Gerald
Tomlinson was an American school teacher, a full-time freelance
writer and a consulting specialist in the field of education, who has
edited many high-school grammar and composition textbooks, but,
during the 1970s, Tomlinson began to write short detective stories –
printed in such publications as Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery
Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Mike
Shayne Mystery Magazine. One story in particular attracted my
attention.
"The
K-Bar-D Murders" was originally published in the November, 1976,
issue of EQMM and reprinted in the anthology Ellery Queen's
Masters of Mystery (1987).
On
his informative and detailed website, "A
Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection," Mike Grost briefly
discusses Tomlinson's "The K-Bar-D Murders," which is where I
learned of the story. Grost described "The K-Bar-D Murders" as "a
brief but well done detective story" packed with as much
details as possible about the characters, murders, sociological
background and a plot with surrealistic touches – one of several
points linking the story to the work of Ellery
Queen. This sounded promising enough to place the story near the
top of my short story to-be-read list.
Robert
Ollinger is a notorious syndicated newspaper columnist, whose column,
Capitol Hot Line, ran "in 112 newspapers from Maine to California" and a quarter
of a century of investigative reporting had left "a host of
enemies in his wake." The terrible "price of telling the
truth." Some have even tried to kill him.
However,
Ollinger not only has enemies everywhere, but also paid informants
and "electronic bugs." So there's always a hot tip,
somewhere, down the pipeline.
When
the story opens, Ollinger gets a rambling phone call from someone
identifying himself as Mr. Napoleon Bonaparte from Honotassa, New
Mexico, who tells him a guy by the name Poindexter is responsible for
"the branding-iron jobs." A case referred to by the
newspapers as the K-Bar-D murders. Someone has shot and killed four
men, in four different states, after which he brands their foreheads
with a branding-iron from the K-Bar-D ranch, but there are two
problems – such a ranch never existed and the victim's don't have a
thing in common. They didn't "serve on the same jury, or fight
in the same platoon in World War Two, or take the same plane from
Dulles to O'Hare, or receive the same coded message from Hong Kong."
Mr.
Napoleon Bonaparte warns Poindexter is moving east and is going to
kill the hard-nosed columnist, because he's so well-known Poindexter
isn't likely to go through "a dozen phone books to find some
other Robert Ollinger." So what does this mean? Ollinger
orders one of his personal investigators, Mort Bell, to deliver him
the K-Bar-D killer or else he can find himself another job!
The
plot comprises of two mini-puzzles: finding the obscure link that
chains the victim's together and the meaning of the K-Bar-D brands on
their foreheads, which functions here as a dying message of sorts.
The murderer is "a trigger-happy psychopath" who never
appears in the story and is captured off-page by Bell. And this
ending exposes the story's main weakness. It's too short.
Tomlinson
crammed too much material in too short a story. The characters,
premise and plot ideas were all excellent, but the story was too
short to do them any kind of justice and should really have been
expanded into a full-length, Golden Age-style serial killer novel –
similar to Arthur W. Upfield's Winds
of Evil (1937) and Ellery Queen's Cat
of Many Tails (1949). So what we're left with is a story full
of good and promising ideas, but the short story format prevented
Tomlinson to develop those ideas further and deliver on their
promise. You can't help but feel that a good mystery novel was wasted
on this short story. All of that being said, "The K-Bar-D Murders"
still makes for interesting detective story. What it does, it does
well. So there's that.
Yes,
my next post is going to be my long overdue return to Bill
Pronzini and Marcia
Muller's historical Carpenter & Quincannon series.
No comments:
Post a Comment