Poor, Poor Yorick - Frederick C. Davis

THE STORY:  Cyrus Hatch is invited to a cocktail party at the home of Marcia Clay, his former fiancee from their college days. When he arrives the apartment is filled with people none of whom Marcia invited. The party was as much a surprise to her as the invitation was to the guests. She tells Cy she had to make emergency order of food and liquor for the dozens of people who she was too overwhelmed to turn away.  She also tells Cy that she was just about to leave for Reno to divorce her husband. While Cy puzzles over the strange instant party thrown by some anonymous host and why it was arranged Marcia goes to her bedroom to finish packing. But she doesn't return Cy and his bodyguard break into her bedroom to discover she's been poisoned and a man is escaping via the balcony. Marcia is saved in the nick of time. Then Cy discovers what appears to be a suicide note that includes a confession to a murder and ends with the unfinished sentence: "The body is hidden in ..."  Is Marcia a murderer and who was murdered and where is the body?

THE CHARACTERS:  Cy Hatch is our unwilling sleuth in this story. He doesn't want to get involved but having saved Marcia and being confronted with the odd suicide note that he is sure was forced out of her by the mystery man they saw fleeing the bedroom he ever so reluctantly finds himself drawn into a complex case. As he proceeds in his sleuthing he will locate a missing person and have a gruesome discovery of where the body was hidden. But Cy is also the son of Police Commissioner Mark Hatch who is fed up with his son interfering in the city's most unusual murder cases. He was already nearly killed in the first case (Coffins for Three) and was tampering with evidence in another. Mark warns his son he will not hesitate to arrest him and throw him in jail if Cy insists on playing detective or obstructing justice in this case.

Everywhere Cy goes he's accompanied by Danny Delavan, his bodyguard who was initially hired by Cy's father. Since then they've become friends of sorts and Danny does his best to give his two cents worth on the many puzzling aspects of the case.  For a former boxer I thought he was rather inept as a bodyguard.  Cy tends to throw the punches first and Danny ends up at the mercy of some of the more talented assailants. At one point a woman with expert fencing skills holds Danny at bay at the end of her épée! Speaking of boxing Danny will be competing in a comeback match at Madison Square Garden defending his title as welterweight champion. He never ceases to talk about how he will knock out his opponent in the first round.  He also has a seemingly endless supply of comp ringside tickets and he hands these out to anyone who will accept them. By the evening of the actual fight all of the primary suspects will show up at the Garden for a boxing match that will end in a bizarre bit of spontaneous violence and a confession from the murderer.

As for the rest of the cast we have:

Richard Clay - theater producer, husband to Marcia, in love with Elspeth and primary suspect. His photography darkroom includes a variety of chemicals including cyanide that turn up to have been used in several crimes. The lover's tetrahedron of Richard-Elspeth-Marcia-Ronald (Elspeth's husband) serves as a one of the most obvious motives for Marcia's attempted poisoning murder by cyanide.

Marcia Clay - Poisoning victim and the victim of what Cy believes to be a complex frame-up to get her accused of the murder of...

Ronald Dexter - husband to Elspeth Burridge. He is a failed actor whose most notable a role was as Yorick, in a burlesque of Hamlet. The skull was not a prop in that production. Instead, Ronald played the deceased clown wearing a full skeleton outfit. It was supposed to be a silent comic role but he literally fainted onstage in his debut and gave up a stage career immediately after. Marcia has fallen in love with Ronald and was planning to leave her husband for him.  In giving up the stage Ronald turned to financial chicanery and has a reputation for con artistry and double crossing his investors.

Philip Carden - a professional adventurer obsessed with treasure hunting which requires a lot of money to pull off. Consequently he's always looking for investors. Ronald and Richard were primary investors in Carden's latest project to recover treasure from a shipwreck off the coast of Florida. Carden is also in love with Elspeth. They did the fall in love at first sight malarkey and Richard Clay was well aware of their instant attraction for each other.

Nicky & Toni DeLancey - two married Italian emigrants who have started a school for teaching a special form of contract bridge. Nicky is a professional bridge player and often competes at the Domino Club where Cy meets...

