TELEGRAM.
ASSOCIATED PRESS, UNITED PRESS, INTERNATIONAL NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK, N. Y.
PETER MORAN WHO FOILED DARING HOLDUP AT HOME OF WEALTHY MILLIONAIRE R. B. McRAE COMMA SURREY COMMA CONNECTICUT AND ARRESTED JOE COSTELLO ALIAS JOE CASTELLI ALIAS JOE COSTANZE ALIAS JOE CASTRUCCIO SINGLE HYPHEN HANDED IS A STUDENT AT ACME INTERNATIONAL DETECTIVE CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOL COMMA SOUTH KINGSTON COMMA NEW YORK STOP PROSPECTUS AND LITERATURE FREE ON REQUEST STOP RATES REASONABLE STOP EARN WHILE YOU LEARN STOP NOW IS THE TIME TO STUDY THIS FASCINATING AND UNCROWDED PROFESSION.
From: Operative P. Moran, c/o Mr. R. B. McRae, Surrey, Conn.,
To: Chief Inspector, Acme International Detective Correspondence School, South Kingston, N.Y.
Well, you certainly stirred up things with those telegrams. This is Friday and the reporters keep coming but the boss says, “Peter, there has already been too much publicity,” so I tell them “I am not giving out any more interviews,” though I cannot stop them from printing the flashlight pictures they took of me and me and the boss and me and Mr. & Mrs. Cutler and me and Mr. & Mrs. Grimshaw and me and Sheriff Vince Dudley and the rest of the Amenia Concert Orchestra and me and Joe Costello.
But I will tell you what I told the reporters from the New York Mirror and the New York News and the New York Herald and the New York Post etc. because you may not read any of those papers especially if you have a paper in South Kingston where the school is.
After Sheriff Vince Dudley and the boss and a couple of others had collected the evidence, I deducted for them and they just stood there, listening and nodding every now and then and wishing they knew how to deduct themselves.
That redhead Anna bell read about the dance Mr. & Mrs. McRae were going to give in a paper they have in Poughkeepsie, where she was laying low with her boy-friend Joe Costello who has a red groove on the underside of his jaw because he was hanged in Texas only the rope broke. So they came to Surrey and that redhead Annabell got a job where she could size up things and she told Joe it would be a pipe. They figured a good time for the hold-up would be ten-fifteen P. M. in the evening, and Joe would have brought his machine-gun right in with him only Annabell met him and said he would not need it because she saw me driving away and she deducted I was running out on the party and I would be gone for hours. So Joe left the machine-gun outside in the car which he says he now regrets. He has had a lot of experience and he thought the automatic would be enough, and it would have been only I came back when I was not expected and sizing up the situation instantly he acted with brilliant decisiveness like it said in the New York Sun. The value of the loot which Costello’s confederate had already collected was in excess of $100,000, and consisted of cash, watches, rings, and jewelry, like it said in the Chicago Tribune. The thug had planned to make his getaway unmolested, hence had severed the telephone wires leading to Broker R. B. McRae’s palatial mansion (photo on Page 1), a fact which was not discovered until Sheriff Vincent Dudley, being in Connecticut, hence out of his own bailiwick, tried to summon the State Police and found the instrument was dead, like it said in the New York Mirror. The telegraph office is in Lakeville and when they get a telegram for Surrey they phone it here but they couldn’t do that Sunday night after Joe cut the wires, so it didn’t come till Monday and you would have saved money if you had just written me a letter.
Joe says Butch Krieger, had the right dope when he warned me about dizzy blonds which Annabell used to be before the apothecary who makes up your doctor’s perscription and who will not resemble the salty mariner who has sailed the seven seas put her wise to henna, and Joe says she steered him wrong or he would have shot me accidentally last Friday and then this story would have had a happy ending. She talked him out of it because she hates the sight of blood. But Joe is a good scout and he is glad I shot him in the right shoulder where he has been shot before so he does not mind it much and ditto about his nose which has been broken so often that he is beginning to lose count. He says you got to be philosophical about life, sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down, and he had never been in prison in Connecticut and he is curious to find out what it is like and if they will let him have a violin. He wants to play the violin, having such a good groove on the underside of his jaw in which to put it, and he expects he will have plenty of time to practise where he is going now. But he can’t make his plans for the future till he knows how much they knock off for good behavior, and if he never sees that redhead Annabell again, why it is O.K. with him.
A gorjous brunett stopped me on the street outside the post-office last night and she says, “Excuse me for talking to a total stranger which I never do, but you are Mr. Moran, aren’t you? I recognized you from your pictures. Mr. Moran, do you know you are my hero?”
I says, “No, I didn’t know that.”
“Well, you are, especially after I read that piece about you in the Lakeville Journal.”
I says, “Tonight is my night off and I haven’t got a date. Maybe I could give you a lift wherever you’re going.”
“Oh, could you? I am in no hurry to get there.”
She squeezes up close to me as I let in the gears. “I’m so thrilled, Mr. Moran, to have a real hero driving for me!”
“I don’t know,” I says, “if you could call this sensual driving.”
She says, “Oh, Mr. Moran!” and then she squeezes up still closer. “To a hero,” she says, “all things are permitted.”
Death on the South Wind
by Valma Clark
EQMM boasts an honorable roster of husband-and-wife detective teams. True, we have not brought you an escapade of Mr. and Mrs. North, or an exploit of Nick and Nora Charles, but we cannot be held responsible for these glaring omissions — neither duo exists in short-story form. We have brought you, however, Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Margaret Manners’s Desdemona (Squeakie) and David Meadow, and Cyril Plunkett’s Joe and Jeri Jones, And now we offer another domestic duet, another ’tecting twosome, another crime-crushing couple. Flippancy aside, meet “Professor” Hollis Mears and his wife Marjorie, in the strange case that linked Honeymoon Island and Mangrove Island. It happened in tropical Florida during that languid period when the south wind, like the mistral of Mediterranean France, blew hot and sultry and maddening... when sabotage and death were invisible fingers of the wind...
Your Editor found a certain fascinating femininity in this story — in the domestic scenes, in the romantic interludes, even in Miss Clark’s deft strokes of characterization. Women readers will recognize the authentic touch of a talented woman-writer; and male fans will welcome a distaff detective story that skillfully avoids the down filling and purple patchwork of the Had-I-But-Known school of sleuthery.
Little Mrs. Mears sometimes felt that there was a great scarcity of really good murders on an isolated Florida island — until the letter that morning. She was engaged in making over her poky little historian husband into a world-famous detective. Naturally he did not know this.
She scowled up at him reproachfully, from the letter, over the mid-morning coffee in his study. “I didn’t know you knew the Riders, Hollis!”
His magnificent forehead (it was startlingly brown from the sun beneath the silver crest of hair, it dwarfed everything about him) lifted to her from the eternal book list from his bookseller. Hollis was fenced in by books so that you could scarcely get to him. He was writing a History of the American Civil War, and the current world war could have been fought and won by the sheer tonnage of the tomes they already owned — all their money went for reference books — but still he was never through buying. “Are you reading my letters again?” he asked, resigned. “I don’t. Who are the Riders?”