It has been awhile since I posted here. I pulled out THE
NIGHT MAYOR by Kim Newman but I just wasn't in the mood for
SF, even hardboiled.
I have been roaming the byways of eBay and turned up one
oddity recently. I was the only bidder on an Argosy pulp date
June 16, 1923, no doubt because the issue was coverless. I
bid my token bid because that issue contains a story by
Carroll John Daly AND it was in the June 1923 issue of Black
Mask that Daly introduced Race Williams in "Knights of the
Open Palm."
So the Argosy arrived yesterday and I read Daly's "The
Lexicon of Youth" and I can report that it is dreadful beyond
belief. Meant to be a funny, light story, it is tediously
ponderous or perhaps ponderously tedious. Whatever talent
Daly had, that month in 1923 it all went into the Race
Williams story.
Another purchase came in today: the digest "Detective Story
Annual 1948." Similar to the Standard Magazines' pulp "Top
Detective Annual" (which reprinted from the Thrilling
magazines from a decade or more back) this annual contains
reprints from the Street & Smith detective magazines from
1944 to 1946.
I bought this one because it contains a story by one of the
lost Black Mask masters Roger Torrey. The story is "She Sang
of Murder" and originally appeared in "Street & Smith's
Detective Story Magazine in the March 1946 issue. That makes
it very late Torrey. The big news for me was the happy
surprise that this story is a long novelette featuring Shean
Connell, the hardboiled PI/piano player hero of Torrey's one
novel 42 DAYS FOR MURDER, which I praised so highly here some
months ago. Because the only Shean Connell stories I knew of
were trapped in very expensive issues of Black Mask I
despaired of reading them unless I hit the lotto. Now I have
one in hand at a reasonable price. I will report on it
shortly but I love the opening with Shean at a nightclub
piano:
"Bobby Long was doing her ten o'clock turn and I was sweating
it out. She had a weird little voice and she used it in a
weird little way, hanging onto every note she got within
striking distance of. There weren't many of them because she
had as much idea of pitch as an alley cat.
"A piano player needed a crystal ball to follow her."
Man, I do like this guy Roger Torrey, who made a few bucks
pounding the ivories in clubs and tells a story with
confidence and a nice touch. I'll give a report after I
finish it.
Richard Moore
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