Nelson Sayre - president of the elite Domino Club which charges an initiation fee of $1000 and then $500 annual dues. Cy thinks the place is a front for card playing gamblers.  Ronald Dexter was involved in a scheme at the club for finding new members and for each new member he acquired he got a kickback.  Dexter has his fingers in everyone's bank accounts. He also was very vocal with Sayre about not receiving his fair share of those "incentives" for new members. Sayre was threatened repeatedly by Dexter who was planning to expose the club for what it really was.

Ted Pella - ridiculously handsome aide to Sayre.  Cy feels Pella has a sinister side based on the supercilious smirk that never disappears from his face. Danny thinks Pella is one of those pretty boy hitmen and he's more than just Nelson's aide.

Gail Reynolds - I was never sure of this woman. She appears at every scene as if she was employed everywhere at once. Did she work for Clay at the theater or for Sayre at the Club?  I hadn't a clue. But her primary role by midpoint is as a romantic foil. She is pursuing Philip Carden making it clear she wanted him and would possibly stop at nothing to get him.

Agatha Burridge - Elspeth's mother. Typical imperious matron found in murder mysteries of this era.  She's also a zealous stage mother who does everything in her power to advance Elspeth's acting career.  Also she tries her best to orchestrate a marriage between Richard and her daughter. She's not above exploitation, manipulation and possibly criminal behavior to make the match a reality. But could she actually have murdered Ronald Dexter and hidden his body?

Elspeth Burridge - a cipher character. Yes, she's an actress. Yes, she's excited many men's libidos. But we never really know her. She exists solely in relationship to other characters. We only know of her through other people. Elspeth appears in only two brief scenes (both alongside her mother) and she barely speaks. But she is always talked about by the rest of the cast and seems to be involved in the primary motive for Dexter's death

ATMOSPHERE: Frederick C. Davis began his career as short story writer in pulp magazines and their influence is always notable in his early full length novels. They are action oriented, chock full of fistfights and other violence between men, and include several truly bizarre, over-the-top murders. The discovery of Ronald Dexter's body is straight out of the weird menace pulps. It might even recall the macabre touches of Edgar Allan Poe to well read aficionados of the great writer. Poor, Poor, Yorick (1939) not only has Poe allusions, but a Shakespeare allusion and Gothic elements galore. Davis also throws in one of my favorite Golden Age plot motifs -- knife throwing!  Check out the illustration on the first edition dust jacket up there at the top of the post. Richard Clay has converted an old wine cellar in his home into a game room including knife throwing targets and a complete set of professional quality knives designed especially for throwing. Everyone in the cast has tried their hand at tossing around those knives; some excel at the skill, others aren't so adept. Four of those knives go missing at one point in the book and they are used inexpertly in several more murder attempts.

The detective novel motifs are also put to good use. Cy and Danny have a lot to contend with besides the strange attempted murder of Marcia and the faked suicide note. Another note turns up supposedly written by Ronald Dexter and fro a while everyone thinks he's alive until Cy proves that note also is a forgery when he points out the discrepancies in the typewriting in the body of the message compared with the greeting and date. It was a note actually written by Ronald long ago and altered to appear to be written two days ago. He later finds the typewriter used to alter that message and it implicates the Sayre's staff at the Domino Club. Which person used the typewriter?  Or was it a member who broke into Sayre's office to use it?

Other puzzling aspects of the case: why were two dozen bottles of Chablis stolen from the wine cellar in Richard Clay's home? How did human blood get on a dart gun used to pull darts out of a dart board? Why were the shoes on Ronald Dexter's body put on the wrong feet? And most surprising of all -- quite a shock for me -- was the second murder that occurs late int he novel.

Leonarde Keeler and wife with his update
of the polygraph machine, circa 1935

THINGS I LEARNED: My knowledge of polygraphs was certainly enhanced by reading this book. Davis goes out of his way to lecture (via his erudite criminologist hero) on the science of the polygraph. He makes sure that Cy calls it a deception indicator and not a lie detector, then goes into great detail about how the polygraph he is using records changes in pulse and respiration rate which are known to increase and later when a person is showing signs of deception while communicating. 

