Category Archives: Short Story

The Girl Who Knew Too Much – Randolph Barr (1941)

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The editor apologizes in advance for the story — not a good sign.

The true author is unknown; Randolph Barr is apparently the Alan Smithee of the pulp world.  The supposed shame is that the story appeared in a “Spicy” publication [1]  .  We are warned that “we meet our heroine with her dress ripped down to her waist.”  It is suggested the reader not get his hopes up as “this is what passed for titillation in 1941.”  I don’t know what sorority house you live next to, Hef, but that sounds pretty OK to me.

Our hero is out walking at 2 AM “all the way to 2nd Avenue and 2nd Street.”  I guess he is on his way to Rue 2 to catch the 2 2 Train.  A girl runs up, as advertised, sporting a black dress ripped to the waist.  “Her breasts were heaving from running” which is also what I do from running.  The excitement continues as the man chasing her is gunned down, and another man drags his body away.  Our nameless hero gives me a move to try as he gets the girl in a cab, goes back to his place, only then asking if she would like to come up for a drink.

She tells us her name is Polly and she is the gal of Boss Russo.  The dead man, Dick Tobin, was also hot for her and died from that fever.  Her rescuer is a reporter, but otherwise respectable.  He offers to go to Polly’s apartment to retrieve something a little less ripped-to-the-waisty for her to wear.  For his trouble, he is conked on the head.  Just as he wakes up to see Louis Russo has tied him up, Polly comes looking for him.  Russo leaves with her, delegating him to his flunkies to deal with.

The reporter escapes and goes to Russo’s HQ to save Polly.  He manages to go from merely being tied up before, to now being shot and tied up.  Nice work, Scoop!  The cops save his bacon by breaking down the door and shooting Russo.  Polly, who has somehow found a reason to be topless again, admits that she has been working — oh the irony — undercover to bust Russo.

The editor was right.  It is a breezy little piffle, that is far less interested in telling a story than in getting Polly half-naked a couple of times.  In other words, A+.

Other Stuff:

A Pinch of Snuff – Eric Taylor (1929)

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Well this is a grim pinch of business.  After the breezy Perfect Crime, I was not expecting this.

Apparently Montreal had a seedy underbelly in 1922.  Since it is specified as “to the east”, Montreal must be lying on its side. [1]  In a single-room apartment, a family of five is sweltering despite it snowing outside.  I don’t know, crack a window maybe?  Did that technology not exist in 1922?

Paterfamilias Armand is chugging a beer, taking stock of his life and wanting to sell short.  He sees his “youngest brat”, who they can’t afford to name, has run out of milk the same time he ran out of gin.  He sees his wife Gabrielle “bony, hollow-chested with bent shoulders, reproachful eyes, and mute lips — a hag at 30.”  Daughter Irene, diagnosed as undernourished, is looking for crumbs in an empty breadbox.  Maybe he keeps the window shut to avoid being tempted to jump.

At 9 pm, Armand grabs his jacket and leaves.  He is going to rob the “wholesale provision warehouse.”  He is so poor that he has to “beg an empty sack” from the corner grocery store to carry the loot in.  Not only does this dolt instantly provide a direct evidence trail back to the clerk who can identify him — please, career criminals, for the sake of the environment, get a reusable bag.

Armand is not the first person to hit this warehouse so a patrolman spots him immediately.  Armand takes off running.  The officer pursues him, and shoots him in the leg.  Despite this injury, the cop is unable to catch up to him before he arrives back home 20 minutes later.  He collapses in the arms of his crying wife.  Finally the cop arrives and trips over a gin bottle.  Armand tries to choke him, but is interrupted by what seems to be a gas explosion.

The passage is so clumsily written, I’m not sure what happened.  There did not seem to be much damage, but it was enough to finish off Armand.  Gabrielle “crossed the floor to her man . . . and stood above him.”  So I guess she is OK.  No, wait, “she clutches her chest” and keels over dead, I guess with a heart attack.  A policeman carries out Armand’s two baby daughters, but Irene just slips away into the crowd

Irene manages to walk a few miles and “that night she fell in with a crippled beggar.”  Wow, that is doubly un-PC; lucky he was white or the description could have taken a really ugly turn.  Irene tells him her story.  Rather than, say, calling Child Protective Services, the man tells his own amusing anecdote to the child.  He had stolen some loot.  Running from the police, he fell on the train tracks where his legs were sliced off by a freight train.  Sadly this did not happen in the US where he could have sued for millions.  The bum offers to kill the cop who shot her father.  She says if he will find the name, she will kill him herself.

