It was a pleasing philosophy and Tommy Braden felt quite virtuous. He scarcely heard the light rap on the door. Only when the rapping became insistent did he open.
Jim Hanvey waddled into the room. He wore a suit which he fancied was a tweed. It hung loosely about his ungainly figure. The golden toothpick was very much in evidence. Jim blinked slowly—“Gosh! Tommy, you ain’t going away, are you?”
Mr. Braden was flustered. He had a premonition of disaster. If only he could hold Jim off for a brief span of time.…“Just running up to Chicago for a few days, Jim. Coming right back. Merely carrying one bag.”
“Awful swell diggings, Tommy. How much do they sting you for this soot?”
“Plenty, Jim, plenty. Say, how about trotting up to Chi with me for a day or so?”
“Naw! Can’t stir, Son. I’ve got to stick around here another day or so if it kills me. How long you planning to be gone?”
“Oh! two or three days at the most.”
“No special business or nothing like that, is there, Tommy?”
Tommy flushed. He had a disturbing presentiment that there was a menace cloaked beneath Jim’s words. “Nothing wrong, if that’s what you mean, Jim.”
“Good boy. It wouldn’t be wise for a guy that’s as well fixed as you to take another flyer. Of course I know there’s plenty of temptation and all that—but the game ain’t worth the electric flashlight,66 Son—not by a durn sight.”
Braden was ill-at-ease. “Wish you’d come along with me, Jim. I hate to travel alone.”
“Sorry, Tommy.”
“You’ll be here when I get back, won’t you?”
Jim shook his head ponderously. “Nope. Don’t reckon I will. Got to hike back to N’Yawk and turn in a report. I’ve been right lucky recently, Son; right lucky.”
Braden was relieved. “Landed your man?”
“No-o. Not exactly. I wasn’t particularly interested in that. It was an insurance company that sent me down here and all they wanted was the stuff. Interesting case, Tommy; awful interesting.”
“I’ll wager it was.” He crammed two suits of pajamas in the traveling bag.
“You know,” Jim’s voice was easily conversational, “we’d almost given up hope of ever getting them Vanduyn pearls back.”
Tommy Braden sat down very suddenly. “The—the what?”
“The Vanduyn pearls. Remember the case? Mickey Donley pulled it.”
Braden leaned forward. “I don’t quite make you, Jim. Do you mean to tell me that you’ve recovered the Vanduyn pearls?”
“Surest thing you know. We knew Mickey couldn’t get rid of ’em so we watched the boys he was calling on. Trailed ’em thataway, see? And the poor sucker that bought ’em off Mickey found a goat and sold ’em—and I got ’em that way. I’m right lucky about things like that.”
Mr. Thomas Matlock Braden was dazed. He knew that Jim Hanvey was speaking the truth. And yet—He gave ear to the even monotone of the detective.
“And say, Tommy; next time we meet I’ll take you on in a golf match. I’m getting my first lesson this afternoon. I run across a swell feller last night. Guy named Morse: Edgar H. Morse. Know him?”
Tommy stared. He moistened dry lips with his tongue. “Go ahead, Jim.”
“Well, Eddie Morse is taking me out on the links this afternoon. He says it ain’t so hard if a guy is willing to practice for fifteen or twenty years. Think of me swinging a golf club. I’ll feel like a sap. But anyway I like this bird Morse. Feel like I and he was buddies even though I never met him until late last night.” Jim blinked slowly as he toyed with the gold toothpick which rested against his vest. “He’s interested in joolry, too, Tommy. Me and him had a long talk about pearls and things. He knew all about the Vanduyn robbery; remembered the whole thing the minute I reminded him of it. Uh-huh, me and Eddie Morse got along fine together.”
Tommy Braden sought to readjust his battered scheme of things. Above everything, he was a game loser. A thin, twisted smile appeared on his lips.
“I’m a fool, Jim.”
“How so, Son?”
“For thinking that you are the idiot you appear to be.”
“Gosh! I couldn’t be that, could I?”
“Hardly. I take it, Jim, that you knew the person to whom Mickey Donley sold the Vanduyn pearls. You located him at this place and followed him here. You discovered that there was considerable mystery about him and also that Edgar Morse was his only intimate acquaintance. You presumed, of course, that Morse was the goat—and so you went straight to that gentleman and warned him against buying any pearls which might be offered. Is that correct?”
Jim grinned in pleased surprise. “Golly! Son, you’re clever. How’d you know all that?”
“Just guessing, Jim.” He rose heavily. “I’d better travel along, I suppose. I’m mighty glad you’re not going to nab the poor fish who tried to pull the deal. You’re a white man, Jim Hanvey.”
“Shuh! We don’t care nothing for that feller. It was just a bit of a business deal with him. Hmm! So you’re running up to Chicago, eh?”
“Yes.” And then—“Why?”
“Oh! nothin’ special. Except that if you should happen to be thinking of cashing a check which somebody might have given you on—well, say the Loop National Bank; I think you’d better change your mind. You see, the feller which gave you that check happens to be a friend of mine and just to avoid embarrassment I suggested to him last night that he should make out the check on a bank where he hasn’t got any money. And he kind of seemed to think it was a good idea.”
