Scouting for Danger

"It is the unofficial force – the Baker Street Irregulars."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four, 1890)

Manly Wade Wellman was an old-fashioned "fictioneer," known in some quarters as "the dean of fantasy writers," but he also wrote detective stories, science-fiction, westerns and juvenile fiction. A versatile writer whose bibliography encompasses a wide sweep of (sub) genres and this is reflected in the two books and short story reviewed on this blog, which comprises of a hybrid-mystery (Devil's Planet, 1942), a private-eye novel (Find My Killer, 1947) and an impossible crime story - "A Knife Between Brothers" collected in The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries (2014).

The subject of this blog-post is one of Wellman's lesser-known novels, which, once again, belongs to a completely different sub-genre than his previously reviewed work. One that can be placed in the category of juvenile mysteries, but also, very snugly, fits into the niche corner of boy scout fiction and scouting literature in general. A peculiar field of fiction now only of apparent interest to collectors.

Holmes "Sherlock" Hamilton is the sixteen-year-old protagonist of The Sleuth Patrol (1947) and the son of the police chief of Hillwood, who wants to follow in his father's footsteps, but for the moment he's still in the scouts and the opening of the book finds him in his basement den – one that resembles "an outlaw hide-out." The walls are decorated with crossed fencing foils, a couple of grim looking "Most Wanted" posters and tacked-up certificates of Scout achievements. A corner table functions as forensic laboratory were fingerprints can be taken with ink, ground pencil lead or white talcum.

Sherlock is eager to help his father, who's also the chairman of the Troop committee, by using his den as a gathering place for the formation of a new Troop. A handful of boys show up: Pete Criley, Harry McMurray and Chuck Schaefer (who reads Ellery Queen), but the three Scouts taking center-stage are Sherlock, "Doc" John Watson and the wisecracking Max Hinkel. So this makes the book really feel like a predecessor of Robert Arthur's The Three Investigators.

One thing this group of boys have in common, besides being Scouts, is that they love detective stories ("we're all Hawkshaws at heart"), which makes it a logical decision to become Scout Detectives. They call their newly formed patrol the (sleuth) Hounds. The second chapter, entitled "The Case of the Bean Burglar," provides Sherlock with his opportunity to shine and quickly solves the case, but his interference will come back to haunt the young detective. A month later, during a school holiday, their Scoutmaster takes them on an outdoors camping trip and this provides the Hound Patrol with a number of problems and challenges – from a friendly rival with the Eagle Patrol to a rundown, reputedly haunted, house in the middle of the woods.

First of all, the car of the Assistant Scoutmaster, Mr. Brimmer, disappears in the middle of the night and this provides the plot with a borderline impossible theft, because how was the (noisy) car started without anyone waking up? Why did they fail to find any of the tracks with the distinctive zigzag pattern? I should probably have tagged this blog-post as an impossible crime, but this was really a slight and easily solvable problem without any real emphasis on the apparent impossibility of the situation. To be honest, the entire plot, what they call, waver thin and relies heavily on the Scouts showcasing their physical-and mental prowess to solve problems and get out of tight situations. A part of the middle section tells of a competition between the Hounds and Eagles, which, for example, showed them using their wits to try and win a swimming race.

I was strangely reminded of Spiral: The Bonds of Reasoning, both the manga and animated series, which also had physical battle-of-wits and logical (survivor) games. Of course, they were a whole lot less deadly in The Sleuth Patrol, but they're definitely related. And, yes, the combination of the camping trip and the criminal angle of the abandoned house in the woods recalls some of the disastrous camping trips of the Junior Detective League from Case Closed (a.k.a. Detective Conan).

The haunted house

But the plot-thread of the haunted house, tied to both the burglary from the second chapter and the car theft, is far from complex and only gives Sherlock an opportunity to showcase his skill set when he finds himself trap at the place – alongside a couple of gun-toting criminals. I got the impression this book was written with the idea of showing young teenagers the advances of taking their homework and physical exercises seriously. For example, when Sherlock finds himself trapped in the dark cellar he deduces, using math, that "the basement of the haunted house was a deep one," once inch short of ten feet, by simply counting the number of stairs and estimating their height. He also showed how his physical fitness allowed him to sneak around the criminals and escape from their clutches unscathed.