Irene hangs out with the legless homeless man for 3 years until she is 16 because who wouldn’t?  He taught her all manner of crime — shoplifting, purse-snatching, burglary — though her education is woefully deficient in the art of quick getaways.  And he gave her the name of the cop who shot her father — Jean Duret.  After the beggar’s death, she put together a gang and established a headquarters at the abandoned snuff factory.

One day, a friend of her fence shows up looking for a place to hide out.  Irene feels obligated to take him in.  Once he commits a murder, however, her hospitality wanes.  She goes to the crime scene and leaves a clue that will lead Detective Duret — her father’s killer — to the snuff factory.

Her plan gets bollixed up in a way that would make a pretty good movie.  There is even sort of a happy ending.

Although it started out depressing and grim, after Armand’s death, it got a lot more fun.

Footnotes:

  • [1] This made sense at 3 am.
  • First published in the June 1929 issue of Black Mask.

The Perfect Crime – C.S. Montanye (1920)

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I

Two men just met in an unsavory waterfront saloon.  Rider Lott pulls out a small case and pinches out a bit.  You’re thinking snuff but no, he places it in a nostril and snorts it right up Broadway.  He offers a hit to his new friend, “Walk in a snow storm, brother?”  Martin Klug says, “It’s dope, isn’t it?”  Lott replies, “Happy dust.”

Lott tries to figure Klug’s particular brand of mayhem by looking him over (i.e. judging a crook by his cover).  He quickly reels off colorful guesses such as “gay-cat, blaster, dip, leather snatcher, flash-thief, peterman, derrick swinger, river rat, rattler grab, and freight car crook” although the cocaine might have caused him to mix a few Pornhub categories in there before getting around to an actual crime.

Klug wisely cops to the last one before Lott starts listing off watersports.  Lott says he himself is an author and inventor.  He wants write a book about his invention — the Perfect Crime.  He is currently workshopping Chapter 1:  Get high and reveal your plan to a complete stranger in a bar.  Lott says, “Crime doctors and criminologists say it is impossible to commit a crime without leaving a clue.”  He basically believes the law of averages requires someone will get away clue-free; might as well be him.

A voluptuous blonde joins them.  Lott introduces her as “Beatrice the Beautiful Brakeman’s Daughter” but doesn’t reveal what makes the brakeman so beautiful.  It is pretty humorous when she says, “My name isn’t Beatrice and I never saw you before.”  Lott questions why such a hot babe is in such a dive.  She lost her job as an upstairs maid 3 weeks ago, so apparently can no longer afford the the glamorous, jet-set life of a domestic servant.

Rich old Mrs. Cabbler had entrapped her by leaving a $10 spot on the dresser.  Not-Beatrice had long dreamed of buying fancy elbow-length white gloves.  She couldn’t resist the $10 ($130 today).  Mrs. Cabbler demanded the cash back and fired her without pay.  Not-Beatrice feels the Bern and says, “Mrs. Cabbler has more money than she knows what to do with.  Money isn’t much use to a person 70 years old.  Young people should have the money!” [1] Conveniently, she keeps it in a trunk under the bed.

Lott sees a 70 year old woman literally sleeping on a fortune to be the perfect test of his Perfect Crime theory.  Not-Beatrice still wants to buy fancy gloves, and Martin wants a new pair a shoes . . . these are the least ambitious crooks in history.  Lott would use his cut to publish his perfect crime book which he muses, “Will be of wonderful assistance to young, ambitious crust-floppers, grifters, and heavymen.”  I’m not sure he didn’t lapse in porn-speak again.

They meticulously plan the crime.  Lott says the Perfect Crime should be committed by a single person — yet he plans this heist for two people.  Not-Beatrice, with no experience in crime (other than swiping the $10), must go to lead the other person to the cash.  Her accomplice will be chosen based on his experience, skill-set, and coolness under fire . . . nah, Lott says he and Krug will just draw straws.  Worst criminal mastermind ever!

Lott draws the long straw so will rob Mrs. Crabbler with Not-Beatrice.  Lott instructs them, “Use no violence of any kind.  Take no chances, leave no clues.  Take great pains to cover every step, and don’t be in a hurry.  After you have the money, if you will go back and check over every move you have made in search of suspicious or incriminating clues left behind, and then remove them, you will have accomplished the Perfect Crime.”

