FIRST BOOKS: The Dead Take No Bows - Richard Burke

The Dead Takes No Bows (1941) gives us the origin of Quinny Hite, a former cop turned opportunistic private eye, two splendid plans – one of the scene of the crimes, the other of a gizmo used to carry out the quasi-impossible crime – and a preposterous story of revenge among theater people who seem to have lost their grip on reality.

In his former life as a cop Hite was honest and decent. One day he raids an illegal dice game, arrests all present ignorant of the fact that one of the gamblers is the District Attorney’s brother-in-law. Newspapers sensationalize the arrest making sure to note the arrest of the D.A.’s relative and as a result the lawyer loses his bid for re-election. In retaliation the D.A. has the Police Commissioner fire Hite. This kind of topical political pettiness gave me the impression that I was in for an intriguing satirical mystery novel. Unfortunately, Richard Burke seems to have been more fascinated with the novelty and fantasy of detective fiction because the plot resembles something that Harry Stephen Keeler might have dreamed up. It's a weird story of oddball performers lost in a limbo of nostalgia, obsessing on their faded glory and past achievements, and dominated by the stereotypical high voltage emotions and passions that are supposedly inherent in theater people.

The book opens with Joan, Quinny Hite’s fiancée, waiting patiently for her man to show up for their wedding to be held downtown at City Hall. She is dressed to go and he is late as usual. Just as Quinny shows up offering apologies murder intrudes. A hotel maid screams from the apartment above them and Hite rushes to the scene.

He discovers two veteran vaudeville actors shot in the head -- Louis Lothrop, comedian and theatrical producer, and Desiree La Fond, his one-time lover. Both murder victims are dressed in 18th century costumes from The Girl from Dieppe, an 30 year old musical revue set in the French Revolution era. An unusual reunion of the 1908 show’s cast had recently taken place, one at which every wore their costumes that was apparently held every year on the anniversary of the show’s opening night. There are odd clues throughout the hotel suite that serves as Lothrop’s extravagant home. Bullet wounds suggest two separate guns – a pistol and a rifle. A walking stick or wand of some type wrapped in a silk cloth is found on a mantelpiece near the dead bodies. A dog costume is found in a clothes closet. After the police arrive and Lothrop’s much younger wife Phyllis shows up unexpectedly with Lothrop’s former partner, David Earle, Hite is taken aside and secretly hired by Phyllis to find the murderer. She doesn’t like the way she and Earle were being questioned by police and she promises Hite that both she and Earle are innocent and have alibis. Hite jumps at the easy $500 retainer and the promise of more to follow when he solves the case.

Of course by this time he has completely forgotten about poor Joan and the wedding is indefinitely postponed. Joan is miffed but not very angry. It’s typical of Quinny apparently. Nice guy, huh?

The plot involves digging into the history of The Girl from Dieppe, the performers’ past lives, and the messy relationships that grew out of their involvement in the production. Forget about typical lover’s triangles and hotheaded romantic tiffs and spats. This company was infected by a lover’s tetrahedron. Nearly everyone was jealous of each other and romantic desires overlapped in quadruplets. Some turned to drink, some turned to drugs to comfort them when they were rejected and couldn’t get their object of desire.

Hite focusses on the raging jealousy between Carlo Ralph and Lothrop. Carlo Ralph was a stage magician and Desiree was his assistant and partner in the act. Lothrop stole Desiree away from Ralph. When Ralph’s magician career started to fail without his attractive female partner Lothrop cast him in The Girl from Dieppe giving him the thankless role of a pantomime dog. The costume found in the closet was the one Ralph wore in the show. Hite is certain Ralph is the killer. But when he learns that Ralph was presumed dead during WW1, that he never returned home and was listed as MIA Quinny is forced to look elsewhere for the murderer. Further investigation turns up more dirty secrets and forlorn love.

