Detective Duos Read online

  DETECTIVE DUOS

  edited by

  Marcia Muller

  And Bill Pronzoni

  DETECTIVE DUOS

  The Best Adventures of Twenty–Five Crime–Solving Twosomes

  Sleuthing twosomes have long made their mark on detective fiction. From the unnamed narrator in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Purloined Letter” who adroitly recounts the virtuosity of the Parisian detective, C. Auguste Dupin; to Dorothy L. Sayers's beloved Lord Peter Wimsey and Mr. Bunter; to Lilian Jackson Braun's interspecies partnership between Phut Phat (an investigative genius who happens to be a cat) and one of its owners; detective duos have come in all guises. Indeed, there are almost as many variations of compatriot crime–fighters as there are types of mystery and detective fiction.

  In this marvelous anthology, a real–life detective duo – married mystery novelists Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini – have brought together 25 of the best paired puzzle–solvers in short stories of remarkable range and scope. Here are traditional tandems: Sherlock and his admiring Watson, in a devilish puzzler “The Adventure of the Empty House,” alongside Nero Wolfe and his (less fawning) employee, Archie Goodwin, in “Fourth of July Picnic.” Husband and wife teams are well represented by Frances and Richard Lockridge's Mr. and Mrs. North, Kelly Roos's Jeff and Haila Troy, and Patrick Quentin's Peter and Iris Duluth. Amateurs work alongside professional crimesolvers in such stories as Julie Smith's never–before–published “The End of the Earth,” featuring Skip Langdon and Steve Steinman, and the clue–seeking precursors to television's Quincy appear as partnered forensic pathologists Dr. Daniel Coffee and Dr. Motilal Mookerji in Lawrence G. Blochman's “The Phantom Cry–Baby.” Sleuthing tandems come in different sexes, so we find Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone and Rae Kelleher alongside Fredric Brown's Ed and Am Hunter, as well as Bill Pronzini's Sabina Carpenter and John Quincannon, where crime solving crosses barriers of both gender and time. And here too is a treasure chest of detective fiction styles: pure deduction, espionage, the impossible crime, the cozy, the dark comedy, the procedural, and more, in locales as varied as the crimes themselves, from England, to Antarctica, to fast–moving trains crossing America. Spanning more than a century of crime fiction, including both classic tales by the greats of mystery writing as well as gems from lesser–known writers, Detective Duos will captivate the sleuth in all of us.

  Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini are best–selling authors and editors of crime fiction, who have both won the Private Eye Writers of America's Lifetime Achievement Award. Muller is best known for her character Sharon McCone, who appeared in 1977 as the first female private investigator in American detective fiction. Pronzini has published (alone or in collaboration) more than forty novels, including twenty–four in his popular “Nameless Detective” series. “Muller and Pronzini, two of the best themselves, have given us a wonderful sampling of the great teams in the mystery field.”

  – Tony Hillerman

  “Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini have done it again. With impeccable taste and comprehensive knowledge of the high roads and the low of mystery stories, they have chosen tales that not only highlight famous detecting teams but also rediscover lesser known 'tec teams. Every story is a gem.”

  – Douglas G. Greene

  INTRODUCTION

  [Section of characters – unreadable]

  the engaging pair, who first appeared in a series of short stories, are highly entertaining and provide readers with a realistic look at day–to–day urban police work. Until recent years, gay and lesbian detectives have been few and far between in crime fiction. The first duo to include a homosexual was introduced in 1980's Vermillion by Nathan Aldyne, a joint pseudonym of Michael McDowell and Dennis Schuetz; in this and three subsequent color–coded titles, gay bartender Dan Valentine and his straight woman friend, Clarisse Lovelace, joined forces to solve mysteries set in Boston and on Cape Cod. In the late 1980's Ellen Dearmore (a pseudonym of Erlene Hubly) combined the lesbian mystery with the historical mystery in a pair of novelettes featuring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas as crime–solvers and peopled with numerous other historical figures. The author's sudden death tragically ended plans for additional Stein–Toklas mysteries.

  The various types and combinations of wholly amateur duos are wide–ranging, husband–and–wife teams being just one of many. E. Phillips Oppenheim introduced one of the more unusual pairings in A Pulpit in the Grill Room (1938): Milan hotel maítre d' Louis, who solves mysteries from his table in the grill room with the aid of retired army officer and journalist Lyson. In the same year, married collaborators G.D.H. and Margaret Cole published a collection of short stories, Mrs. Warrender's Profession, in which the mother of their series sleuth, James Warrender, outdetects her professional son. James Yaffe's delightful series of “Mom” stories –two novels and numerous short tales, the best of which were collected in 1997 under the title My Mother, the Detective – are built along the same lines as the Coles' Mrs. Warrender.