II

After the crime, the three meet up at the 10th Avenue apartment of Not-Beatrice’s sister.  Klug assures Lott that they left behind no clues.  Unfortunately, Mrs. Crabbler woke up during the robbery so they had to kill her.  Lott is peeved at this, but his $3,000 cut raises his spirits.  Not-Beatrice is not too choked up over the “old hag” dying.  In addition to her $3,000 cut, she bogarted a fine pair of white gloves from the old woman.

Lott and Klug fight over who will get Not-Beatrice.  Well actually, she chooses Lott and Klug attacks him.  Lott brains him with a whiskey bottle, and kills him.  This must be 2nd Chapter stuff — leave a dead body at the home of the sister of one of the perps.

It finally comes out that when Not-Beatrice stole the nice new gloves, she threw her old gloves away in the old woman’s trash can.  D’oh!  Within seconds, the police traced the laundry marks to this address.

Not much new going on here.  For a story called The Perfect Crime, the actual crime is stunningly mundane.  Still, it is pithy and good-humored.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] On the other hand.  Although, the shocker here is that Newsweek still exists.
  • First published in the July 1920 issue of Black Mask.
  • Cocaine was big business until the Jones-Miller Act of 1922.  In what can only be explained by a collapse in the time/space continuum, the two politicians made cocaine illegal rather than 1) taking campaign contributions from Big Pharma to keep it legal, and 2) then taxing it.
  • This is the 2nd post entitled The Perfect Crime.  See also, The Utterly Perfect Murder.

Pigeon Blood – Paul Cain (1933)

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The woman was bent far forward . . .

Now that’s how you start a story!

It regresses to the mean quickly as she is only leaning over the steering wheel with squinty eyes looking at the road ahead and checking the mirrors for the car following her.  Her eyes get the opposite of squinty as they begin firing on her.  One shot blows out a tire, and a parting shot thuds into the back of the seat beside the woman.

The brave drive-by missers speed away, leaving the woman fortuitously stranded by a gas station.  She gives the mechanic her card and cabs her way back to Manhattan.  They see from her card that she is Mrs. Dale Hanan [1] of the Park Avenue Dale Hanans.  The mechanic recognizes her his the name.  “She’s Hanan’s wife — the millionaire.  Made his dough in oil” which is why his bread is so yummy.  His partner says, “That’s swell.  We can soak him plenty.”

Her cab stops at  63rd and Park Avenue.  Hey, there’s the Regency — I’ve stayed there!  She calls her husband and tells him what happened.  An hour later, he is paying a visit to Mr. Druse.  Hanan tells Druse that Jeffrey Crandall just tried to kill his wife.  Hanan says his ex-wife Catherine has gone through about $115k of her inheritance gambling.  She has further run up a debt of $68k.

Hanan says his wife still has a set of rubies named “Pigeon Blood” by the worst marketing department on earth.  The plan was for Crandall to steal the rubies, Catherine to collect the insurance to pay him back, and Crandall to give her back the rubies.  Which sounds great, although, I’m not sure why Crandall needed to be involved at all.  Anyhoo, Crandall gave her back some phonies, doubling his take.  She threatened to rat him out to the insurance company even if she had to go to jail.  That’s when his boyz started shooting at her.  Druse agrees to help out for the low, low sum of $35k.  What the hell, that’s $650k in 2018 dollars!

Druse goes to her place and finds her drunk, with a dead man in her apartment.  The dude tried to sneak up the fire escape so she brained him with a niblick.  They leave the apartment.  Druse asks how long she and Hanan have been divorced.  Like every woman I talk to, she takes about 3 seconds to tell him she is married.

They go to Druse’s luxurious penthouse apartment.  It is as fabulous as you would expect from a guy who takes $650k cases.  It lacks an infinity pool, but has an infinity carpet — the living room is open to the dark city skyline outside, without even a railing.

Druse leaves Catherine and uses a phone downstairs to call Hanan.  He tells Hanan his wife Catherine is dead — what a scamp!  Then he goes to see Crandall and gives him the same story.  Crandall turns out to be pretty honest as gangsters go.  The rubies had already been switched out when he stole them.

