The Big Book of Reel Murders

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by Stories That Inspired Great Crime Films (epub)


  The chief had kind-heartedly arranged that Dorgan was to have a “rest,” that he should be given no work about the farm; and all day long Dorgan had nothing to do but pretend to read, and worry about his children.

  Two men had been assigned to the beat, in succession, since his time; and the second man, though he was a good officer, came from among the respectable and did not understand the surly wistfulness of Little Hell. Dorgan was sure that the man wasn’t watching to lure Matty Carlson from her periodical desire to run away from her decent, patient husband.

  So one night, distraught, Dorgan lowered himself from his window and ran, skulking, stumbling, muttering, across the outskirts and around to Little Hell. He didn’t have his old instinct for concealing his secret patrolling. A policeman saw him, in citizen’s clothes, swaying down his old beat, trying doors, humming to himself. And when they put him in the ambulance and drove him back to the asylum, he wept and begged to be allowed to return to duty.

  Dr. Bristow telephoned to the chief of police, demanding permission to put Dorgan to work, and set him at gardening.

  This was very well indeed. For through the rest of that summer, in the widespread gardens, and half the winter, in the greenhouses, Dorgan dug and sweated and learned the names of flowers. But early in January he began to worry once more. He told the super that he had figured out that with good behavior Polo Magenta would be out of the pen now, and needed looking after. “Yes, yes—well, I’m busy; sometime you tell me all about it,” Dr. Bristow jabbered, “but just this minute I’m very busy.”

  * * *

  —

  One day in mid-January Dorgan prowled uneasily all day long—the more uneasy as a blizzard blew up and the world was shut off by a curtain of weaving snow. He went up to his room early in the evening. A nurse came to take away his shoes and overcoat, and cheerily bid him go to bed.

  But once he was alone he deliberately tore a cotton blanket to strips and wound the strips about his thin slippers. He wadded newspapers and a sheet between his vest and his shirt. He found his thickest gardening cap. He quietly raised the window. He knocked out the light wooden bars with his big fist. He put his feet over the windowsill and dropped into the storm, and set out across the lawn. With his gaunt form huddled, his hands rammed into his coat pockets, his large feet moving slowly, certainly, in their moccasinlike covering of cloth and thin slippers, he plowed through to the street and down toward Little Hell.

  Don Dorgan knew that the blizzard would keep him from being traced by the asylum authorities for a day or two, but he also knew that he could be overpowered by it. He turned into a series of alleys, and found a stable with a snowbound delivery wagon beside it. He brought hay from the stable, covered himself with it in the wagon, and promptly went to sleep. When he awoke the next afternoon the blizzard had ceased and he went on.

  He came to the outskirts of Little Hell. Sneaking through alleys, he entered the back of McManus’s red-light-district garage.

  McManus, the boss, was getting his machines out into the last gasps of the storm, for the street-car service was still tied up, and motors were at a premium. He saw Dorgan and yelled: “Hello there, Don. Where did you blow in from? Ain’t seen you these six months. T’ought you was living soft at some old-folks’ home or other.”

  “No,” said Dorgan, with a gravity which forbade trifling, “I’m a—I’m a kind of watchman. Say, what’s this I hear, young Magenta is out of the pen?”

  “Yes, the young whelp. I always said he was no good, when he used to work here, and—”

  “What’s become of him?”

  “He had the nerve to come here when he got out, looking for a job; suppose he wanted the chanst to smash up a few of my machines too! I hear he’s got a job wiping, at the K.N. roundhouse. Pretty rough joint, but good enough for the likes o’ him. Say, Don, things is slow since you went, what with these dirty agitators campaigning for prohibition—”

  “Well,” said Dorgan, “I must be moseying along, John.”

  Three men of hurried manner and rough natures threw Dorgan out of three various entrances to the roundhouse, but he sneaked in on the tender of a locomotive and saw Polo Magenta at work, wiping brass—or a wraith of Polo Magenta. He was thin, his eyes large and passionate. He took one look at Dorgan, and leaped to meet him.

  “Dad—thunder—you old son of a gun.”

  “Sure! Well, boy, how’s it coming?”

  “Rotten.”

  “Well?”

