criminal investigator. As early as 1827, Richmond: Scenes from the Life of a Bow Street Runner, a heavily fictionalized tale of the Bow Street Runners, appeared, but it was not popular and can be viewed only as a “false start” for detective f
iction. The first successful writer of tales of criminal detection was the Frenchman Eugène Vidocq (1775–1857), a reformed criminal who had been appointed by Napoleon in 1813 to be the first head of the Sûreté Nationale. Vidocq’s memoirs (including some that were plainly fiction) were widely read. Tales of his detection and capture of criminals, often involving disguises and wild flights, and later, recounting his previous criminal career, some probably not written by Vidocq himself, capitalized on his reputation as a bold detective.

  The first great purveyor of unabashedly fictional stories about a detective was Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). Although Poe was primarily interested in tales of horror and fantasy, his stories of an amateur detective, the Chevalier Auguste Dupin, set the standard for a generation to come. The cerebral sleuth first appeared in Poe’s short story “Murders in the Rue Morgue” [1841]. In each of the three Dupin stories (the other two are “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” [1842] and “The Purloined Letter” [1844]), the detective outwits the police and shows them to be ineffective crime-fighters and problem-solvers. After Poe’s death, “mysteries” appeared occasionally in magazines in the form of short stories, but the mainstream of American crime fiction was the flood of dime novels, with early popular titles including The Old Sleuth and Butts the Boy Detective. A supposed memoir, Detective Sketches [by a New York Detective], probably wholly fictional, appeared in 1881 in the format of a dime novel. Ellery Queen estimates that between 1860 and 1928, more than six thousand different detective dime novels were published in the United States.

  Poe’s popularity was probably greater in Europe than America, at least for most of the nineteenth century, and Europeans led the way in the growth of crime fiction after Poe. Another Frenchman, Emile Gaboriau, created the detective known as Monsieur Lecoq, using Vidocq as his model. First appearing in L’Affaire Lerouge (1866), Lecoq was a minor police detective who rose to fame in six cases, appearing between 1866 and 1880. Gaboriau’s works were immensely popular (though Sherlock Holmes later described Lecoq as a “miserable bungler” and dismissed Dupin as a “very inferior fellow”). The prolific English author, Fergus Hume, who wrote The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), which sold over 500,000 copies worldwide, claimed that Gaboriau’s financial success inspired his own work.