Druse regroups with the Hanans back at his crib.  Druse lays out the whole story and someone inevitably goes over the edge of that open-air living room.  The story is pretty standard, but the image of that death is staying with me.  That would be worth the price of admission in a movie.

And by “price of admission” I mean a month’s Netflix fee because God knows they haven’t earned their $7.99 in months.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] I refuse to watch The Handmaid’s Tale because of the producers’ hysteria that it could become reality any day.  On the other hand, the old convention of sticking Mrs. In front of the husband’s full name is about as close to Offred as you can get.
  • Druse has a Filipino boy working for him at his pad.  We know this because the phrase “Filipino boy” appears 13 times in 3 pages.
  • Paul Cain was last heard from in One, Two, Three in this same collection.  So either he is a great writer, or he has a lot of stuff in the public domain.
  • First published in the November 1933 issue of Black Mask.
  • Also that month:  Duck Soup released.

The Hitchhiker – Riding the Nightmare (10/05/90)

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Teleplay by the writer of the incoherent A Whole New You, and the even more incoherenter The Miracle of Alice Ames.  It’s going to be a long night.

We get a shot of a castle with arches.  Wait they don’t have roman columns on castles, do they?  Maybe a mausoleum?  We see a white horse running through the woods at night, but just barely.  Then a shot of some kind of optical effect, a light?  Another shot of the horse.  The light seems to be some sort of rotating cube.  I have replayed this 10 f***ing times and I still have no idea what it is.  It scares the horse, but just pisses me off. [1]

The phone wakes Tess up just as I’m dozing off.  She has broken a sweat sleeping at her desk.  She tells her secretary to show her visitors in.  Her publisher Jim and reporter Dorothy enter to discuss the Davidson article.  Dorothy wants to use photographs in the article, but Tess wants to use the Clemente List.  This second scene was the first sign of trouble except for the entire first scene.  WTF is a Clemente List?  How is it an alternative to photographs?  I played this scene over and over and could not understand what she was saying.  I got Clemente List from the closed caption, but I guess I need footnotes in addition to subtitles.

Jim wants to see Tess’s version, but it will take her a couple of hours to put together.  Dorothy says, “The deadline is 2:00.  I’d say any pictures are better than nothing.”  However, Tess quotes Jim who always says, “Better nothing than anything but the best.”  Tess promises to have the articles and illustrations on Jim’s desk by 2:00.

She scrambles to meet the deadline, but for some reason her sister Jude is there.  Despite the time crunch, there is plenty of time to talk about Jude’s problems with her husband Gordon.  Jude wonders where he is all those late nights, but Tess assures her Gordon would never cheat on her.

In the next shot, Tess is in bed with Gordon.

She gets out of bed when she hears her daughter Karen arrive home.  She has been made editor of the school paper, just like Mommy, except without the whoring.  Tess says they’ll talk about it later and returns to Gordon.  He says he has to go, and I guess Karen doesn’t wonder why her sweaty uncle is leaving her robed Mommy’s bedroom in the afternoon.

That night, Tess again dreams of the horse and the mausoleum.  This time, she gets on the horse and rides it toward the light.  The director seems to think it is important that we see a necklace with a T on it around her neck . . . but not important enough to give us a decent shot.  The horse jumps through the light which seems to be a portal, arriving on the lawn of a large house, but without Tess.  When the horse stops, the T necklace is around the horses neck.  Jude is standing in front of the horse and sees blood near the T necklace.

Tess again wakes up screaming.  Karen comes to the room after hearing Tess screaming which I guess is why she bangs Gordon while Karen is in school.  But wait, Jude says he has been going out at night.  Tess looks at the T necklace she wore to bed and sees there is blood on it.  WTF?  Is she the horse?  Then who was the horse she was riding?

The next day, Gordon meets Tess on the street in front of her office.  Gordon has bad news — his wife Jude is pregnant.  Tess thinks that is great and sees no reason for their arrangement to change (i.e. she can go on humping her pregnant sister’s husband — who are these people?).  Gordon, however, wants to be faithful to Jude now.  And by now, I mean right now — he still proposes they go away together in a couple of weeks.

That night, Tess dreams of the horse again.  Picking up from the previous cliff-hanger, Jude is still fingering the bloody T around the horse’s neck.  OK, now Jude is riding the horse through the woods.  She gets clotheslined by a low branch and is knocked off the horse.  Somehow this causes real Jude, in the hospital, to sit bolt upright as we all do after a nightmare.  Wait, in the hospital?  Is this 9 months later?

