Great Detectives

by Otto Penzler

  Quiller is often introspective, and likely to conclude that “In this trade you grow a protective shell, the years of deceits and betrayals adding to it layer by layer till the day comes when you feel trapped and want to break out and it’s too late, because you know it’s yourself you’ve been betraying and deceiving over all those years. The shell is a part of you; it grows from the inside outwards, like your fingernails.”

  Also, “You don’t do what you do for the sake of your country or world peace, though you kid yourself. You do it to scratch an itch. I’m not talking about the people who do it for the money—they’re just whores. Most of us do it because we don’t get a big enough kick out of pushing a pen or punching the clock or washing the car on Sundays. We want to get outside of all that and live on our own so we can work off our scabby neuroses without getting arrested for it. We want to scratch the itch till it bleeds.”

  Quiller and four other executives at the Bureau have the suffix 9 to their code names. It means they’ve proved themselves reliable under torture. It’s not an award of any kind, but an indication to directors that a man with the 9 suffix is suitable for sending into an area (behind the Iron Curtain, for example) where “implemented interrogation” will be made if he is captured. Quiller’s reaction to this ability to stand torture is straightforward. “Within a couple of hours,” he says, “an efficient interrogator and his team can turn any man into a raving animal if they use the full technique. But they can’t; there’s a breakoff point because the whole idea is that they want information out of you and they know they won’t get it if they’ve gone too far and wrecked the psyche. What you’ve got to do is try not to talk this side of consciousness, because once you’ve flaked out you’re safe till they start again. And if you can do it once, you can do it a dozen times.”

  Quiller is at home with wild animals. He feels a brother to them and knows their ways, their fears. What he calls “mission feel”—the sixth sense of the working executive—is closely related to the instincts of the animal. “Mission feel is never wrong,” he says. “It’s the instinct we develop as we go forward into the dark like an old fox sniffing the wind and catching the scent of things it has smelled before and learned to distrust. The forefoot is sensitive, poised and held still above the patch of unknown ground where the next flicker of a nerve can spring a trap.”

  His attitude toward women stems from his fear of people, his need to feel cut off and isolated. He chooses women who are themselves solitary, reserved, each in her own way a lone wolverine with some hurt to heal, a past to forget, or a lie to live. Some of them are seeking their own identity, as Quiller himself may be, and he finds himself attracted to them as reflections of his own enigma. They are lean and have quietness, are watchful, talking little, turning their heads slowly to appraise a newcomer, withdrawing with the speed of a spring if their approach is too immediate.

  Quiller is versed in psychology, sleep dynamics, the nervous system and its behavior under stress. His fast-driving technique is based squarely on a knowledge of what happens to a car when it’s pushed to the limit. He is aware of the target-finding values of positive and negative feedback as he makes his way through a mission. He is good enough at code-breaking sometimes to intercept a signal from an opposition cell without having to ask London.

  Knowing Quiller to be difficult, obstinate, obdurate, and perverse, the directors at the Bureau handle him in the most appropriate way. They seldom offer him a mission outright, because it would give him the chance of refusing it out of sheer bloody-mindedness. They lead him into it with a carrot, working up his interest indirectly. “I understand,” they’ll say, for example, “they’ve landed Smythe with a real stinker, and frankly I don’t think he can handle it.” Or they’ll just tell him this one “isn’t for him” without saying why, so that he feels deprived of an important mission.

  “Of course, this kind of job isn’t really in your field.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not much of a mission. Everyone else has refused it.”

  “Oh, have they?”

  Quiller understands this technique. “They know,” he says, “they’ve got to look for the man who stands facing the wrong way in a bus queue to show he doesn’t really want a bus, the man who always wants the window open when everyone else wants it shut, the awkward fellow who’s going to kill himself one day trying to prove he’s bullet-proof. And if they want him for a dirty, rotten, stinking job that he’d normally throw back in their faces, all they’ve got to do is tell him that everyone else has refused it.”

  An executive can refuse to accept a mission for any one of a dozen reasons: it doesn’t seem to fit his particular talents, it means working in extreme heat (Africa, say) and he prefers extreme cold (or vice versa), he doesn’t get along well with this particular director or director in the field, he’s too well known behind the Iron Curtain, and so forth. But if he accepts a mission, he’s totally committed, even to the point of using a cyanide capsule.

  The executive is told as little as possible about the background to a mission. He needs to go in with a clear head, uncluttered by minor details or major (often political) considerations.

  Quiller is aware of this. “You can always refuse a mission,” he says, “it’s in the contract. But you can’t ever judge the odds against coming out alive and you can’t even tell whether you’re due for a rough ride or a great big routine yawn because they won’t give you any information. We accept that. We know we’d be scared stiff by the size and scope of a big operation if we could see the overall picture, and all we want is our own little box of matches to play with in the corner while the boys at the top work out how to stop the whole house from going up if we make a mistake.”