Tommy Braden had the grace to laugh. He clasped Jim Hanvey’s hand—
“Thanks for the tip, Jim. You’re surely a thoughtful chap. And one of these days we’ll try some golf; what do you say?”
“We sure will, Tommy—unless it turns out that I ain’t got sense enough to learn the darn game.”
THE END
* * *
57 This was during Prohibition, it will be recalled: Mr. Morse invites Braden to have an alcoholic drink in private.
58 Braden apparently refers to the slogan (probably incorrectly) attributed to American showman P. T. Barnum: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
59 Not actual children, rather, bonds or other securities sold during World War I or which increased in value because of the war.
60 Dun and Bradstreet have marketed independent analyses of the financial condition of companies and individuals since their founding in 1841.
61 The legendary king of Lydia (596–547 BCE), said to be phenomenally wealthy.
62 The Plantagenets were the royal family of England from 1154 to 1485; their dynasty ended with the death of Richard III. They were succeeded by the Tudors.
63 Originally the Hawaiian word for “people” and thus the name given to native Hawaiians. By this time, it referred to the Melanesian peoples spread across the South Pacific, many of whom worked in Australia on sugar plantations or cattle stations or as servants in towns; they were often treated horribly and reduced to near-slave status.
64 He means a stiffly starched white shirt, very much like the material used for movie screens of the day.
65 A portmanteau of “chiffonier” and “wardrobe,” first marketed by Sears in 1908—a combination of a bureau with drawers and a compartment in which to hang garments.
66 A joke—a play on the old saying “the game isn’t worth the candle,” a phrase that meant the game (the entertainment) was so worthless that the cost of burning a candle was more than it merited.
Reading Group Guide
1. Do you like Jim Hanvey as a character?
2. Have you ever been conned? Did you find yourself thinking that you might have been taken in by some of the con men and women in these stories?
3
. Do you think that Hanvey cultivated his image as unsophisticated or unpolished?
4. Do you find Cohen’s dialogue natural and believable? Do you think that is important to your response to the stories?
5. What appealed to you most about these stories? What bothered you?
6. Does knowing about Cohen’s “Florian Slappey” series affect your enjoyment of these stories (see “About the Author,”)?
Further Reading
Jim Hanvey short stories:
“Buyer’s Risk,” Detective Magazine, May 9, 1924.
“Detective Hanvey Pays a Midnight Call,” American Magazine, May 1926.
“Free and Easy,” Red Book Magazine, April 1926. Collected in Detours (Boston: Little, Brown, 1927).
“The Frame-Up,” American Magazine, June 1928.
“As the Twig Is Bent,” American Magazine, November 1928.
“Jim Hanvey Intervenes,” American Magazine, February 1930.
“The Hollywood Bridal-Night Murder,” Illustrated Detective Magazine, September 1931.
“A Gentleman for a Night,” American Magazine, October 1931.
“A Diamond Setting,” American Magazine, January 1932.
“Cold Cash,” American Magazine, March 1932.
“High Seize,” American Magazine, February 1934.
Untitled story, Scrambled Yeggs, New York: Appleton-Century, 1934.
“Double Jeopardy,” The Saint, December 1957.
Jim Hanvey novels:
The May Day Mystery. New York: D. Appleton, 1929.
The Backstage Mystery. New York: D. Appleton, 1930.
Star of Earth. New York: D. Appleton, 1932.
Florian Slappey collections:
Florian Slappey Goes Abroad. Boston: Little, Brown, 1928.
Florian Slappey. New York: Appleton-Century, 1938.
About the Author
Octavus Roy Cohen (1891–1959), little remembered today, was a prolific writer of more than sixty books, hundreds of short stories, five plays, and the scripts for thirty movies. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, he was a cousin of the mystery writer Rodrigues Ottolengui (see Final Proof in this series) and, like him, born to Jewish parents. He attended Clemson College (later Clemson University), graduating in 1911, and in 1913 he gave up a brief career as a newspaperman when he was admitted to the bar in South Carolina.67 He practiced for only two years and took up writing fiction.
