"Murder in the Family" (1943)
Nineteen-year-old Danny is homeless and hungry; it is late at night and he is looking for some place to sleep at the La Brea Tar Pits. He hears a scream, finds a woman who has just been murdered by being lifted up and hung by the neck on the metal fangs of a statue of a saber-toothed cat! This woman died with her purse on her, and penniless Danny decides to take some money for food. Just as he is committing this crime the cops arrive. Danny manages to escape them, then uses the money for bus fare and a meal at a Log Cabin, which I guess is the name of or a nickname for a chain of restaurants in Southern California. This first part of the story is full of Los Angeles references: Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, Santa Monica Boulevard, Earl Carroll's, etc. Frankly, I prefer it when stories are set in New York and drop the names of places I have been.
Danny is tormented with fear that the cops, who got a good look at him with their flashlights, will catch him and he'll end up in the gas chamber. But then he finds a clue in the wad of bills he took from the dead girl--a note written on a sales receipt with the purchaser's name (Cicely Rieff) and address. Maybe with this info he can catch the killer himself and escape death at the hands of the state!
Danny goes to the address, a boarding house, and gets mixed up in a very confusing and crazy plot involving a bunch of double-crossing, lying, blackmailing, murdering jerk offs. "Murder in the Family" is one of those stories in which we are lead to believe one person is a victim and another is a fiend, and then we learn that the innocent-seeming person is really the villain and the person we thought a criminal mastermind was just misbehaving because somebody had psychological influence over them, and various permutations of that sort of idea.
Maybe I can explain the gist of this thing briefly. (Maybe not.) Mrs. Rieff runs the boarding house where reside a multitude of shady characters. In a flat over the garage in the back lives a prostitute or a call girl or courtesan or whatever you want to call her, whom Hollywood actors come to have sex with; they give this woman expensive gifts and she and Mrs. Rieff split the money when Rieff sells the gifts, and I guess maybe Rieff blackmails the actors--there is so much blackmail in this story that I lost track of who was blackmailing who and now, as I copy edit this blog post some hours after reading the story, am assuming everybody living in this boarding house is a blackmailer or blackmailee or both. We also have Mrs. Rieff's son, Teddy, a handsome but evil guy--Brackett more than once says he looks like a "blonde Satan." And a pretty young woman, Frieda, Teddy's cousin, Mrs. Rieff's niece, and sister of Cicely, the girl killed at the La Brea Tar Pits. And then there is the servant woman, middle-aged Millie.
I think Cicely was blackmailing her aunt, Mrs. Rieff over the prostitution thing, and also blackmailing a tenant, Halstead. I can't remember what Halstead was doing that he could be blackmailed over; he didn't have a speaking part. When Danny, our hero, gets to the boarding house, Halstead is laying dead next to the trash pile, a gun in his hand. Eventually we learn that Halstead was going to ambush Cicely and kill her because he was sick of paying her the blackmail, and Millie jumped him from behind and beat him with a frying pan to save Cicely, who was the only person to ever be nice to Millie in her whole life. Teddy and Frieda welcome Danny in to the boarding house, pretending he is an old friend of Frieda's. At first it seems like Frieda is doing this because she wants an outsider to save her from the evil Teddy, and Teddy is doing it because he wants somebody around on whom he can pin the murder of Cicely, but things turn out to be more complex than that. Eventually, in between people getting tied up and beaten up and all that, we learn that Cicely, I think, was only blackmailing people to raise money to pay the people who were blackmailing her. I think it was Frieda and Teddy blackmailing Cicely, but then Teddy fell in love with Cicely, his cousin, so Frieda, fearing her sister would go to the cops, killed Cicely (Frieda is strong for a woman.) Danny has a fight with Teddy and knocks Teddy out; while Danny's back is turned Frieda kills Teddy by passing a five-inch-long needle through Teddy's eye to destroy his brain--Frieda needs Teddy dead because Teddy will narc her out to the cops; she figures maybe people won't notice the evidence of her little amateur lobotomy and can frame Danny for the blonde Satan's death. Mrs. Rieff, bitter over the death of her son, tries to kill both Frieda and Danny with a pistol, but Danny outfights her and holds both women captive at gunpoint as the cops arrive.
When I wrote about "Enchantress of Venus" back in 2017 I pointed out that Brackett included in that story a lot of brutal sexualized violence with incestuous, heterosexual and homosexual overtones, and she does the same thing here. Frieda kills her cousin and sister by penetrating them with a long narrow object (when Danny sees Cicely's body Brackett describes how blood has pooled between the "small curved breasts" that strain against her tight evening gown.) Teddy ties up Danny spreadeagled to a bed and pulls his hair while he is bound, and when Danny is freed by Millie the two men fight in a way that includes lots of bloody scratching and grappling and clothes tearing. When Danny interrogates Frieda he pulls her hair. Whoa.
I think I have to give "Murder in the Family" a marginal negative vote--it is just too confusing, a puzzle I didn't care to figure out. I'm all for gross eroticized violence, but the story is too short for Brackett to give the legion of characters any personality (besides, part of her project here is to heighten the mystery by keeping everybody's personalities obscured so the sympathetic person on page X can turn out to be a diabolical monster on page X+3) which means the terrible risks they all run and nightmarish fates they all suffer inspire only a minimum of suspense or dismay in the reader.