  Aaron Marc Stein's The Sun Is a Witness (1940) introduced archeological sleuths Tim Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt, colleagues and platonic friends who apply their understanding of history and nuances of various cultures to resolve mysteries in such far–flung and well–depicted locales as Mexico, Greece, and Yugoslavia. George Baxt, known for his novels about gay New York police detective Pharoah Love, began a second series in 1967's A Parade of Cockeyed Creatures, this one starring eccentric lovers and amateur detectives Sylvia Plotkin and Max Van Larsen. John D. MacDonald's immensely popular Travis McGee often detected with a partner, his economist friend, Meyer; McGee, whose self–described profession of “salvage consultant” hides a darker side to his work, enlists Meyer's aid in several titles, notably Darker Than Amber (1966). Another well–regarded amateur team, journalist Maggie Rome and – cantankerous New England newspaper – editor C. B. Greenfield, was established by Lucille Kallen in her 1979 novel, Introducing C. B. Greenfield. Though frequently at odds, the pair is always gruffly affectionate, with Rome doing most of the legwork and Greenfield applying his intellect to the information she gathers in order to bring about a solution. The private–eye story is a subgenre typified by heroes who are loners. Nevertheless, a surprising number of fictional private investigators have worked with others in their profession, as well as with amateurs and members of different professions – a tradition that extends back to the dime novels of the nineteenth century and the tandem exploits of such characters as Old Sleuth and Young Sleuth, and Nick Carter. Carter, who detected with his father and a variety of other partners, was the most popular of all the dime–novel sleuths; first introduced to the American public in 1886, his career lasted through several incarnations, the last of them as a James Bondian secret agent, well into the 1980's.

  Dime–novel detectives were in effect superheroes, possessing vast amounts of arcane knowledge, abnormal physical abilities, and a talent for assuming almost any identity and disguise. Much more realistic were the detectives who populated the offspring of the dime novels, the pulp–paper magazines that flourished during the first half of the twentieth century. Such upper–echelon titles as Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and Street and Smith's Detective Story were training grounds for some of the more important names in the crime–fiction genre, among them Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Cornell Woolrich, and Fredric Brown. The hard–edged stories that were the pulps' staple fare displayed a wide variety of series characters, including such private–eye duos as Roger Torrey's Marge Chalmers and Pat McCarthy; Merle Constiner's The Dean and his “Watson,” Ben Mathews; and D. L. Champion's Rex Sackler and Joey Graham. (Non–private–eye duos were also a mainstay of the pulps. Two o
f the best known are Erle Stanley Gardner's Ed Jenkins, the Phantom Crook, who is joined in many Black Mask stories by his wife, Helen Chadwick; and Frederick Nebel's Police Captain Steve McBride and alcoholic reporter Kennedy of the Free Press, who were likewise showcased in a long–running Black Mask series.)

  The most famous private detective team is certainly Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Almost as renowned in their day were Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, an unlikely pair of Los Angeles operatives; first seen in The Bigger They Come (1939), they were featured in another thirty novels over an equal number of years. Originally an underpaid assistant and later Bertha's partner, Lam does most of the active detecting because, we're told, private investigation is an unseemly profession for a woman. In fact, Bertha is a mountain of a woman who loves to watch Donald work and can seldom be moved by anything other than a large fee. Lam, on the other hand, is a former lawyer who knows “just how far he can stick his neck out ... a romantic at heart, but hard as a diamond and a man who never forgets a favor or an injury.”

  Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring) launched the careers of chubby, unconventional Humphrey Campbell and his fat, lazy, and corrupt partner, Oscar Morgan, in Then There Were Three (1938) and brought them back in four more fast, furious, and witty mysteries set primarily in central California. Otis Beagle and Joe Peel, “two of the most upright and fearless heels ever to run a detective agency,” were the invention of former pulp writer Frank Gruber; the southern California–based partners starred in two novels, Beagle Scented Murder (1946) and The Lonesome Badger (1954). (Gruber's primary series also utilized a duo, Johnny Fletcher and his muscular stooge, Sam Cragg, itinerant book salesmen and amateur sleuths in The French Key, 1940, and a dozen subsequent novels.) Fredric Brown's Ed Hunter and his uncle, Am Hunter, joined forces in The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947) to investigate the murder of Ed's father, and worked so well together that they later opened a detective agency; their exploits are chronicled in a total of seven novels and one short story. New York City detective agency owners Schuyler Cole and Luke Speare, the protagonists of The Deadly Miss Ashley (1950) and five other novels by Frederick C. Davis, are an appealing pair whose cases' solutions, like those of the Hunters, depend far more on legwork and deduction than on the violent tactics utilized by so many fictional private eyes.

