The Complete Cases of the Marquis of Broadway, Volume 1

by John Lawrence

  The Complete Cases of the Marquis of Broadway, Volume 1

  by

  John Lawrence

  Introduction by

  Ed Hulse

  Altus Press • 2014

  Copyright Information

  © 2014 Altus Press

  Publication History:

  “Meet the Marquis: John Lawrence’s Greatest Creation” appears here for the first time. Copyright © 2014 Ed Hulse. All Rights Reserved.

  “Broadway Malady” originally appeared in the February 1937 issue of Dime Detective magazine.

  “Live Man’s Shoes” originally appeared in the August 1937 issue of Dime Detective magazine.

  “Escape Mechanism” originally appeared in the October 1937 issue of Dime Detective magazine.

  “Natural Killer” originally appeared in the December 1937 issue of Dime Detective magazine.

  “Boomerang Blastout” originally appeared in the February 1938 issue of Dime Detective magazine.

  “Body About Town” originally appeared in the April 1938 issue of Dime Detective magazine.

  “Witness! Witness!” originally appeared in the June 1938 issue of Dime Detective magazine.

  “Twelve Morticians Named Green” originally appeared in the August 1938 issue of Dime Detective magazine.

  “Death in Round Numbers” originally appeared in the December 1938 issue of Dime Detective magazine.

  Copyright © 2014 by Argosy Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

  THE MARQUIS OF BROADWAY is a trademark owned by Argosy Communications, Inc.

  Published by arrangement with Argosy Communications, Inc.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Designed by Matthew Moring/Altus Press

  Special Thanks to Joel Frieman, Paul Herman, Ed Hulse, Everard P. Digges LaTouche, Rob Preston & Ray Riethmeier.

  Meet the Marquis: John Lawrence’s Greatest Creation

  Ed Hulse

  TO MANY readers of the great Popular Publications pulp Dime Detective, the magazine’s appeal derived from its variegated assortment of criminal investigators, both amateur and professional. In addition to the customary hard-boiled private eyes, one could find a doctor (Frederick C. Davis’s Carter Cole), a bookie (T. T. Flynn’s Mr. Maddox), a cab driver (John K. Butler’s Steve Midnight), a tattoo artist (William E. Barrett’s Needle Mike), a bail bondsman (Norbert Davis’s “Bail Bond” Dodd), and any number of newspaper reporters. Actual police detectives were in the minority; presumably they lacked sufficient color or eccentricity demanded of the periodical’s sleuths by editor Kenneth S. White. But of this latter group one stood head and shoulders above the others: John Lawrence’s Marquis of Broadway.

  Dubbed mystery fiction’s “king of the unremembered” by historian Francis M. Nevins, Lawrence sold regularly to Black Mask, Dime Detective, and other crime pulps published during the Thirties and Forties, and he frequently rated billing on their covers. But despite the relatively recent renewal of interest in hard-boiled detective yarns of that Golden Age, he remains one of the genre’s lesser-known figures, virtually ignored by authors of reference books on the subject.

  John Frederick Brock Lawrence was born in Windsor, Ontario on February 4, 1907. His parents divorced when he was young and Lawrence was raised by his mother. After completing his education, he moved from Ontario to New York City and brought her along. Lawrence quickly obtained a job on Wall Street—not especially difficult to do during those Roaring Twenties—and reportedly earned a great deal of money before suddenly finding himself jobless in the wake of the catastrophic 1929 stock-market crash. With no other options immediately open to him, the still-ambitious young Canadian took up fiction writing.

  Lawrence had the good fortune to come along just as two young pulp editors, Harry Steeger and Harold Goldsmith, were starting their own line of rough-paper magazines after pooling their meager resources and obtaining a line of credit. Popular Publications began in the fall of 1930 with four titles, one of which—Detective Action Stories—published Lawrence’s first two stories: “Private Enemy Number One” (October 1931) and “The White Eye” (November 1931). The circulation of Detective Action Stories stubbornly refused to grow as expected, a failure Steeger eventually attributed to the magazine’s cover price of 20 cents. He launched Dime Detective the same month that Lawrence’s second yarn saw print in Detective Action. Initially edited by Rogers Terrill, the new sheet offered tales of similar quality for half the price. Dime Detective was an instantaneous success, and Lawrence joined its roster of contributors in April 1932 with “The Scarlet Comet.” Over the next ten years he would place 50 stories with the magazine. His earliest series characters for Dime Detective were New York-based private eyes Sam Beckett and Cass Blue, but they got lost in the shuffle after he introduced a lone-wolf police detective named Drago in “Murder by Magic” (May 1936). The swarthy, taciturn, nattily attired Drago was less a crime solver than he was an avenging angel, administering vigilante justice from behind a badge. He shot and slugged his way through four ultra-violent adventures before being displaced by Lawrence’s final and greatest creation for Dime Detective.