  Most missions require a cover for the executive, with a cover name. During his clearance, therefore, from the Bureau, he is given his cover name when he departs on an operation. Quiller seldom carries out a mission under his code name; he becomes Mr. Gage, or Mr. Longstreet, and so on. The cover name is even used in signals from Control (the London office) to Local Control (the operational base in the field) unless absolute secrecy can be relied on. Thus, any shadow executive working on a mission is already two removes from his true identity. Although this is mere formal security, he is bound to feel nameless, rootless, and his identity tends to become associated with the mission in hand rather than with his past as a person. This is reflected in most executives’ attitude toward the Bureau. Despite the grandiose title of “shadow executives” (probably coined by the hierarchy at the time when rat catchers became “rodent operatives”) these men know what they really are. As Quiller puts it: “We’re ferrets, to be put down a hole.”

  Quiller prefers working alone, on solo missions, accepting a director in the field where necessary but never working alongside other executives.

  Once he has left his base and begins work in the field, he is usually at risk. If he is captured and interrogated, or if he is exposed to the opposition’s view (perhaps holed up in a building or on a ship and unable to leave), or if there is the slightest risk of his giving away his base and his director in the field, he will cut himself loose and take the consequences—just as any other executive would. If he is slow to do this, the director will do it for him.

  Quiller once had to brief a recruited agent: “You’ve got to learn to cross the line and live your life outside society, shut yourself away from people, cut yourself off. Values are different out there. Let a man show friendship for you and you’ve got to deny him, mistrust him, suspect him, and nine times out of ten you’ll be wrong but it’s the tenth time that’ll save you from a dirty death in a cheap hotel because you’d opened the door to a man you thought was a friend. Out there you’ll be alone and you’ll have no one you can trust, not even the people who are running you. Not even me. If you make the wrong kind of mistake at the wrong time in the wrong place, and it looks like you’re fouling up the mission or exposing the Bureau, they’ll throw you to the dogs. And so will I.
”

  This situation is accepted by the executives. So is the fact that they are expendable if the crunch comes or a wheel falls off. The executive is cut loose the instant he presents a risk to the network, to the Bureau. The working phrase is: “The mission is more important than the man.”

  Inspector Schmidt

  George Bagby

  SOME DETECTIVES HAVE DIFFICULTY keeping pace with their prey because they lack physical strength, or prowess, or even basic fitness. Some are prisoners to precise police procedure and never deviate from it, either because of lack of imagination or unwillingness to break the rules. Some are lazy; others prefer to chase women or drink or gamble. Some detectives blunder into solutions because they are not smart enough to resolve a case logically; others run the risk of eggs Benedict on their faces because of unchecked arrogance. None of these shortcomings afflicts Inspector Schmidt, Chief of Homicide of the New York City Police Department. He has one flaw, and one only: his feet. Just as Nero Wolfe has the most famous girth in mystery fiction, and Hercule Poirot the most illustrious grey cells, Schmidt has the most notable feet.

  George Bagby is a pseudonym of the prolific and erudite Aaron Marc Stein, author of more than ninety detective novels. As Hampton Stone, he also writes about Jeremiah A. “Gibby” Gibson. Under his own name, he tells about Tim Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt in one series and about Matt Erridge in another.

  After graduating from Princeton with a degree in classics and archaeology, Stein worked as a journalist for more than a decade. During World War II, he served as a cryptanalyst of Chinese and Japanese codes. Born in New York in 1906, he still resides in Manhattan.

  Inspector Schmidt

  by George Bagby

  IN RECOUNTING THE FACTS OF INSPECTOR Schmidt’s birth, I might be happier if I could say they were ordinary. That, however, would be to tamper with the truth. So, if any reader concludes from the circumstances of the birth of the chief of homicide that the inspector is an exotic, it is only to be hoped that the rest of this account may serve to erase that erroneous impression.

  In this century most people who are born into an urban environment are born in hospitals. Inspector Schmidt was not. He was conceived in a hospital, but he was born in my bathroom. The year was 1934 and I was hospitalized. Kind friends came to call and, since people I know always do the correct thing, each of them brought me a detective story. It must have been that their kindness and goodwill far exceeded their knowledge of the literature because none of the books they brought me was much good. With appalling unanimity they had missed the masterworks of the genre.

  As a result, in the space of three hospital days I read a dozen or more indifferent to unconscionable detective stories. Naturally enough I came up for air muttering: “I could write a better one with both my mind and my imagination tied behind my back.” I was not prepared to say I could do better with both hands tied behind my back since I have always found pencils, pens, and typewriters quite difficult enough to manipulate even with unfettered hands.

  Since in actuality both my mind and my imagination were far too vigorous to be tied down and I was too indulgent of them to attempt it, Inspector Schmidt was conceived at a time when both were being given full play. After a period of gestation—not nearly so long as the customary nine months—one morning when I was only a few months out of the hospital I was shaving and there he was in full occupation of my theretofore empty mind. Lest anyone think that this term of less than nine months is too peculiar, it is well to remember that for a great man there is a classical precedent for such haste. Was not Macduff untimely ripped from his mother’s womb?

  My bathroom was familiar territory. I can vouch for it. There was no mother about, not even a womb. Inspector Schmidt, nevertheless, was born that morning in my bathroom. I don’t know where he came from and he insists that he doesn’t know either.

