This is another story from the HARD-BOILED DETECTIVES
anthology, which reprints one story from Dime Detective for
each year of the magazine's existence. Originally appearing
in the January 1932 issue, "The Crime Machine" is the debut
of police detective Vee Brown, who has gained considerable
notoriety for gunning down criminals. Brown is one of the
first playboy/detectives, but unlike Bruce Wayne or Richard
Curtis Van Loan, his activities as a cop are known to all
while the source of his considerable wealth is a secret. This
leads a newspaper reporter to investigate him, and the
reporter is the narrator of the story, not Brown, which makes
for a considerable difference from Daly's yarns about Race
Williams. The prose is more restrained, though it can get get
pretty lurid in the action scenes. And Vee Brown is an
interesting character, small and unathletic, but deadly with
a gun and willing to meet the criminals on their own ground
and deal out his own brand of justice. Cultured,
well-educated, and wryly humorous even as he's gunning down
the villains, it's almost like Niles Crane became the Spider
instead of Richard Wentworth. This is a bizarre story and
entertaining enough so that I want to read more about the
character. If any of the other Vee Brown stories were ever
anthologized, though, I'm not aware of them.
James
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 25 Nov 2002 EST