  “Broadway Malady” (February 1937) introduced NYPD Lieutenant Martin Marquis and the officers of his hand-picked Broadway Squad, who were described by Francis M. Nevins as “not only the most vicious group of cops in [pulp] literature, they support a system in their own image, ruthless and tyrannical almost beyond imagining. With 22 legalized murderers under his control, Marquis’s job is ‘to rule half the city’s thieves,’ or, to be more precise, the other half of the city’s thieves.”

  Marty is trim and dapper, although slight of frame, having a round and weathered face with deep-set blue eyes. In marked contrast to the average plainclothes officer, he dresses like one of New York’s “swells,” generally showing up at crime scenes clad in smartly angled derby hat, black silk scarf, black kid gloves and shoes, dark suit, and ankle-length black Chesterfield coat. He looks, in fact, like Hollywood’s idea of a gangster, and Lawrence often makes him behave like one.

  Again from Nevins: “Although he thinks of himself as a polished and quiet man of culture, his immaculate appearance and good taste are no more than a veneer, poorly concealing the brutal and insecure mugg from Avenue A who worships power with the intensity of a fanatic. The man who enjoys being mistaken for a vice-president, who supports a widowed mother and two sisters in Brooklyn and visits them once a month, who has had his Central Park West apartment redecorated ‘in proper old oak and leather’ like an English gentleman’s den, is nothing but a gangster with a badge.”

  The Marquis surrounds himself with like-minded subordinates. Members of the Broadway Squad share his casual morality and frequently abuse their authority not only for financial gain but personal satisfaction as well. Hiding behind badges they dish out frequent beatings to lesser crooks who’ve run afoul of the Squad. Some of Marty’s men have unsavory backgrounds: They’ve taken bribes, robbed banks, and framed malefactors against whom they couldn’t find evidence that would stand up in court. Indeed, they repeatedly show contempt for the judicial system and, without regard for legal niceties, dispense such punishment as they deem appropriate on the city’s mean streets. The Marquis and his Broadway Squad assert their authority openly, moving quickly and decisively against those who challenge their supremacy.

  In “Broadway Malady” (February 1937), Marquis warns politically connected gambler Frankie May to lay off young Jerry Lyle when the latter falls for glamorous dancer Dori
nne, whom Frankie wants for himself. The gambler brazenly defies the Marquis and has thugs first beat and then shoot Jerry. What’s more, he has one of his buddies in Police Headquarters warn Marty to stay away.

  The Marquis reacts to this challenge against his authority by enlisting the aid of a notorious Chicago kidnaper known in the underworld for killing his victims if his ransom demands are not met precisely. He then engineers a “snatch” of Frankie and prevents the gambler’s second-in-command from paying the ransom in time. The subsequent murder is carried out without any hint of Marty’s involvement and the Broadway Squad’s curiously defined prestige is restored.

  That prestige is again undermined in the second series entry, “Live Man’s Shoes” (August 1937), in which the Marquis is framed for murder. As Lawrence describes the situation, Marty is less concerned with beating the rap than he is with losing power:

  It was the first time the Marquis had been framed. Rage had him speechless—rage and cold, instant perception of what he was up against. This was cool, devastating challenge to the one thing that kept the Broadway Squad alive—prestige. Someone had dared thumb his nose at the Marquis of Broadway. He had to smash the killer mercilessly enough so that snickers would have no chance to start along the Stem.

  The infuriated Marty takes over the murder investigation and intimidates any and all officials that could thwart his plans by interfering. (“If you get in my hair in any way, shape or form,” he threatens an assistant District Attorney, “I’ll have you beaten up.”) Amazingly, the master-mind of this particular frame turns out to be a minor member of his own squad. Without evidence that would hold up in court, Marty coolly lures the traitor into a death trap manned by other Squad members.

  The Marquis of Broadway series is studded with such sequences of cold, unflinching brutality. It’s quite remarkable, really, for a pulp magazine supposedly dedicated to the detection, apprehension, and punishment of criminals. Marty and his men aren’t better than their adversaries, they’re simply better at their jobs. Lawrence’s cynicism oozes from each printed page; there’s no Chandler-like romanticizing of his detectives. The Broadway Squad—whose most colorful members eventually come to the fore in expanded roles—anticipates the amoral cops in such later films as Mulholland Falls and L.A. Confidential. Marty is occasionally “offstage” or reduced to walk-on status, while his underlings, Al Hackett, Ace McGuire, or Big Johnny Berthold, take the lead in an investigation. Like the chief they serve, these men are a law unto themselves.