  “Oh, the old stuff. Keepin’ the wanderin’ boy tonight wanderin’. The warden gives me good advice, and I thinks I’ve paid for bein’ a fool kid, and I pikes back to Little Hell with two bucks and lots of good intentions and—they seen me coming. The crooks was the only ones that welcomed me. McManus offered me a job, plain and fancy driving for guns. I turned it down and looks for decent work, which it didn’t look for me none. There’s a new cop on your old beat. Helpin’ Hand Henry, he is. He gets me up and tells me the surprisin’ news that I’m a desprit young jailbird, and he’s onto me—see; and if I chokes any old women or beats up any babes in arms, he’ll be there with the nippers—see! so I better quit my career of murder.

  “I gets a job over in Milldale, driving a motor-truck, and he tips ’em off I’m a forger and an arson and I dunno what all, and they lets me out—wit’ some more good advice. Same wit’ other jobs.”

  “Effie?”

  “Ain’t seen her yet. But say, Dad, I got a letter from her that’s the real stuff—says she’ll stick by me till her dad croaks, and then come to me if it’s through fire. I got it here—it keeps me from going nutty. And a picture postcard of her. You see, I planned to nip in and see her before her old man knew I was out of the hoosegow, but this cop I was tellin’ you about wises up Kugler, and he sits on the doorstep with the Revolutionary musket loaded up with horseshoes and cobblestones, and so—get me? But I gets a letter through to her by one of the boys.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  “Search me….There ain’t nobody to put us guys next, since you got off the beat, Dad.”

  “I ain’t off it! Will you do what I tell you to?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then listen: You got to start in right here in Northernapolis, like you’re doing, and build up again. They didn’t sentence you to three years but to six—three of ’em here, getting folks to trust you again. It ain’t fair, but it is. See? You lasted there because the bars kep’ you in. Are you man enough to make your own bars, and to not have ’em wished onto you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You are! You know how it is in the pen—you can’t pick and choose your cell or your work. Then listen: I’m middlin’ well off, for a bull—savin’s and pension. We’ll go partners in a fine little garage, and buck John McManus—he’s a crook, and we’ll run him out of business. But you got to be prepared to wait, and that’s the hardest thing to do. Will you?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you get through here, meet me in that hallway behind Mullins’s Casino. So long, boy.”

  “So long, Dad.”

  When Polo came to him in the hallway behind Mullins’s Casino, Dorgan demanded: “I been thinking; have you seen old Kugler?”

  “Ain’t dared to lay an eye on him, Dad. Trouble enough without stirrin’ up more. Gettin’ diplomatic.”

  “I been thinking. Sometimes the most diplomatic thing a guy can do is to go right to the point and surprise ’em. Come on with me.”

  They came into Kugler’s shop, without parley or trembling; and Dorgan’s face was impassive, as befits a patrolman, as he thrust open the door and bellowed “Evenin’!” at the horrified old Jewish scholar and the maid.

  Don Dorgan laid his hands on the counter and spoke.

  “Kugler,” said he, “you’re going to listen to me, because if you don’t, I’ll wreck the works. You’ve s
poiled four lives. You’ve made this boy a criminal, forbidding him a good, fine love, and now you’re planning to keep him one. You’ve kilt Effie the same way—look at the longing in the poor little pigeon’s face! You’ve made me an unhappy old man. You’ve made yourself, that’s meanin’ to be good and decent, unhappy by a row with your own flesh and blood. Some said I been off me nut, Kugler, but I know I been out beyont, where they understand everything and forgive everything—and I’ve learnt that it’s harder to be bad than to be good, that you been working harder to make us all unhappy than you could of to make us all happy.”

  Dorgan’s gaunt, shabby bigness seemed to swell and fill the shop; his voice boomed and his eyes glowed with a will unassailable.

  The tyrant Kugler was wordless, and he listened with respect as Dorgan went on, more gently:

  “You’re a godly man among the sinners, but that’s made you think you must always be right. Are you willing to kill us all just to prove you can’t never be wrong? Man, man, that’s a fiendish thing to do. And oh, how much easier it would be to give way, oncet, and let this poor cold boy creep home to the warmness that he do be longing so for, with the blizzard bitter around him, and every man’s hand ag’in’ him. Look—look at them poor, good children!”