"The Case of the Wandering Redhead" (1943)
Marty James is a violent crook, a "racketeer." And our narrator! Marty is in love with Sheila Burke, who has skin white like milk, blue-green eyes with sparks in them, red hair that looks like fire! But Sheila Burke and her Ma, who live in a sixth floor walk up and have run out of money for food, hate Marty's guts! Ma calls him a "cheap little hoodlum" and Sheila says, "You've got blood on you, Marty....You're not in my world."
Marty doesn't give up easy, however. His strategy is to wait until Sheila and Ma are starving, thinking that Sheila will have to turn to him and accept one of his endless series of proposals of marriage in order to survive--Marty's thugs terrorize any local business that hires Sheila, so she can't get a job. But Sheila has just met a guy fresh into town from the farm and today while Marty is at the Burkes' apartment with his right hand man Tony, declaring his love to Sheila (who is calling him a rat and so forth), this Good Samaritan climbs those six flights of stairs with three bags of groceries for the Burkes, putting a crimp in Marty's plans.
Marty can't spend 24/7 working his schemes to get Sheila to marry him because he has business to attend to. For example, Buckwald, a fellow crook who is trying to muscle in on Marty's territory. Marty and Tony have to leave the Burkes' and head to the apartment Buckwald shares with his girlfriend; Tony expects he is going to teach Buckwald a lesson. Ay, caramba! It's a trap! Tony and other members of Marty's gang are working for Buckwald! Tony knocks Marty out, and when Marty wakes up he is tied up and facing Buckwald, Tony, some other thug formerly on Team Marty, and Buckwald's girlfriend, who keeps complaining that Marty's blood is getting on her carpet. Tony explains that Marty hasn't been handling business right, he being too obsessed with that Sheila Burke: "When a guy goes simple on a dame, like you have, it's time for a change."
Marty fights his way out of this mess--everybody involved, including Buckwald's main squeeze, gets shot full of holes, but Marty's wounds are not life-threatening. That Marty is a survivor. He makes his way back to the Burkes' place, and tries to force them to provide him an alibi. They refuse, and that farm boy, unafraid by Marty's gun, insists on attacking our narrator, driving him outside for a final showdown with the cops.
This is a far better story than "Murder in the Family," even if there is no reference to saber-toothed tigers, the characters all having believable and interesting motivations, and the action scenes being the best of all three of the stories we are talking about today. Moderate recommendation.
"I Feel Bad Killing You" (1944)
Surfside is a corrupt town where the bars and hotels break all the regulations and the cops are paid to look the other way. (In her intro to Los Angeles Noir 2, Denise Hamilton floats the idea that Surfside is supposed to represent Santa Monica.) Detective Paul Channing quit the Surfside police force a few years ago, but he's back in Surfside today because his little brother Hank, a Surfside beat cop, turned up dead, apparently having committed suicide by jumping off a pier. Channing thinks his brother was murdered, and he is back to get to the bottom of things. The local police captain isn't too happy to see him, though.
Like "Murder in the Family" this story has a multitude of characters whose roles in the many crimes taking place is a mystery that unravels as the story proceeds, with some people who initially seem innocent or morally compromised but trying to help Channing later turning out to be among the most villainous of all, while some of those who appear at first to be the worst are in fact themselves pawns or victims. This story isn't quite as confusing as "Murder in the Family," though, and the characters are a little more interesting.
The early scenes of "I Feel Bad Killing You" consist of introducing us to six suspects: the police captain of the Surfside division of the LAPD (don't ask me to explain the relationship between Surfside and LA, because I don't understand it); a local store owner; a young man who works at the store and was a friend of Hank's; that store employee's sister, who dated Hank; a drunk journalist; and the drunk journalist's girlfriend. Then Channing immediately gets captured by Dave Padway (a seventh suspect) and his thugs; when Channing was a detective in Surfside he tangled with Padway's gang, sending some of Padway's men to prison and some others to the morgue, and now Padway tries to get his revenge. Padway murders two of the suspects, then shoots Channing and leaves him for dead on the side of the road, but Channing has only suffered a flesh wound and can continue his investigation.
Acceptable. There's no sex, really, but there are lots of descriptions of pain and blood and torture (Channing is afraid of fire and Padway keeps burning him with matches) and descriptions of the beach and buildings and all that that I suppose are OK. (In his intro in Tough Guys & Dangerous Dames, Dziemianowicz points out Brackett's emphasis on the landscape.)
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I was curious to read some of Leigh Brackett's crime fiction, and I am glad I have done so. But I have to say, as I have said before, that detective fiction is not really for me. Part of it (and maybe this is snobbery I am about to propound) is that, it seems to me, that most of even the lamest and most adventure-focused SF is trying to make some point about life or society, that we need less government or more government, less democracy or more democracy, less technology or more technology, that the future is going to rock or the future is going to suck, that smart people are using their smarts to help us or to exploit us, or whatever. This gives even a story about a barbarian tolchocking thieves or an astronaut hosing down BEMs with a ray pistol an additional level of interest. SF stories have an ideology. If these three detective stories have an ideology, I didn't detect it; maybe that reflects a flaw in me, but even so, it contributes to the inability of these stories, and detective stories in general, to move or inspire me.
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