“A sucker reads that ad,” Quade went on. “He sends you a song poem and you give him a form letter telling him the lyrics are swell and have all the elements of a potential hit. All Mr. Sucker needs with his lyrics is some good music and, by a strange coincidence, you have a famous song writer on your staff who was so impressed with the lyrics he’ll gladly write the music for them — for a mere $50.00.”
Al Donnelley began to squirm in his chair. Murdock snorted. “So what? Al does write the music for some of these — er — would-be song writers. We render a definite service. The small fee isn’t exorbitant. The postal authorities—”
“Okayed you on that, I know. They couldn’t say anything about your publishing enterprise, either. If you can get a few suckers to kick through for a song printing job, well — it’s perfectly legitimate to make eight or nine hundred percent profit on the printing, which you let out to a music printer.”
Murdock shrugged. “I’m listening. You’ll listen when Nick Darcy gets after you.”
“Oh, he’s your lawyer, too! O.K.! So the songs of nine hundred and ninety-nine of these suckers are tripe. But the thousandth song, or maybe it’s the ten thousandth, is a natural. Such a song was one called Cottage By the Shore, submitted by one Billy Bond.”
“All right,” conceded Murdock. “Bond sent me some lyrics. Tripe that he got back. You can’t prove otherwise.”
“I think I can. As it happened, Billy Bond wrote the music for his own song. You couldn’t hook him on that fee, but he fell for your ad, anyway, and sent you the song. Instead of clipping him for a printing fee, you told him the song was no good. You admit that. But it was good. And you knew it. So you changed a word here and there, turned a copy of the thing over to your dummy, Al Donnelley, who took it to Wingate, who in turn published it — adding to the string of song hits already produced by Al Donnelley!”
Al Donnelley opened and closed his mouth. He looked frightened. But over the face of Murdock came a grim look.
Quade went on: “The song was published only a few days ago. When Billy Bond heard it, he recognized it for his own and he came to you and squawked. Said he was going to sue you. You denied stealing his song.”
“Of course I did!” snarled Murdock. “I never even read his tripe.”
Quade proceeded relentlessly: “But Billy Bond sent in an item to The Showman and when you saw that, Murdock, you began to get scared. You could smell trouble, so you sent for Soup Spooner.”
Soup Spooner yawned. “Ho-hum, here we go again!”
Quade shot him a quick look. “Soup killed Billy Bond, then he cut Cassidy, the piano player’s throat, because Cassidy had picked up and taken home Bond’s original manuscript. You, Murdock, didn’t want that to be floating around. You made only one little mistake, Murdock. But you couldn’t help that. Because when Billy Bond first wrote his song, he made two copies.” Quade was making this up fast. “One of them he sent — to Iowa, to his father. It’s dated, and it proves that Al Donnelley’s version, called Cottage By the Sea, is a plagiarism!”
Quade reached into his breast pocket and took out a folded song manuscript. “This,” he said, “is another copy that we happen to have. As someone here knows, it was sent to someone else. I’m going to ask Sergeant Vickers here to play it on his trombone. And I want you all to listen and see for yourselves if it isn’t note for note like Al Donnelley’s Cottage By the Sea.”
He handed the music to Sergeant Vickers and the detective spread it out on his music stand. He picked up his trombone, blew a practice note or two.
Quade was watching Soup Spooner. The chemist-killer’s eyes were fixed carelessly on the red vase on the mantel and there was a mocking smile on his lips. Quade knew suddenly that Soup would not break. He had no nerves. Even though he knew he was within thirty seconds of eternity, that he could not escape it without confessing to two murders, he would say nothing. Soup Spooner was that sort of man.
Sergeant Vickers moistened his lips with his tongue, nodded and blew one note on the trombone.
Martha Henderson screamed. “Stop it! Don’t play!”
Quade stabbed his forefinger at Murdock’s secretary. “Why shouldn’t he play, Miss Henderson?”
“Because I don’t want to hear that song. If a man’s been killed because of it, I—” She trembled violently.
“Nonsense, Martha!” Quade said sharply. “The rest of us want to hear it. Don’t we, Murdock?”
“Go ahead,” said Murdock.
Vickers put the trombone to his lips again. This time he played two notes. Then Martha Henderson catapulted from her chair, heading for the mantel. Quade put out his foot and tripped her.
Martha Henderson hit the floor on her hands, screamed and came up to her knees. “Don’t!” she screamed. “Don’t play! You’ll kill us all and — and I don’t want to die!”
Quade stooped and caught her wrists. “Why not play it, Martha?”
She fought Quade, her eyes constantly on the vase on the mantel. She was completely hysterical now. “Because you’ll kill us. The bomb — if you play, the bomb’ll go off! We’ll blowup!”
Soup said disgustedly, “A dame! The finest chemical experiment I ever made and a dame spoils it!”
“Your iodine-ammonia bomb, Soup?” Quade asked softly. “It’s already gone down the drain. The vase is empty.”
Murdock, the music racketeer, was slumped in his chair, his eyes popping. “I–I don’t understand all this!”
Quade said, “So, you’re only a crook, Murdock. Not a murderer. You weren’t mixed up in the other. It was Martha Henderson, your trusted secretary. And Al Donnelley.”
Soup said, “Ah, that stuffed shirt! He didn’t know what it was all about. He couldn’t write a song if he had to. Martha slipped him the stuff now and then that he got published. Martha got it from the trash in the office and he cut her in on the profit.” He sniffed. “I shoulda known better than to trust a dame. Jeez! That woulda been swell if he’d played that piece. This whole place woulda gone — boom!”
Frank Gruber, Hardboiled Humor, & the Noir Revolution
Frank Gruber (1902–1969) was one of the most successful and prolific writers of the pulp era. At his peak he produced three or four full-length novels a year, many about series characters Johnny Fletcher and his sidekick Sam Cragg. Each year Gruber also wrote numerous short stories, many featuring Oliver Quade, “The Human Encyclopedia,” that is arguably his most warmly remembered series character.
By the late 1930s Gruber had visited Hollywood, and sold the screen rights to Oliver Quade with hopes that a regular series of films would be made (see Gruber’s essay on writing Oliver Quade mysteries in our Behind the Mask feature following the last story in this collection). Unfortunately only one lackluster Quade film was made. However, within a few years, Gruber was writing successful screenplays almost every year, including such major features as The Mask of Dimitrios, Terror by Night (one of two superior Sherlock Holmes scripts for Basil Rathbone), and with his companion and fellow Black Mask contributor, Steve Fisher, the classic noir thriller Johnny Angel. This last film was based on the novel Mr. Angel Comes Aboard by fellow Black Mask writer Charles G. Booth.
Although Gruber had a light touch, and successfully combined humorous characters with authentic hard-boiled milieus, a technique that was a major influence on later mystery writers like Craig Rice, Gruber claimed that he, Steve Fisher, and Cornell Woolrich became great friends at Black Mask and together developed the noir thriller under the brilliant hand of editor Fanny Ellsworth. Ellsworth was the great woman editor of the pulps who took over Black Mask from Captain Joseph Shaw in 1936 and promoted a kind of dark, psychologically centered emotional tale in Black Mask, often of innocent men trapped by fate. Gruber describes his writing friendships in his colorful autobiography, The Pulp Jungle, which is also an informal history of pulp magazines, and the era in which they flourished.