Great Detectives

by Otto Penzler

  Most of them were about the “babes in the studio apartment.” In retrospect, the “babes” seems to me unbearably cute. It was also inaccurate. We were both experienced newspaper reporters, Frances much more experienced than I. But we were babes in Manhattan and had fallen into the habit of eating. The Sun Rays pieces helped us sustain the habit. They also helped me, finally, to get a job on the city staff of the Sun.

  The “babes” were the Norths in embryo. And the time was fifty years ago. You could buy twenty-five cents’ worth of stew meat and make it do for two dinners. If, of course, the stew didn’t spoil between meals: we had no refrigeration in the studio.

  I kept on writing North stories while I was doing rewrite, and covering murder trials, on the Sun. We seemed to spend more than our combined salaries, although by then Frances had found a job more suited to her skills, and somewhat better paid. The New Yorker kept on buying. And we both, from time to time, read detective stories—mystery novels, novels of suspense, whatever publishers care to call them. (My own preference is for “detective stories,” or the variants which I think of as “chases.” Chases are more likely to become one-shots in magazines, or did before general magazines shrank so drastically in size and, of course, in number.)

  It was Frances who first decided to write a detective story of her own. For several days her typewriter clicked happily. Then it stopped clicking. Then she came to me. There was one point with which she was having a little trouble, and perhaps I could help.

  I read the dozen or so pages and it seemed to me to start very well. Then there was a scene, obviously crucial. A rowboat, apparently with nobody in it, was crossing a lake in the moonlight. I recognized the lake; we were renting a summer weekend cabin on just such a lake.

  The rowboat came ashore. There was a body lying in it.

  “Fine,” I said. “Very good scene. Foreboding. Only, with only this dead man in it, what made the boat move? You say it was a still night; no wind to blow it ashore. So?”

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s the point I’m having trouble with. I thought maybe you could help. After all, you were in the navy.”

  I had been. On a battleship which had spent most of 1918 in what was then the Brooklyn Navy Yard. New engines were being installed. With new engines she could move herself. In fact, she did move while I was still aboard. Across water in the yard and, with a considerable bang, into a pier. U.S.S. North Dakota managed, later, to steam to a drydock for junking.

  None of this seemed to have much to do with a rowboat, occupied only by the dead, moving across a quiet lake under a full moon.

  Frances was disappointed. I promised her we would work on it.

  We did work on it. And we got nowhere. I still think about it now and then. I still get nowhere.

  But then we got the idea of collaborating on a mystery, without the magical boat, but with Mr. and Mrs. North, already established characters.

  The way we worked together, on that and subsequent books in what became a series, was to have story conferences. Who will we kill this time? Male or female? And who will do the killing, and why?

  We would talk things out, making notes, coming up—usually slowly—with ideas, each of us accepting or rejecting the other’s notions.

  After some hours of this, each of us would type up a synopsis of the book and of individual scenes in it. We would name the characters, which is often a tricky business. We would, finally, jumble it all together. Then I would write the story, drawing on our outlines and my experience, not very extensive, as a police reporter. And also my experience in covering murder trials, which was much greater. (Hall-Mills, Snyder-Gray and others celebrated in the now-distant past. Newspapers went all out for trials in those days. Some rented houses to lodge their covering staffs. The Sun made do with three of us and now and then, as in the Browning separation suit, with only two.)

  I did all the writing on all our books. Frances summed it up neatly in one speaking appearance we made together: “I think up interesting characters and Dick kills them off.”

  (The Norths themselves almost got killed off before, as detectives, they were ever born. Somebody, and I am afraid it was the late George Bye, my agent and close friend, suggested that they be renamed—perhaps become the Souths, or maybe the Wests.

  It would be too much to say that by then the Norths had a following. But they were known to New Yorker readers. The suggestion that this perhaps minimal advantage be thrown away was hooted down, mostly by me, but also by the editors.)

  When Frances died very suddenly and I kept on writing, several reviewers searched diligently for change in our style. One or two found it, which I thought very astute of them.

  I wrote no more North stories after Frances’s death, partly because, in my mind, she had always been Pamela North; partly because the spontaneity seemed to be ebbing out of them.

  People used to ask me what Pam and Jerry looked like. I could never tell them. I have always avoided detailed physical descriptions of characters. It is better, it seems to me, to let readers form their own conceptions. (This attitude of mine may stem from the days when I was a boy and my mother read Dickens to me. She read from heavy volumes of an edition set two columns to the page in six-point type. There were sketches of the characters. None of them ever looked remotely like the people I had learned to know so intimately from Dickens’s words.)

  So Inspector Heimrich is a big man, who thinks he looks like a hippopotamus; Lieutenant Shapiro is tall and thin. He wears gray suits which need pressing and has a long sad face. Readers can take it from there.

  They have taken Pam North a good many places. Nobody ever seemed to care much about what Jerry looked like. When the collection of North stories was published in England, the publishers decided they needed to be sketched as chapter headings. They were stolid-looking characters. Pam was matronly; Jerry smoked a pipe. Neither was in the least what I had, vaguely, imagined.