  “How would I know?” he says. “You were there before I arrived and I wasn’t. If you don’t know, who should? Is it my fault that you’re a lousy witness?”

  This, by the way, is one of Inspector Schmidt’s characteristics. He’s a master of the affectionate insult. As his closest friend, I can testify to that. I bear the scars. But back we go to his birth. I was working up a nice lather and he wasn’t there. I applied the lather to my whiskers and there he was, fully grown and fully panoplied. He resembled no one I had ever known. He was sui generis.

  Again if this mode of birth should seem odd, remember that here, too, there is the classical precedent. The goddess Athena’s birth was much the same. She sprang fully grown and fully panoplied out of the forehead of Zeus, so why not Inspector Schmidt, although no goddess he, out of a cloud of lather?

  If the inspector has a given name, he has never made me privy to it. I can only assume that it may be something like Percy or Obadiah and as a schoolboy he had suffered such tortures because of it that by the time he appeared in my bathroom he was permanently traumatized into keeping it well concealed. On army records a man might be listed as John NMI Doe. That doesn’t stand for John Nehemiah Murgatroyd Ichabod Doe. It stands for John No Middle Initial Doe. If the inspector had ever been in the army, they would have had him listed as NFI NMI Schmidt—No First Initial No Middle Initial Schmidt.

  In dealing with the inspector’s history, one is confronted with insuperable metaphysical problems. When a man is born fully grown and at the moment of his birth he has already risen through the ranks from rookie patrolman to the exalted station of inspector, chief of homicide, N.Y.P.D., he has obviously had a history and it cannot be more than that mere pre-parturition fetal history that is common to all the rest of us.

  Furthermore at that place and time of his birth—my bathroom in 1934—he was already in the prime of life. In all the years that have passed since 1934, however, he has not aged by even a single gray hair or even one arterial plaque. Since he has never been to Florida, it cannot be said that he succeeded where Ponce de León failed and that he found the Fountain of Eternal Youth. I don’t know where he found it and he is adamant in his refusal to share the secret, but it is obvious that he did find the Fountain of Eternal Prime of Life.

  The inspector is a native New Yorker. We can narrow it down even closer than that. He is a native of Manhattan Island and on Manhattan Island he grew up and went to school. Do not assume from this that he is any pale and puny city flower. He is able-bodied, well muscled, and physically tough. He earned his splendid physical development playing in the city streets where a ball that breaks a window is an automatic home run and the runner needs to be very fast if he’s not to have that broken window taken out of his hide. In football season the city-street quarterback cannot worry about any quarter-ton of defensive linebackers bearing down on him. He has to watch out for the ten-ton truck. Playing against that kind of opposition toughens a kid. He grows into a man who can handle himself.

  Physically, however, the inspector does have one weakness and he has never made a secret of it. His feet hurt. The pain is not unremitting. He can gain relief any time he is in a situation that permits him to shed his shoes. He never misses an opportunity. Inspector Schmidt goes shod only when he must. He attributes this problem of his to the beat-pounding he did at the beginning of his departmental career when he was a rookie patrolman. He served his patrolman time back in those dark ages when the policeman was a pedestrian presence in the streets. He walked his beat. He didn’t ride around in a squad car. He met the citizenry, lawful and unlawful, face to face and toe to toe. It was then that he learned to know people and to judge human character. It was then that he learned how to deal with people.

  It was then also that he did permanent damage to his feet. Here, too, you must be reminded, there is a classical precedent to be cited. Had not Achilles the one area in which he was vulnerable and, like the inspector’s, was not his problem pedal? The resemblance ends there. Achilles had his temper on a short fuse. Inspector Schmidt is a patient man. He is implacable in his pursuit of killers, but he never flies off the hand
le.

  Early in our association he was on a case where a fleeing fiend took advantage of one of those times when the inspector had his shoes off. As the dastardly sadist fled, he sprinkled carpet tacks in his wake and with the aid of that vicious device made his escape. It was, of course, only a temporary escape. Inspector Schmidt eventually did catch up with him.

  I cannot say that, so far as I have been able to observe, the inspector ever since has been more cautious about watching where he is putting his feet down, but for one reason or another it has never happened again. It may be that the word has been passed among the ungodly that it’s not worth the cost of the carpet tacks. It will stop Inspector Schmidt only temporarily.

  One might think the inspector would envy those young patrolmen of this latter day who can cover their beats sitting down as they ride about in the squad cars. He doesn’t. In the first place he is incapable of envy. There’s never been any of that in the man. Also he is equipped with a mind that in all things moves straight from cause to effect. He foresees the day when those young patrolmen are young patrolmen no longer and in the prime of life they will find it painful to sit down. The inspector believes in the law and for him that includes the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Everything wears out. Everything breaks down. Something’s got to give.

  There are, of course, those who say that walking a beat had nothing to do with it. The world, they say, is full of fuzz and former fuzz, men who have nevertheless gone through life with their shoes on. These detractors would have it believed that it is a simple matter of Inspector Schmidt’s being too big for his boots. This silly canard, however, must be considered in terms of the source from whence it comes. Are you prepared to take as authoritative the word of some killer the inspector has brought to book?