Philip Carden delivers a four page length monologue on the history of sunken treasures and shipwrecks that goes on for four full pages. He cites historical instance with dates or successes an failures in this risky and dangerous hobby of those looking to get rich quick.  The most fascinating was the case of a diver who accidentally came across a legendary shipwreck known to have been carrying gold bullion. He later went back surreptitiously to recover some of the loot but was ignorant of an approaching hurricane. He had to abort the search. After the hurricane subsided he returned only to find the entire wreck was gone. The storm had either moved it or entirely buried it once again. 

During one of Cy's criminology classes at Knickerbocker College,
where he is assistant professor in the sociology department, he lectures his students on the concept of the perfect murder and how a large per centage of murders never are prosecuted simply because they are never known to be murders. But, he posits, if you have been arrested on suspicion of murder there are a variety of instances in the inherently flawed American trial by jury system that may allow you to get away with your crime.  He then gives multiple examples ranging from jury boredom or indifference (citing several examples from actual court cases) to impartiality from the judge. I didn't make note of all the examples because the lecture goes on five or six pages and was utterly engrossing. This part of the book may have been the most insightful  castigation of American justice system I've come across in a popular work of fiction. Nothing seems to have changed in over 70 years. In fact, it's only worsened.

Danny at the mercy of Toni's
fencing skills on the UK edition

EASY TO FIND?  Good luck finding one, my friends. Of all of Davis' detective novels this one seems to be the most elusive.  I had a copy sitting on my shelves for almost ten years before I finally decided to read it. And I had to read it quickly because I had just sold it from one of my many listing online. Now it's on its way to a lucky reader/collector. It was the only copy of Poor, Poor Yorick offered since I bought it. There are no copies offered for a sale online as of today's date. And I know of no reprints either. Perhaps someone uploaded the book to an online library.  I never bother looking for those. If you come across a copy in the wild, as it were, snap it up.  This book though elusive is highly recommended as an imaginative, entertaining, unexpectedly educational, and often surprise-filled example of a traditional Golden Age detective novel.

UPDATE!! As pointed out in the comment below this book was published in the UK by Heinemann as Murder Doesn’t Always Out. I found three copies of that edition for sale online. One is priced affordably but has no DJ. The other two are well over  US$300. I’m sure all three will sell soon. Happy Hunting! 

FIRST BOOKS: The Corpse in the Corner Saloon - Hampton Stone

Jeremiah X. Gibson, Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan, is accompanied by his colleague from the D.A.'s office known only as "Mac" who also serves as the narrator in their debut which deals with the murder of a promiscuous barfly and sometime entertainer as well as the apparent suicide by poisoning of the man who supposedly killed her. But it's a lot more complicated than a tawdry sex crime --she was strangled, her clothing was carefully cut from her back and the word "Bitch" was written in lipstick on her bare skin-- and suicide. The first complication is that there are multiple witnesses who saw the man, night club dancer Hubert von Mund, in the woman's apartment. He has a very distinctive garish plaid coat he wears everywhere. And a man wearing that coat was seen in the window of Fleurette Val's home. It wasn't just his coat that make the witnesses remember him --  he was doing something rather lewd with his pants down. Gibby doesn't buy that someone would go to the trouble of such an elaborate crime, perform a sex act, and then come to a bar wearing the same coat and knock back a beer with a cyanide chaser. He starts an intensive investigation that takes him from tenement apartments to bars to small businesses meeting up with a collector of erotic photographs and dirty books, an odd husband and wife who seem to spend a lot of time playing voyeur on their neighbors, Hubert's ex-dancing partner who was abandoned when he broke his contract leaving her without a job, and a coiuple of hunky tattooed bartenders who have attracted quite a following from the regular female bar patrons.