When Emily the maid is found dead in her apartment surrounded by candles in a what appears to be a mockery of a shrine Hite is baffled. A letter suggests she confessed to the murders and committed suicide. But why all the candles? Is the suicide faked? Maybe Emily saw something she shouldn’t have the night she found the two bodies in Lothrop’s suite.

The fantastical elements of The Dead Take No Bows threaten to turn the book into a self-parody. Burke seems to have modeled his first detective novel on a mixture of private eye action of pulp magazines and the nonsense found in Philo Vance mystery novels. The gimmick here is a murderer who tried to baffle police by using two weapons. And Hite obsesses on the theory that the guns were fired simultaneously. Why would that matter at all? It turns out that the killer created an elaborate bit of machinery using a strange contraption found in the Lothrop home in order to do just that. But I wondered why anyone would bother with it. It seemed an utter waste of time, something dreamed up for sheer theatricality and to puzzle the police, something that would only happen in a detective novel. If the killer was present in the room with the two people and he had a gun he could simply shoot both with one gun and leave.

Dare I mention that the hotel suite has special entrances that allow for anyone to enter the theater next door unseen? Lothrop owned the theater and had a bridge built at the uppermost floor connecting to his hotel suite so he didn’t have to leave his hotel and take the extra five minutes to enter the theater through its front door. Another piece of odd business that exists only to make the story strange and weird. And, of course, allow the killer to gain entrance to the crime scenes repeatedly without being seen.  If that wasn't enough two other secret doors and entrances are discovered that connect the Lothrop suite to other places within the hotel and the theater. It’s like Burke took the worst gimmicks from Carolyn Wells and the absurd “impossibilities” in the poorer S.S. Van Dine novels (remember the pencil under the massively heavy sarcophagus in The Scarab Mystery Case?) and threw them all into his story with no regard for common sense. In the end Hite solves he case, gets his money from Phyllis, and marries Joan. But the finale is as ludicrous as the manner in which the murders were committed.

Burke can prove to be engaging and insightful as in the scene between Quinny Hite and Dorothy Earle, David Earle’s actress daughter who shares with the detective her observations about the sad lives of her father’s friends. She comments on the tragedy of turning your back on the present and disappearing into the past. Her frequent startlingly poetic statements (“Poor Uncle Lou… he was just sifting ashes.”) are so poignant they seem to belong to another book altogether and not this off-the-wall, Keeleresque murder mystery. For that reason I’m interested in reading the other few Quinny Hite novels I’ve acquired over the years.

Inspector Pierson (William Demarest, left) and Mike Shayne
(Lloyd Nolan) confer over the dead body of Desiree La Fond
(played by a mannequin)

Intriguingly, The Dead Take No Bows was sold to the Hollywood and turned into a vehicle for Lloyd Nolan in the Mike Shayne private eye series. That’s rather remarkable for a first time novelist, I think. Even moreso for having been turned into a movie so quickly after the book was published. Most of the Mike Shayne movies, oddly, used different books other than the original Brett Halliday stories and substituted Shayne in the role of private eye. So in Dressed to Kill (1941), the renamed movie version of Burke’s book, Quinny Hite is gone, but Joan is still there trying marry Nolan as Shayne.

I found the movie uploaded to YouTube and watched it a few nights ago. I was flabbergasted to learn that the plot was almost 100% true to Burke’s kooky novel. The only noticeable changes were that Phyllis, Lothrop’s second wife, was transformed into a society matron; Dorothy was relegated to one dumb scene in a taxi and robbed of her poignant monologue; one minor character became a potential second murderer in the slightly rewritten finale; and the original method for killing the two actors was dispensed with and a similar idea was substituted, one more plausible and possible but still rather ludicrous when you examine it closely.

There are a handful of fairly affordable copies of The Dead Take No Bows out thee for sale, including some with the rare DJ. But instead I recommend you look up the movie and watch it. It’s so faithful to the story it’s almost like reading the book. One warning in advance: Be prepared for Manton Moreland and Ben Carter doing some awful scaredy-cat Black man "humor" in one of the few wholly original, but insulting, scenes in the movie.