So the book really is closer to adventure stories and boy scout fiction than to the juvenile mysteries of The Three Investigators.

Finally, The Sleuth Patrol ends with an interesting and somewhat unique event, in which hundreds of Scouts, from different groups, are summoned to help the police comb the swamp for a wounded man. So you can also view the book as a recruitment tool for the Scouts, because Wellman painted an attractive and exciting picture of the life of Scouts. Even if you eliminated the presence of the criminals. It reminded me of the traditional school-camp droppings. So one can only imagine how attractive this must have looked to children and (young) teenagers from the pre-1950s (i.e. last generations before TV-and internet).

So, plot-wise, The Sleuth Patrol is a very thin detective story, but still a well-written and fun read, which told a boy scout story on top of the premise of a juvenile mystery. Admittedly, that was not entirely without interest. Probably not to everyone's taste, but worth a shot to readers of juvenile (mystery) fiction.

Bone Dry

"If we're going to get to Mars, we're going to have to clear the maps. The dragons, Cyclops, and other monsters of the mind must be killed, and the siren exposed for the fraud she is."

- Robert Zubrin (The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, 1996)

Manly Wade Wellman was, what you would call, a "fictioneer" and his bibliography covers a multitude of genres, which range from fantasy and horror to science-fiction and detective stories – raking in several awards along the way, e.g. World Fantasy Award and Edgar Allan Poe Award.

I previously reviewed two stories from Wellman's body of work: an impossible crime novel with a hardboiled edge, entitled Find My Killer (1947), and a short story, "A Knife Between Brothers," collected in The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries (2014).

It's purely coincidental that both tales are listed in Locked Room Murders (1991), but the subject of this review, Devil's Planet (1942), apparently escaped Robert Adey's attentive eye. That's a shame, because it's an efficacious example of the science-fiction/mystery hybrid and predates Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1954) by more than a decade – which is considered to be the prototype for these type of genre-benders.

Devil's Planet was originally published as a book-length novel in Startling Stories and takes place on the dry, parched surface of a dusty, drought-stricken Mars in the 30th century. And that's more than 900 years in our future!

The protagonist of the story is Dillon Stover, who grew up on the laboratory farm of his late grandfather in the Missouri Ozarks, but has recently inherited both a small fortune and a mission from the old man: perfecting the condenser-ray to make rain possible again on the thirst-choked planet. But, before he can get to work, Stover visits Pulambar, "the Martian Pleasure City," which is the last place on Mars with lakes, canals and a well of trouble!

Mace Malbrook is one of the (main) oligarchs presiding over Mars and the foundation of their rule is a tight grip on the water monopoly, but the first encounter between Strover and Malbrook ends with the former clipping the jaw of the latter – giving Malbrook an opportune excuse to get rid of Strover through a crooked duel.

News of the altercation and possible duel between the two spreads, which makes Strover the prime-suspect when Malbrook dies in a mysterious explosion behind the locked door of his private and fortified room. A dying Martian, Prrala, was with Malbrook when the explosion occurred and claims Strover appeared in the room, while he was actually on the outside of the room.

However, Prrala's final words are enough for Chief Agent Congreve of the Martio-Terrestrial League Service to place Strover under arrest, but that’s when the story really begins to move. Strover manages to escape from both the prison and the city. Nearly dies in one of the sun drenched deserts of Mars. Returns to the city and dons an ancient disguise to examine the scene of the crime, while dodging an eager murderer with an expending body count.

Wellman adroitly blended fast-paced story telling with a well thought out plot and encapsulated all of these different elements in a new and fascinating world, which only seems to have one drawback: this universe appears to have stagnated, culturally and technologically, after the 20th-and 21st century, because there are references to "an ancient but most readable work," known as Alice in Wonderland, and the New York theatrical world of the twentieth century, but nothing more recent than that. The technology is unimpressive for a story that's set a millennium from now on a nearby planet, which is exemplified in the clunky, simplistic robot servitors trudging around the story.