  I suppose I had thought, insofar as I thought of it at all, that Pam was small and quick and blond. I had no quarrel with the casting of her in either the play or the television series. Either Peggy Conklin in the play or Barbara Britton in the TV series was all right with me. (During rehearsals of Owen Davis’s play, Miss Conklin used to crouch in the wings, for all the world like a runner preparing for the hundred-yard dash, and make her entrances at a runner’s speed. Which was, to my mind, entirely appropriate.) Gracie Allen, in the movie, seemed to me a triumph of miscasting.

  Pam’s mind is another matter. It seemed to me to glint. Its logic was darting, now and then bewildering but always acute. The female mind is often like that. Owen Davis once told me that Pam North was what every well-married man likes to think his wife is.

  I have been most lucky to be twice married to women with minds like that, which is obviously more than any man deserves. Men plod their ways on paths of logic, and laboriously reach conclusions to find women sitting on them, patient as they wait for laggards.

  Men like to call this superior mental alacrity “womanly intuition.”

  Patrick Petrella

  Michael Gilbert

  IT IS DIFFICULT TO write espionage fiction with any degree of authenticity, but when Michael Gilbert chronicled the adventures of counterintelligence agents Daniel Calder and Samuel Behrens in Game Without Rules (1967), Ellery Queen selected it for Queen’s Quorum—the list of the 125 most important books of detective/crime short stories. Queen thought it, after Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, the best volume of spy stories ever written.

  It is perhaps only slightly less difficult to write police procedurals with any degree of authenticity (the N.Y.P.D., for example, being a tiny bit more open than the CIA). But when Michael Gilbert wrote Blood and Judgment, in 1959, his first novel about Patrick Petrella, it was selected as one of the year’s best mysteries by Anthony Boucher.

  It is not easy to create a memorable series character, but Michael Gilbert is the creator of novels about Inspector Hazelrigg, as well as the gentlemen noted above
.

  The versatile and accomplished Gilbert, 65, writes while commuting from his home and family in Kent to his full-time legal practice in Lincoln’s Inn. At one time the legal adviser to Raymond Chandler, the English solicitor/author drew up the will of the great mystery writer. Michael Gilbert’s daughter, Harriett, has also published highly acclaimed mystery novels in recent years.

  Patrick Petrella

  by Michael Gilber

  WHEN LIEUTENANT OF POLICE Gregorio Petrella married Mirabel Trentham-Foster, their acquaintances were more than surprised, they were positively aghast. They predicted disaster; and if not disaster, rapid disillusionment and separation. The two persons concerned confounded these prophets. They lived together in love and amity, and have continued to do so until this day.

  The use, in the previous sentence, of the word “acquaintances” rather than “friends” was deliberate. Both of them were solitary by nature. This may have helped to cement their happiness. When two solitary-minded people find each other their union can be very firm.

  At the time of his marriage Gregorio was a lieutenant in the political branch of the Spanish police, the equivalent, in England, of the Special Branch. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that he spent most of his working life keeping General Franco alive. He carried out his duties efficiently, not out of any love of El Caudillo, or even of any particular sympathy with his policies, but because it was his job, and one which he was technically well equipped to do.

  For one of Gregorio’s particular accomplishments, uncommon in a Spaniard, was that he was a linguist, bilingual in Spanish and French, competent in Arabic and English. This was useful since most of the hopeful conspiracies aimed at the removal of the head of the Spanish state had their origins abroad. A lot of his work took him into the country of the Basques and across the Pyrenees into Southern France. Sometimes he went further afield: to Tangiers, to Sicily and to Beirut. It was in Egypt that he found Miss Trentham-Foster. She was attempting a painting of the pyramids.

  She had already torn up three versions in disgust, and said to the friendly young Spaniard who had been watching her, “They all look so damnably conventional.” Gregorio considered the matter, and said, “Might it improve them, if you painted the pyramids lying on their sides? Or even upside down?”

  They were married three months later. Patrick was their only son. His upbringing accorded with his parentage. For the first eight years of his life in Spain (a country democratic with children, rigidly autocratic with adults) he spent his time running around with other boys of his own age from all classes of the community, learning things which horrified his mother as much as they amused his father. On his eighth birthday she put her small foot down. Coming as she did from an English professional family she had irreversible ideas about the proper education of male children. Capitán Gregorio saw that Mirabel’s mind was made up and gave way. His pay was not large, but fortunately there was family money on both sides. Prospectuses were sent for. The rival claims of different preparatory schools were carefully examined and the small Patrick was launched into the traditional educational system of the English middle and upper classes.

  With such an upbringing he might have found it difficult to adapt himself to boarding-school life, and it is reasonable to suppose that he was, to start with, fairly miserable; but there were factors in his favor. His temperament was, for the most part, sunny and equable. On the other hand, when he lost his temper, he lost it thoroughly; and he knew how to fight. He had not altogether wasted his time with the small banditti of the slums of Madrid. His methods might be unorthodox, but they were effective.