Jude gives us a little exposition that “I lost my baby, didn’t I?”  She blames Tess.  Gordon asks if she spoke to Tess, which makes no sense.  Jude says, “I don’t have to.  I saw.  I know.”  Risking his nomination for husband-of-the-year, Gordon decides that this is the best time to tell his wife — in the hospital with a miscarriage — that he was banging her sister.  Jude quite appropriately tells him to beat it.

He goes back to Tess’s place.  He tells her “she acted like she knew.”  He says he is sorry over and over.

We cut to a nice sunny day.  Gordon is in Tess’s kitchen wearing a nice dress shirt and tie, and calls Karen to get the lunch he packed for her to take to school.  Tess comes in and they are all joshing like Ozzie and Harriett.  After Karen leaves, Tess says “I think we’ve done a pretty good job as parents.”  So I guess Tess’s fling with Gordon has been going on for 15 years.  And he might be the biological father, but exactly what parenting did he contribute as Uncle Gordon?

Tess suggests they deserve a reward for being such good parents.  She wants to go away to a cabin in the woods for the weekend.  “Without Karen?” Gordon asks.  So, is Jude dead?  What happened to Jude?  And she is thinking Karen should know of their weekend getaway?  She knows Mommy is banging Uncle Gordon?

Tess, for some reason, meets Gordon out on the same street she met him when they were sneaking around behind the aching back of his pregnant wife.  She sees that he has brought Karen.  He says he didn’t have the heart to leave her by herself.

At the cabin, there is an argument about bedtime.  Gordon takes Karen’s side and Karen calls Tess a witch before running to her room.  In bed, Gordon and Tess are sleeping back to back.  Tess dreams about that goddam horse again.  Now Tess is the rider again.  She is wearing the T necklace, and this time the horse seems to have not accessorized.  The horse jumps through the light again and Tess falls to the ground.  We now see the horse is wearing a necklace with a K on it.

We cut to another nice sunny day.  Gordon and Karen are at Tess’s funeral.  Karen asks if he is going to leave.  He says, “I’ll take good care of you, I promise.”  And continues, “Do you promise to take good care of me?”  She smiles and we see she is wearing a necklace with a K on it.

Lauren Hutton (Tess) is literally the only person to give a reasonable performance.  The men are especially egregious.  Jim doesn’t have much to do but plays it so pointlessly humorless and aloof that it is laughably distracting.  Gordon has long moments of absolute blankness.  At times, he is still and emotionless, not giving a hint of what he is thinking or of his motivation (see the pictures above).  Tess’s sister is similarly a tree stump with awful 1980s hair.  Karen is very cute; almost too cute.  She also has a strange acting style where fear is pretty close to laughter.

Once again, this series has put me in a position where I feel I must be missing something obvious.  These aren’t stupid people.  Nothing as incoherent as this seems could have made it through the production process.  Just about nothing about it makes sense to me.

What is the horse?  Did Jude die?  How did Gordon become man of the house?  Seriously, that kitchen scene is such a non-sequitur and so tonally different from the previous scene that it suggests a time leap or even a different reality.  And let’s consider Karen.

At times the 14 year old actress shows a strange maturity, and at other times is just a kid.  Gordon seems to have a creepy relationship with her.  He brings her along on a romantic weekend with Tess, takes her side in childish arguments.  Is he a pedophile?  She seems to be cool with that, egging him on at the end.  And would the state really allow the single non-biological uncle with tinted sunglasses to adopt this Lolita?  I guess he could show a relationship by showing he was banging her dead mother’s dead sister, but would that help his case?  Something is going on there that they were either too dense to see, or too scared to commit to.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] After a couple more tries, I realized it was rectangular light.  A tree bisected it so it appeared to be a dash and a dot, then gave the illusion of rotating.  Filmed competently, it could have been pretty cool.
  • I read the original short story.  Not really my thing, but it didn’t shed much light on the episode.  There was no Karen, and Jude was OK with her sister humping Gordon.
  • Mostly it made me wonder how Google Books can just put it online for free.  Sure there were a few pages missing, but is anyone thinking, “I liked those seventeen pages, I think I’ll buy the book to see the other two”?  Readers of this blog are paying customers, although the currency is mostly disappointment and wasted time.