  Examples of investigators joining forces with police officers, lawyers, and other professional and nonprofessional individuals are more numerous. Erle Stanley Gardner's Paul Drake detected with attorney Perry Mason in many novels, such as The Case of the Moth–Eaten Mink (1952), as well as in the original Perry Mason television show (1957–1966) starring Raymond Burr, William Hopper, and Barbara Hale. Thomas B. Dewey's series of paperback originals featuring Los Angeles investigator Pete Schofield and his sultry wife, Jeannie, is one of the few examples of a husband–and–wife duo in which one of the team is a private eye; the series began with Go to Sleep, Jeannie (1959) and continued through seven additional novels. Marvin Kaye's series about publicist Hilary Quayle and private operative Gene (a man so colorless that Kaye did not see fit to give him a last name) is a variation on the theme in that Hilary would rather be a private detective, but feels she would have difficulty succeeding because of her gender. In the first of their adventures, A Lively Game of Death (1972), she thus coopts Gene to provide the proper legal umbrella under which she can operate. A similar rationale and ploy were used as the basis for the 1980's television series Remington Steele, starring Stephanie Zimbalist and Pierce Brosnan. A 1978 novel by Bill Pronzini and Collin Wilcox, Twospot, teamed the “Nameless Detective” and Lieutenant Frank Hastings of the San Francisco Police Department. Working together, the two professionals solve a complex series of crimes and narrowly avert a political assassination.

  Easily the most offbeat pairing in this category is that of Norbert Davis's Doan and Carstairs, whose unique talents are displayed in three novels – The Mouse in the Mountain (1943), Sally's in the Alley (1943), and Oh Murderer Mine! (1946) – and two long pulp novelettes. Doan is a private eye who looks fat but isn't, and who, despite a great fondness for alcohol, has never suffered a hangover; Carstairs is an aloof, fawn–colored Great Dane whom Doan won in a crap game and who considers Doan a low, uncouth person, not at all the sort he would have chosen for a master. Their adventures are both hard–boiled and funny.

  Fictional espionage agents, like private eyes, tend to be loners, but there are a number of duos of this type as well. The earliest are two young men from the British Foreign Office, Carruthers and Davies, who stumble across German plans to invade England in Erskine Childers' highly acclaimed novel The Riddle of the Sands (1903). John Buchan's British intelligence agent, Richard Hannay, is aided by the American agent Blenkiron in thwarting the Kaiser in Greenmantle (1916). Two operatives of an unnamed American intelligence organization, Harrigan and Hoeffler, help preserve national security in a series of tales by Patrick O'Malley (a pseudonym of Frank O'Rourke); the first of these, The Affair of the Red Mosaic, appeared in 1961. Ross Thomas's The Cold War Swap (1966) teamed undercover agent McCorkle with an able amateur, Padillo; he brought them back for three encores, all set in Washington, D.C. Michael Gilbert's team of deadly British counterintelligence agents, Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens, appears in numerous short stories. In perhaps the most unusual twist on a spy duo, Dorothy Dunnett's Johnson Johnson, skipper of the yacht Dolly, teams with a different woman (or “bird”) in each of six titles set in such locales as Scotland, Spain, and the Bahamas; the first of these, Dolly and the Singing Bird (U.S. title: The Photogenic Soprano), was published in 1968. All titles in the series originally appeared in England under the author's real name, Dorothy Halliday.

  Yet another variation on the duo theme is the teaming of two authors and their individual series characters on common cases. Stuart Palmer's New York–based spinster schoolteacher, Hildegarde Withers, and Craig Rice's hard–drinking Chicago lawyer, John J. Malone, joined forces in six novelettes collected in People vs. Withers and Malone (1963). Richard S. Prather and Stephen Marlowe united their best–selling softcover private eyes, Shell Scott and Chester Drum, in the wild and woolly Double in Trouble (1959). In the only prominent two–author, two–gender pairing to date, Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone and Bill Pronzini's “Nameless Detective” shared a case in Double (1984) that takes place not in San Francisco, where both sleuths normally operate, but at a private–eye convention in San Diego. Finally, there are the pairings of two different series characters created by one author. A few examples among many: Carter Brown's sheriff's investigator Also Wheeler and his flashy female private eye, Mavis Seidlitz, in Lament for a Lousy Lover (1960); Michael Innes' John Appleby of Scotland Yard and portrait artist and amateur sleuth Charles Honeybath, in Appleby and Honeybath (1983); and the aforementioned joining of Tony Hillerman's Navajo Tribal Policemen, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Detecting duos have also been prominently featured in other forms of popular culture: films, radio and television shows, even comic books and comic strips. Such superhero teams as Superman (Clark Kent) and Lois Lane, Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, The Green Hornet and his faithful valet, Kato, and The Shadow (Lamont Cranston) and Margo Lane certainly qualify. As do Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as portrayed by Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in numerous films; and such other cinematic pairs as Nick and Nora Charles, Charlie Chan and his Number One (or Number Two or Number Three) son, Hildegarde Withers and Oscar Piper, and Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and her friend Jimmy in the amusing trio of novel adaptations starring Margaret Rutherford (e.g., Murder at the Gallop, 1963). In addition, such celluloid sleuths as The Saint, The Falcon, Torchy Blane, Ellery Queen, The Crime Doctor, and Boston Blackie had recurring sidekicks and foils who both helped and hindered their investigations.

