The joy was so intense now that it was almost an agony. Everything was gleaming — gleaming gold. Dinah wouldn’t leave her Daddy Bloomers. Dinah was going to be his after all. The gold was sand, a vast stretch of golden sand by the summer sea. Dinah was jumping and prancing, her pigtails flying, the gulls curving above her in the gentle golden sky. Look, she had turned! She was running toward him and as she ran, there was another golden child running with her, a solemn little girl clutching a stick of candy rock.
Laughing, sporting, Dinah and Rosie came nearer and nearer. In ecstacy Mr. Loomis stretched out his hands to them.
“Hey, Bloomers,” shouted Al Potts, “what’s up? What’s the mailer?”
“Happy.” Mr. Loomis’ outflung arms sank onto the desk. “So happy...”
As his head drooped forward onto his hands, the office clock struck five.
The trail of the brown sedan
by MacKinlay Kantor[1]
MacKinlay Kantor chose “The Trail of the Brown Sedan” for inclusion in his fascinating AUTHOR’S CHOICE, and here is what Mr. Kantor himself wrote about the story:
“This was one of the last stories I did for Howard Bloomfield of Detective Fiction Weekly, and it was written in July, 1933, while I was working on long remember. My cops-and-robbers tales sprang out of the old Chicago days. Every young writer who has ever been a newspaper reporter, or who has lived for a time on the fringe of the underworld, can contrive countless stories of this sort. I think ‘The Trail of the Brown Sedan’ has a kind of sharpness and pungency not always found in pulp magazine material; it is the best of a series of stories which I wrote about the fictitious Glennan brothers.”
We do not mean to take issue with MacKinlay Kantor, but we can’t help wondering. Is it really true that every young writer, with the experience and background which Mr. Kantor specifies, can contrive countless stories life “The Trail of the Brown Sedan”? In all honesty, we doubt it. The word “countless” implies mass production, and mass production is admittedly not the safest or surest pathway to quality. True, many of our most prolific writers have often produced gems of the finest cut and clarity, but these were the coalescences of infrequent though inspired moments. Mass production generally means a sloppy and slovenly style, and plots patched together from outworn formulas. And note too the verb which Mr. Kantor instinctively used: “can contrive countless stories”; if these numberless yarns, so easy to produce, clearly show evidence of having been “contrived,” then they will not rise above an inferior grade of “pulp magazine material” and will not achieve future reprint.
No, the simple truth is that MacKinlay Kantor’s best stories, out of his salad days, are at least a little better than he thinks, and that stories which, fifteen years later, are a little better than one thinks are not hacked out by the ream or plucked off an assembly line. It just isn’t that easy!
The last recorded words of Sergeant Paul Van Wert, spoken about a minute and a half before he died, were directed at First-class Patrolman Nicholas Glennan, who opened the door for the three detectives and their manacled prisoner.
“Looks like more Indian summer,” said Sergeant Van Wert.
“Another good day,” nodded Nick Glennan, and pushed on the bronze cross-bar which served as handle for the narrow panel. When you’re convoying a tough guy like Rainy Moper out of a railroad station you don’t use the revolving door. No, you use the regular door — Detective Johnson goes ahead, and the tough guy follows along, locked tight to Detective Cohen’s wrist. You, Sergeant Van Wert, bring up the rear. You nod to the cop on station duty and say something about the weather. He opens the door for you, and you all go outside and get killed.
Said the News-Detail, in its second extra published about an hour and fifteen minutes later: “The three detectives were jubilant, for Rainy Moper, murderer, mail bandit, and extortionist, had fought a hard battle against extradition. Their arrival at the Union Terminal was unheralded. They stepped from the Pullman, brushed through the first crowds of office-bound commuters, and hustled their prisoner out of the station.”
Said the News-Detail, in its special copyrighted story which went ticking over twenty wires: “Officer Nicholas Glennan, hero of the raid which wiped out the American Packing Company payroll bandits last March, was on station duty. He spoke to his fellow officers and opened the door for them, then started back toward the lower station level.”
Said Antonio Bambasino, proprietor of the Union Terminal Smoke Shop: “I was just looking out the window when those men come out with him. They is a blue touring car parked close, with another man he sit at the wheel. One detective he get in front. Those two more start to get in back with the Rainy Moper fellow. Nobody say a word. Then the guns to shoot they start, like this—”
Sister Mary Louis, Superior of St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital, was only twenty feet away, walking toward the station door. Accompanied by Sister Clementina, and having just emerged from a taxicab, Sister Mary Louis was not expecting to see the very quintessence of murder... She had level gray eyes, a firm chin, and her calm voice had only a slight tremble in it as she talked to the police.
“I noticed,” she declared, “that a brown sedan was parked beside the blue touring car. Just as the group of officers got into the touring car, a man opened the door of the sedan. No, he had no mask. He held something in his hands; it must have been a machine gun. A man was shooting from the front seat, too. We heard the shots... we stood there, petrified. Looking at those men. No one screamed. It happened too suddenly. Then the brown car went forward across the low curb, turned past the lamp-post, and raced up the street—”
Taxicab Operator Fred Cepak, license No. 1786, got a good look at the men in the brown car. “There was three. One driving, one in the front seat beside him, and one in the back. Two of them was big, fleshy guys, and the one driving was a little dark runt. Naw, they weren’t masked or nothing. And well dressed, kind of. The guy in back pulls up with a machine gun, but the fellow in front had an automatic in each hand. The shots go bang, bang, plunk — faster than I can say it — then the little guy says, ‘Hell. You got him! And with that they shag-tail outa there. The cops in the touring car are sliding down, dead as anything, all blood and— The sedan door came open, just as the gunmen bounced offa the curb. Then this cop comes out the station door and starts to shoot—”
They were good witnesses, for the most part. Somehow they seemed unusually methodical in telling what they saw. It was as if the blast of gunfire had robbed them of all hysteria. Eight o’clock, on a bright Indian summer morning... there in front of the sober railroad station. They were mainly accurate in their statements.
Nick Glennan, with only thirty minutes left before he would be relieved by Officer Canaday, thought he’d see whether he had gained or lost any weight during the hours since he came on duty. He found a penny in his breeches pocket and dropped it into the maw of the slot-machine scales, there in the south corridor of the station.
Then the shooting began... He had his gun out, before he reached the street. As he opened the glass panel he could see Detective Johnson’s wet, red face sliding lower and lower in the front seat of the police car. That was enough; it told a long story to Nick Glennan in just two-fifths of a second.