  By the time that he stepped off the other end of the educational escalator at the age of seventeen there was nothing except the jet blackness of his hair and a slight darkness of his skin to distinguish him from any other public schoolboy.

  At this point his father took a hand, and Patrick went, first, to the American University in Beirut, where he learned to speak and read Arabic; then to a college of rather peculiar Further Education in Cairo, where he learned, among other things, how to pick locks.

  His own ambitions had hardly changed since the age of eight. On his twenty-first birthday he joined the ranks of the Metropolitan Police as a constable. A slight difficulty, arising out of the question of his nationality, was overcome through Colonel Gregorio’s personal friendship with the then assistant commissioner. After he had completed his training at Peel House, Patrick’s first posting was to the North London Division of Highside, and it was about his experiences here that the first stories were written.

  It will be appreciated that the protagonist of a fictional series differs in a number of respects from his counterpart in real life. He is not born; he springs into being, mature, competent, and armed at all points to deal with the first problem his creator has seen fit to face him with. (“Oh, damn!” said Lord Peter Wimsey at Piccadilly Circus. “Hi! driver.”) Such autogenesis has its dangers, even for so meticulous a plotter as Miss Sayers. A whole literature has sprung up in an attempt to reconcile the details of the earlier life of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson.

  There is an equally important matter, which afflicts real and fictional characters alike, the matter of growing older. If Hercule Poirot really had retired from the Belgian Police Force in 1904, how old was he on his last appearance?

  It may be true that readers, on the whole, care little for these niceties. For them their favorite characters live forever in a fifth dimension where time does not wither nor custom stale. It is, however, worth noticing one point. Just as people believe that exterior circumstances occurring at the time of a child’s conception (a period of happiness, a sudden shock, the conjunction of the planets or the phases of the moon) can affect the infant’s whole character thereafter, so can quite trivial occurrences on the occasion of his first public appearance affect, for better or for worse, a character destined for a long fictional life.

  The fictional Patrick Petrella was conceived in church. The moment of his conception is as clearly fixed in my mind as though it had happened yesterday, not twenty-five years ago. It was a drowsy summer evening and the preacher had reached what appeared to be only the midpoint of his sermon. It was not an inspired address, and I turned, as I sometimes do in such circumstances, to the hymn book for relief. It opened on the lines of Christina Rosetti, “Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I. But when the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by.” A commonplace thought, given great effect by the rhythm and placing of the words. Then—“Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you. But when the leaves hang trembling, the wind is passing through.”

  And there, quite suddenly, it was. A scene, complete in every last detail. A working-class family, composed of wife and children, sitting in their front room, being talked to by a visitor (parson? social worker? policeman?) but remaining totally unresponsive to his efforts. Answering in monosyllables. Trembling. Heads bowed down. Why? Because they know, but their visitor does not, that there is a monster in the back room. Their father, a violent criminal, had escaped that day from prison and is hiding there. Certainly heads would hang and limbs be trembling. It is at that moment that their visitor (he is now quite definitely a policeman, and a youngster at that) recalls the lines of the poem and realizes the truth. He bursts into the back room, and tackles the intruder, who gets the better of him, and escapes. Pursuit. Final capture.

  In that short sequence, which cannot have lasted for more than a few seconds, a complete character was encapsulated. A young policeman, in his first posting (this was automatically North London, since we had lived in Highgate before migrating to rural Kent), sufficiently interested in his job, and in the people involved in it, to visit the wife of a man who was serving a prison sentence; sufficiently acute to notice the unnatural behavior of the woman and her normally rowdy children; sufficiently imaginative to deduce the reason for a single, furtive glance in the direction of the kitchen door. Courageous enough to go for the man, not nearly s
trong enough to overpower him, but with sufficient tenacity to continue the chase after he had been roughly handled; above all, an unusual young man, who read and could quote poetry.

  Most police work was knowledge; knowledge of an infinity of small, everyday facts, unimportant by themselves, deadly when taken together. Nevertheless, Petrella retained an obstinate conviction that there were other things as well, deeper things and finer things; colours, shapes and sounds of absolute beauty, unconnected with the world of small people in small houses in grey streets. And while in one pocket of his old raincoat he might carry Moriarty’s Police Law, in the other would lie, dog-eared with use, the Golden Treasury of Palgrave.

  “She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies” said Petrella, and “That car’s been there a long time. If it’s still there when I come back it might be worth looking into.”

  Almost everything that happened afterwards was as traceable to that first conception as is the character of a real person to the vagaries of his parents and the accidents of the nursery and the schoolroom.

  Other things were added later, of course.

  Why was he called Petrella? A foolish question. Why are you called Gubbins? Because it was your father’s name. Why such an odd name? Because his father was a foreigner. Then why Patrick? Because his mother was an Englishwoman.

  It was this dichotomy which produced the two opposite strands in his character. His father was a professional policeman, who carried out a job which was not always agreeable in a totally professional manner. In such a situation, the end might be held to justify the means. At the same time, since he was a political policeman, it was inevitable that he would, from time to time, question the motives and the character of the people who gave him his orders.