  Kugler looked, and he beheld Polo and Effie—still separated by the chill marble counter—with their hands clasped across it, their eyes met in utter frankness.

  “Vell—” said Kugler wistfully.

  “So!” said Patrolman Dorgan. “Well, I must be back on me beat—at the asylum…There’s things that’d bear watching there!”

  The Letter

  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  THE STORY

  Original publication: Hearst’s International, April 1924; first collected in The Casuarina Tree (London, Heinemann, 1926)

  FAMOUSLY ONE OF THE GREATEST English fiction writers of the twentieth century, William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) was actually born in Paris and his first language was French, learning English only after he moved to Kent to be raised by a strict clergyman uncle when his parents died. He suffered from tuberculosis and a pronounced stammer, a physical affliction he treated autobiographically in his most famous novel, Of Human Bondage (1915), with its club-footed protagonist.

  Although he studied accounting and medicine, qualifying as a physician, Maugham wanted to be a writer and, when his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), was an immediate success, he gave up medicine to be a full-time writer and knew he had made the correct decision when his play, Lady Frederick, triumphed in 1907.

  After his marriage to Lady Wellcome in 1915, he served in the Red Cross and a British ambulance unit in France early in World War I but was soon transferred to the Intelligence Department and traveled to Russia. He also served in World War II with the British Ministry of Information, stationed in Paris. He had bought a villa in southern France in 1928, shortly after his divorce, and made it his permanent home until his death.

  Maugham enjoyed travel and frequently went to the Far East, sometimes to do research for his novels, such as The Moon and Sixpence (1919), based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin, who had gone to live and work on a South Pacific island, and often for the sheer pleasure of the trip. Probably his most famous short story “Rain” (1921, originally published as “Miss Thompson”), is set on an island off the coast of Asia and inspired several film versions, beginning with a 1928 silent titled Sadie Thompson (with Gloria Swanson and Lionel Barrymore), followed by the memorable Rain (1932), with Joan Crawford and Walter Huston, and Miss Sadie Thompson (1953), a semimusical version in 3-D with Rita Hayworth and José Ferrer.

  Set in Malaysia, “The Letter” is based on a real-life incident that occurred in 1911. A headmaster’s wife in Kuala Lumpur was arrested after she shot the manager of a local tin mine when, she claimed, he had come to her house while her husband was away and tried to kiss her. He turned off the lights, she told the courtroom, and when she reached for the light switch to turn it back on, she inadvertently grabbed a revolver and shot him six times. A jury found her guilty but public sympathy was with her, extolling her for protecting her virtue, and she received a pardon, even though the prosecutor presented evidence that she previously had been on intimate terms with her victim.

  Maugham added only one element to the real-life murder, introducing a damning letter that leads to blackmail.

  THE FILM

  Title: The Letter, 1940

  Studio: Warner Brothers

  Director: William Wyler

  Screenwriter: Howard E. Koch

  Producer: Hal B. Wallis

  THE CAST

  • Bette Davis (Leslie Crosbie)

  • Herbert Marshall (Robert Crosbie)

  • James Stephenson (Howard Joyce)

  • Frieda Inescort (Dorothy Joyce)

  • Gale Sondergaard (Mrs. Hammond)

  The plot was too perfect for Hollywood to tinker with it too much and, apart from the very last scene, the screenplay is utterly faithful to Maugham’s story. The Hays Office, formally known as the Production Code Administration, would not permit a murderer to go unpunished so scriptwriter Howard E. Koch added a final scene that punished the wayward wife. Lost to Hollywood censors is the recognition that no one in the Maugham story had any hope of happiness when all was said and done. The film is no darker than the story, simply more obvious.

  The story was successfully adapted for the theater by Maugham, opening both in London and in New York in 1927. In London, Gladys Cooper produced and starred in it, with Nigel Bruce (later famous as Dr. Watson in all the Basil Rathbone–starring Sherlock Holmes films); it enjoyed a sixty-week run with theatrical icon Gerald du Maurier as the director. In the United States, Katharine Cornell starred in the Broadway run of 104 performances. It has since been revived on more than one occasion.