Plot-wise, a seasoned mystery reader should be able to piece together the identity of murderer and motive together, but the method for the locked room explosion deserves a nod of acknowledgment, because it's clever and reasonably well clued. I wonder if the idea for this trick and futuristic locked room scenario came to Wellman after reading [SPOILER: Nine Times Nine (1940) by Anthony Boucher].

Anyhow... if this poorly written review has made you curious about this exemplary specimen of a hybrid mystery, you can pick up a copy of Devil's Planet from both Adventure House and Ramble House.

A Tough Nut to Crack

"What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer."

- Hugo Gernsback.

Raymond Chandler once said of Dashiell Hammett, one of the trailblazers of the Hardboiled School, that he returned murder in the capable hands of those individuals who were not faced by the seamier side of life – committing crimes for a reason and not to provide a body to reinvigorate the reader's interest in chapter XII. The mean streets supplied them with the simply means for murder that excluded the hand wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish, however, quite a few of their literary decedents tugged the hard-bitten private eyes on their sleeves into a more classically furnished environment.

Over the course of forty books and stories, Bill Pronzini drew a detailed picture of the life of his nameless gumshoe, resulting in one of the most realistic and well-rounded characters in the genre, but he still stumbles over murders that could have sprang from the imagination of John Dickson Carr (c.f. Hoodwink, 1981). Henry Kane's The Narrowing Lust (1955) has his "private richard," Pete Chambers, confronted with an apparent suicide in a secured room with all the doors and steel shutters locked from the inside and Michael Collins' one-armed shamus, Dan Fortune, grapples with the handle of quite a different locked door problem in the short story, "No One Likes to Be Played for a Sucker."

Manly Wellman's Find My Killer (1947) is another excellent sample of taking the tough, street hardened private eye, with a take-no-nonsense attitude, and assign him to a case that should've been entitled The Pistol Murder Case signed by S.S. van Dine.

Find My Killer opens with Jackson Yates, an ex-policeman operating on a free-lance basis, dropping by at the office of J.D. Thatcher, a lawyer who turns out to be a woman with eyes that are two different shades of blue, hoping to procure an open spot as a bodyguard for one of her clients. Unfortunately, for him, the services of a bodyguard are no longer required and he's not the only one who's miffed about it. Yates finds one of his would-be-contenders for the job harassing Thatcher and quickly disposes of him in a good, old-fashioned bare knuckle fist fight. Impressed with his quick and effective performance, Thatcher offers Yates a partnership on a job that could very well put a $5000 check in their pockets.

Richard Ealing offered this bounty, written down in an official codicil that was attached to his will, to everyone who can find his killer and deliver the proof needed to secure a conviction, but the problem is that his death is being written-off as a suicide – which is sort of a problem when you intend to tag someone for murder. Consider the facts: Richard Ealing drew his last breath in the gunroom, after a slug from a derringer, a short-barreled pistol, hit him in the chest and the weapon was still clutched in his hand. Paraffin tests showed the presence of gunpowder residue on the dead man's hand and the door of the room was locked from the inside. A tough nut that has to be cracked if they want to slap either his much younger wife, her lover, his personal physician or any of the other stock-in-trade suspects with a murder charge and cash in their just reward.

Wellman delivered with this novel a text book example that shows how to intersperse hardboiled sequences, in which, for example, our narrator has to go to blows with a dunderheaded homicide cop, with a cleverly conceived plot that contains big chunks of clues – both real and false. Although the clue to the murderer's motive wasn't given until quite late in the book.

Anyway, what makes this book, IMHO, special is that the structure of the plot rests on forensic science, such as ballistics and pathology, placing the story somewhat awkwardly in the Scientific School of Detection. But these scientific elements or cleverly exploited, on both sides of the table! As a matter of fact, it's done so well that I can almost forgive him for the routine solution and off-hand explanation of the locked room angle, which was the only plot thread that did not came true to the promise that its premise made and a bit more originality, in combination with the forensic portion of the solution, would've turned this into an impossible crime novel to take notice off. 

Otherwise, it comes recommended for being a perfect specimen of what was conceived before the shotgun wedding between the Golden Age Detective Novel and the Hardboiled Private Eye Story.