  Among the more prominent radio series duos were George Harmon Coxe's Flashgun Casey and his girlfriend, Annie Williams (Casey, Crime Photographer); Havana charter boat owner Slate Shannon and his lady love, Sailor Duval (Bold Venture, starring Humphre
y Bogart and Lauren Bacall); Mr. Keen and his intelligence–challenged sidekick, Mike Clancy (Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons); and Jack, Doc, and Reggie of the A–1 Detective Agency, technically a trio, though Jack and Doc did most of the investigating (I Love a Mystery). The list of television duos is even longer. In the 1950's there were Mr. and Mrs. North, starring Richard Denning and Barbara Britton, and Dragnet, in which Jack Webb's Sergeant Joe Friday of the Los Angeles Police Department worked with such partners as Frank Smith (Ben Alexander) and Bill Gannon (Harry Morgan). In the 1960's there were Kelly Robinson (Robert Culp) and Alexander Scott (Bill Cosby), the globe–trotting espionage agents in I Spy; Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughan) and Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum), who battled the international crime syndicate THRUSH in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; and private eye Joe Mannix (Mike Connors) and his African–American secretary, Peggy Fair (Gail Fisher), in Mannix. In the 1970's and 1980's there were San Francisco police commissioner Stuart McMillan (Rock Hudson) and his wife Sally (Susan St. James) in McMillan and Wife; San Francisco Police Lieutenant Mike Stone (Karl Malden) and Inspector Steve Keller (Michael Douglas) in The Streets of San Francisco; southern California–based amateur crime–solvers Jonathan and Jennifer Hart (Robert Wagner and Stephanie Powers) in Hart to Hart; and New York police officers Christine Cagney (Sharon Gless) and Mary Beth Lacey (Tyne Daly) in Cagney and Lacey.

  The stories gathered in these pages cover most of the broad spectrum of detective duos, both in historical development and in types of partnerships. Edgar Allan Poe's “The Purloined Letter” is one of the first detective stories and also features the first example of a duo, that of the master detective and his chronicler. The selections by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson), R. Austin Freeman (Dr. John Thorndyke and Christopher Jervis), and Hulbert Footner (Madame Rosika Storey and Bella) are also examples of this type. Husband–and–wife teams are well represented by Frances and Richard Lockridge's Mr. and Mrs. North, Kelley Roos's Jeff and Haila Troy, and Patrick Quentin's Peter and Iris Duluth, as are pairs of male and female private investigators by P. G. Wodehouse's Paul Snyder and Elliot Oakes, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, Fredric Brown's Ed and Am Hunter, and Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone and Rae Kelleher. And Bill Pronzini's Sabina Carpenter and John Quincannon story offers a look at both a two–gender and an 1890's private–eye duo. Barbara D'Amato's Suze Figueroa and Norm Bennis are police officers as well as ethnic detectives. Another ethnic pairing is Jack Webb's Father Joseph Shanley and Detective–Sergeant Sammy Golden. Agatha Christie's Mr. Satterthwaite and the mysterious Harley Quin may be classified as amateur sleuths, and Julie Smith's Skip Langdon and Steve Steinman are a police officer–amateur duo. There are forensic pathologists (Lawrence G. Blochman's Dr. Daniel Coffee and Dr. Motilal Mookerji, another ethnic character), Interpol agents (Edward D. Hoch's Sebastian Blue and Laura Charme), spies (Michael Gilbert's Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens), and actual historical figures (Ellen Dearmore's Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas). Also represented is the collaboration between two writers and their individual series characters (Stuart Palmer's Hildegarde Withers and Craig Rice's John J. Malone), and, just for fun, a detective association between an animal and a human (Lilian Jackson Braun's Siamese cat Phut Phat and one of its owners, known as Two).