  In addition to the 1940 Bette Davis vehicle, The Letter was also a film in 1929 with Jeanne Eagels as the adulteress/murderer. Herbert Marshall, who appeared as her lover, also was in the 1940 version as the cuckolded husband. Eagels, a great silent film star, died just a few months after the film was shot. Although she was deceased, she nonetheless was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress. The National Board of Review named The Letter one of the Top Ten Films of 1929.

  Just as Jeanne Eagels had died shortly after filming the 1929 version of The Letter, James Stephenson also died within months after filming the 1940 version; he was only fifty-two.

  “The Letter” also has been adapted for television on at least six occasions, the role of Leslie Crosbie being so juicy that major stars have taken the role, including Madeleine Carroll, Sylvia Sidney, Celia Johnson, and Lee Remick. In 1956, William Wyler again directed The Letter, this time as his first television drama; it starred Siobhan McKenna, John Mills, Michael Rennie, and Anna May Wong.

  The story also was a radio staple, most interestingly as sixty-minute dramas on Lux Radio Theatre productions in 1941 and 1944 with Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall starring.

  In a memorable scene from the film, Robert Crosbie, the disillusioned but hopeful husband, tells his cheating wife that he wants to go on as before, if she’ll promise to love him forever. “If you love a person,” he says, “you can forgive anything.”

  Having agreed, and now in his arms, Leslie cries out, “No. With all my heart, I still love the man I killed.”

  The film received numerous awards and nominations. While it did not win an Academy Award, it was nominated for seven: Best Picture, Best Actress in a Leading Role (Bette Davis), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (James Stephenson), Best Director (William Wyler), Best Black-and-White Cinematography (Tony Gaudio), Best Film Editing (Warren Low), and Best Music, Original Score (Max Steiner).

  THE LETTER

  W. Somerset Maugham

  OUTSIDE ON THE QUAY the sun beat fiercely. A st
ream of motors, lorries, and buses, private cars and hirelings, sped up and down the crowded thoroughfare, and every chauffeur blew his horn. Rickshaws threaded their nimble path amid the throng, and the panting coolies found breath to yell at one another; coolies, carrying heavy bales, sidled along with their quick jog-trot and shouted to the passerby to make way. Itinerant vendors proclaimed their wares.

  Singapore is the meeting-place of a hundred peoples, and men of all colors—black Tamils, yellow Chinks, brown Malays, Armenians, Jews, and Bengalis—called to one another in raucous tones. But inside the office of Messrs. Ripley, Joyce, & Naylor it was pleasantly cool; it was dark after the dusty glitter of the street and agreeably quiet after its unceasing din. Mr. Joyce sat in his private room, at the table, with an electric fan turned full on him. He was leaning back, his elbows on the arms of the chair, with the tips of the outstretched fingers of one hand resting neatly against the tips of the outstretched fingers of the other. His gaze rested on the battered volumes of the Law Reports which stood on a long shelf in front of him. On the top of a cupboard were square boxes of japanned tin on which were painted the names of various clients.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Come in.”

  A Chinese clerk, very neat in his white ducks, opened it.

  “Mr. Crosbie is here, sir.”

  He spoke beautiful English, accenting each word with precision, and Mr. Joyce had often wondered at the extent of his vocabulary. Ong Chi Seng was a Cantonese, and he had studied law at Gray’s Inn. He was spending a year or two with Messrs. Ripley, Joyce, & Naylor in order to prepare himself for practice on his own account. He was industrious, obliging, and of exemplary character.

  “Show him in,” said Mr. Joyce.

  He rose to shake hands with his visitor and asked him to sit down. The light fell on him as he did so. The face of Mr. Joyce remained in shadow. He was by nature a silent man, and now he looked at Robert Crosbie for quite a minute without speaking. Crosbie was a big fellow, well over six feet high, with broad shoulders, and muscular. He was a rubber-planter, hard with the constant exercise of walking over the estate and with the tennis which was his relaxation when the day’s work was over. He was deeply sunburned. His hairy hands, his feet in clumsy boots, were enormous, and Mr. Joyce found himself thinking that a blow of that great fist would easily kill the fragile Tamil. But there was no fierceness in his blue eyes. They were confiding and gentle, and his face, with its big, undistinguished features, was open, frank, and honest. But at this moment it bore a look of deep distress. It was drawn and haggard.

 

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