The Corpse in the Corner Saloon (1948) is a forerunner to the sex-and-crime murder mysteries that would flood the popular fiction marketplace in the 1950s.  For the year of publication this book is incredibly racy, just shy of salacious. You get a veritable cornucopia of transgressive topics and incidents: exhibitionism, , erotic drawings, pornographic books, and sex in bedooms with draperies open. Naked people and voyeurs are everywhere. The reviewer for The Saturday Review in November 1948 said "Well enough done, but definitely not for queasy palates." Understatement! Stone manages to raise several sexual topics with wiseacre dialogue and well placed innuendo avoiding vulgarity with ironic humor.  The characters themselves are mostly a sleazy bunch (I counted only two suspects who weren't sex obsessed or window lurkers), no need to make it raunchier by going into great detail. Besides, I think the editors must've thought they were risking too much by including the murderer fondling himself in a window. They had to tone down all the rest of it somehow.

As for the mystery elements Gibby (as he is referred to by our narrator) is keen on the "Clue of the Coat", as it were. In fact, clothing and the world of tailoring play an extremely important part in the solution to the two crimes. A tailoring business owned by Marlowe Trutt features prominently in the story. Arnold Carroll is Trutt's longtime associate and friend.  For a long time the story seems to be implicating Carroll as the murderer with a motive of over-protectiveness of Trutt and revenge. Trutt has a surprise connection to Fleurette Val that turns the case on its head. And when an unusual order for a fabric that matches the strange yellow and blue plaid of Hubert's distinctive coat is trace back to Trutt's business Mac becomes highly suspicious of Carroll.

One of the more interesting clues is the word neatly written on Fleurette's back. Of great interest to Gibby is the "t" which is not fully crossed. This turns out to be the trademark of someone's signature and is well known to anyone who uses Trutt as their tailor.  His signature with partially crossed T's (see the illustration on the Dell paperback) is well known because his name is the company logo. His flourishing signature appears on labels in clothes as well as the ornate business cards he hands out to clients. Someone is trying to frame Marlowe Trutt. Gibby sees through this transparent ploy immediately.

Despite the tawdry nature of the crimes and the prurient interests of the window spies in the various apartments that face the murder scene this is a well plotted mystery with deft twists and several excellent red herrings that fooled me and led me away from the real unexpected villain of the book. I'd classify it as a fair play detective novel that mixes up noirish subject matter found in typical private eye novels of this era with traditional mystery novel plotting. One particular clothing related clue mentioned exactly once in the early part of the book is a clincher to the identity of the killer. I completely missed that clothing remark. It was placed nonchalantly with the expertise of Carr or Christie. Kudos to the writer for that one. 

THE AUTHOR:  "Hampton Stone" is one of the many pseudonyms used by Aaron Marc Stein (1902-1985) who began his mystery writing career as early as 1935 when as "George Bagby" he wrote a long series of detective novels inspired by the growing popularity of police procedurals. They all feature Inspector Schmidt and the narrator George Bagby who, like S. S. Van Dine, "authors" the books as if the cases were real. Under his own name Stein created the archaeologist sleuthing team of Timm Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt, and the engineer Matt Herridge. The "Hampton Stone" detective novels all feature Gibby and Mac and lasted into the early 1970s with a total of 18 books.

THINGS I LEARNED: The art of tailoring and the business of being a tailor is a highlight of the novel.  Even supporting characters turn out to have tailoring and sewing skills. Clothing aficionados take note!  You will learn all about the snobbery of high end tailors and their tastes in fabric, the commercial aspect of clothing industry disdained by true tailors, the "ghetto" of Manhattan's garment district, and even the intricacies of inserting a zipper into a pair of pants. It was all sort of fascinating. The many crime movies I've seen featuring tailors as protagonists from The Tailor in Panama to The Outfit don't offer anywhere near the depth of understanding nor give as much insight into tailoring as in this book.

EASY TO FIND? Dozens of copies of the two vintage paperback editions are out there for sale. Pries for the vintag e paperbacks range from $3 - $15. You can choose from the nifty Dell Mapback shown above, or a Paperback Library edition from 1971 with cover art that makes Gibby look like long gone, action movie star Steve McQueen. Hilarious! A few copies of the US 1st edition shown at the top of this post are also available for sale ranging from $15 to $54, with and without DJs. I read my copy from the Chicago Public Library. Don't have one to sell you. Sorry.