Bill Hagen wrote:
> Someone earlier had a question about a Defective
Detective anthology, published
> by Bowling Green State University Popular Press,
edited by Ray Browne & Gary
> Hoppenstand. Believe both the original and a
follow-up, More Tales of the
> Defective Detective in the Pulps, are still
available.
>
> I have the second one, and prize it since it
reproduces the original pages--
> including illustrations and ads--from 1939 Dime
Mystery Magazine issues.
> Collected in More Tales are 3 stories by "Russell
Gray" [Bruno Fischer], 2 by
> Edith ahd Ejler Jacobson, 2 by John Kobler, and one
by Leon Byrne.
This may be wandering further down an OT topic than is
suitable for this group. I went back to the book I referenced
earlier (THE SHUDDER PULPS by Robert Kenneth Jones), and
found an entire chapter entitled
"The Defective Detectives." The author's premise is that one
of the failings of the pulps was that the villains were more
interesting than the protagonists. So, a trend of
"humanizing" the hero arose, making them "weird" or "flawed"
to increase interest level, I guess from a series
establishment perspective.
Jones doesn't generalize; he places the beginning of this
trend squarely in the pages of the October, 1938 issue of
Dime Mystery Magazine. He describes the emergence of Peter
Quest (created by John Kobler), a PI who couldn't see due to
recurring attacks of glaucoma.
The team of Edith and Ejler Jacobson mentioned above, created
Nat Perry, a hemophiliac detective known as The
Bleeder.
Jones says the "defective detective" trend was pretty much
gone by 1941
-- the weirdness of the heroes was so commonplace it bored
readers (WW2 was also heating up, which had a major effect on
the pulps). Some of the later characters included Loring
Dowst's Pendexter Riddle, the
"extraordinary question mark;" Dale Clark's Ghostly Jones, a
poltergeist specialist; Dane Gregory's Rocky Rhodes and Satan
Jones; Stewart Sterling's Jim Big-Knife, last of the Kwanee
Blackfeet; and Wyatt Blasingame's Joe Gee, the detective who
couldn't sleep while on a case.
Russell Gray/Bruno Fischer is cited time after time as the
creator of the most interesting characters. Calvin Kane, for
example, had a deformed body, sidling along "like a crab as
he dragged his withered right leg along. One shoulder was six
inches higher than the other. But he had one physical
advantage: arms like steel."
These writers were both the antithesis and the successors of
Hammett.
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