Cohen began writing for magazines, such as Snappy Stories and All-Around Magazine, and soon became a popular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post. His first stories appeared there in 1919, and his work was featured regularly in the Post until the 1940s.68 While he wrote fiction of all sorts, his first love was apparently the mystery genre. His first series sleuth was David Carroll, created in 1918 and described by mystery critic Jon Breen as “small, energetic, and relatively colorless.”69 His second creation, Florian Slappey, was one of the earliest Black detectives in crime fiction and made Cohen’s reputation. Cohen drew on his upbringing in South Carolina to depict his version of the Southern experience and wrote more than 250 stories set there. Slappey was a comic stereotype of Black Americans, a sometime-detective first operating in “Bumminham” and then in Harlem.70 Even when Slappey moved to New York, Cohen continued to write about the “African Negroes of the South,” as he put it in a 1925 interview in the New York Times: “The cultured Negro is quite right when he says my stories do not portray his feeling. The more subtle Negro who goes to college…is a different individual altogether… I have never pretended to write about the whole Negro race.”71
In the 1920s and 1930s, the Slappey stories appeared nearly weekly in the Saturday Evening Post.72 “They belonged to an era now past,” wrote the New York Times in Cohen’s obituary, “the era of the ‘blackface’ comedian, when the Negro appeared in fiction as a caricature rather than a reality.”73 William L. DeAndrea, in his Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, describes Slappey as a “decent, if bumbling detective, and his cases are often well enough constructed to stand up, if the reader can overlook the prejudices of an earlier age.”74 The Slappey stories were collected in two books and a wide range of magazines. Kevin Burton Smith, editor of the influential Thrilling Detective Web Site, noted, “The Florian stories, unfortunately, while arguably even more popular in their day than those featuring [Jim] Hanvey, are now more famous for their unflattering and offensive portrayal of African Americans than their historical significance.”75
Cohen’s career might be only a footnote in the history of crime fiction, a reminder of the shameful history of depictions of the Black experience in America by white writers, if it were not for his third significant creation, the detective Jim Hanvey. Hanvey too reflects Cohen’s Southern upbringing, not in his race or even his dialect, but in his small-town ordinariness. Hanvey is also infused with Cohen’s sense of comedy. Deliberately uncouth and without any veneer of sophistication or polish, Hanvey feels real and likable in a way that Cohen’s other characters do not.
“Later in his career, Cohen finally did change with the times,” observed Bruce F. Murphy, in his Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery.76 In the 1940s and 1950s, Cohen wrote crime fiction in a more contemporary style, such as Romance in the First Degree (1944), about a war veteran who investigates a murder in the upper classes of New York, and The Intruder (1955), about a police detective caught up in the murder of a playboy. At the time of his death in 1959, Cohen’s literary career merited a half-page obituary in the New York Times: “Octavus Roy Cohen Dead at 67; Known for Stories of the South. Wrote Dialect Series about Negroes—Also Author of Novels, Mysteries, Films.”
* * *
67 Cohen married the following year and had a son, Octavus Roy Cohen, Jr.
68 According to the FictionMags Index, Cohen wrote 164 short stories, three novelettes, and two articles for the Post. William G. Contento and Phil Stephensen-Payne, eds., FictionMags Index, updated August 25, 2019, http://www.philsp.com/homeville/fmi/0start.htm#TOC.
69 Jon Breen, “A Note on Octavus Roy Cohen,” Mystery*File 46 (November 2004), http://www.mysteryfile.com/cohen/breen.html. Cohen actually created several other series characters: Eric Peters, a railway porter, and two police officers, Lt. Max Gold and Lt. Marty Walsh. Breen’s note also includes a fine bibliography of Cohen’s mystery fiction compiled by Steve Lewis, listing thirty-eight books of Cohen’s that have some crime fiction content.
70 Slappey was clearly a prototype of the stereotypical Black characters of the popular radio show Amos ’n’ Andy, for which Cohen wrote.
71 Quoted in Cohen’s obituary, “Octavus Roy Cohen Dead at 67; Known for Stories of the South,” New York Times, January 7, 1959. Cohen died on January 6 in Los Angeles.
72 In 1920, Cohen’s play Come Seven, starring Earle Foxe as Slappey, ran for seventy-two performances on Broadway.
73 “Octavus Roy Cohen Dead at 67.”
74 William L. DeAndrea, ed., Encyclopedia Mysteriosa: A Comprehensive Guide to the Art of Detection in Print, Film, Radio, and Television (New York: Prentice Hall General Reference, 1994), 68.
75 Kevin Burton Smith, “Jim Hanvey,” Thrilling Detective Web Site, accessed November 2, 2020, http://www.thrillingdetective.com/hanvey.html.
76 New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 1999, 104.
The Dead Letter
An undelivered letter with a cryptic message holds the key to an unsolved murder
When Henry Moreland is found dead on a lonely New York road after a violent storm, it seems he died of natural causes while walking to the home of his betrothed, Eleanor Argyll. An examination of the corpse reveals, however, that he was killed by a single, powerful stab wound. His wallet was untouched, eliminating robbery as the motive—but who would want to murder the well-liked and respected man?
Richard Redfield, an old family frie
nd who harbors a secret love for Eleanor, vows to bring Henry’s killer to justice. Richard soon finds himself out of his element. Together with a legendary detective named Mr. Burton, he embarks on an unsuccessful mission to find the murderer. When suspicion turns to Richard himself, he leaves the family behind and goes to work in the “Dead Letter” office in Washington. Then a mysterious letter from the past turns up, and a new hunt begins…
This twisting tale is the first full-length American detective novel, written under a pseudonym by Metta Victor in the 1860s. It revived American crime fiction, which had languished after Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories of the 1840s. Combining elements of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone and the “sensation” novels popular in England, it opened the doors for generations of American crime writers to follow.
For more Library of Congress Crime Classics, visit: sourcebooks.com
Jim Hanvey, Detective Page 23