  The bulk of the Marquis series—26 novelettes—was published in Dime Detective between early 1937 and late 1942. Lawrence had cracked Black Mask in 1933 and occasionally made sales to that distinguished pulp’s legendary editor, “Cap” Shaw. He appeared more frequently in the magazine after Popular’s 1940 purchase of it, with most of his Mask yarns being Broadway Squad adventures told in first person by subordinates of the Marquis. Lawrence’s last World War II-era tales for Dime Detective and Black Mask were published in the October 1942 issues: “Military Secret” in the former title, “Detour to Death” in the latter. By the time they hit newsstands he had returned to his native Canada and was in uniform for the conflict’s duration.

  Lawrence’s fiction-writing career never regained the momentum it had achieved before the war. He appears to have sold only a handful of stories after returning, one of them being the Marquis’s swan song in Dime Detective. “A Frame for the Marquis” (June 1948) unfolds during one of New York City’s bone-chilling cold waves. Doris Connelly, daughter of a con man who was friend to Marty, asks the Broadway Squad’s chief to find her brother Gerry, who’s been accused of murdering a visiting Colorado police officer. Not surprisingly, the Marquis takes heat from other public officials and, in a blast from the past, threatens to sock the assistant D.A. in charge of the case. Later he discovers Gerry’s body in a warehouse on the Jersey waterfront and finds himself framed for the boy’s murder. Sound familiar?

  This last Marquis novelette seems oddly subdued, especially in Marty’s handling of the real culprit. Moreover, at one point he suggests that the Broadway Squad’s reputation for ruthlessness has been deliberately fashioned to make it more fearsome to the Main Stem’s criminals. This is spectacularly at odds with Lawrence’s earlier series installments and might explain why the revival effort failed.

  John Lawrence was a skillful storyteller whose prose helped define the Popular Publications house style. It was alternately terse, tough, biting, and brittle. But his true accomplishment with the Marquis of Broadway series was in moving beyond the white hat/black hat conventions of crime pulps. Marty Marquis and his Broadway Squad might have lacked the moral clarity of Raymond Chandler’s pulp-magazine detectives, but they were—and are—equally compelling figures. Hopefully, this long-overdue collection of their exploits will elicit for their creator the praise he has long been denied.

  Broadway Malady

  In which the Marquis of Broadway turns physician and cures the Big Stem’s smartest smart-money boy of his murder-migraine, with nothing but a stick of medicated chewing gum.

  THE boy lay in the dingy precinct locker-room. His lips were smashed and bloody, and there was a scraped, bluish welt across his right cheek. One of his eyes was swollen closed. There was a wound in his head that had clotted his blond hair. His dinner-coat was ripped down the seam, covered with mud and blood. His stiff shirt and collar were smeared and crushed, and his black tie hung down in two ends. He breathed with difficulty, the injuries to his face and clotted blood in his throat making it sound like sobbing.

  There were half a dozen detectives in the locker-room. Every eye was silently on the Marquis—small, neat, blue-eyed, his black clothes, as always, unobtrusively immaculate, black-gloved hands in his tight overcoat pockets, round, weathered face looking gently down at the boy whom all Broadway knew he had taken under his protection, weeks before. There was sulphurous, expectant silence in the room.

  No such slap in the face had been administered to the Marquis, in years. Behind the dark, curious eyes of the precinct-men was awe—awe at the temerity of the someone who had done this, who had thrown the glove directly in the face of the strange man who was, probably, the most powerful single force in the white-light section—Lieutenant Martin Marquis. He was almost a legendary figure, even before this. Not a particularly saintly figure, in all truth, but the only man who had ever proved himself master of the Roaring Forties; the only copper who had ever made his name dominate the theatrical section and made any and every individual on that promenade of pleasure feel the force of his hand.

  That anyone would deliberately, defiantly, put this red flag in the Marquis’ face was electrifying. Anyone? There was little mystery, as to who the “anyone” in this particular case might be, to the group that watched the tableau in utter silence. They knew, as all Broadway did, that this was the climax in a drama that the Stem’s whisperers had been watching rise for two months. They were, they knew, watching Broadway history in the making. Of them all, the Marquis was probably the calmest.

  He bent forward and, with one neat, black-gloved hand, rolled back the eyelid of the boy’s good eye. It was normal size.

  A plainclothesman, hanging a coat in a locker, muttered over his shoulder: “Just a beating, Marquis.”

  The two uniformed men in the doorway, who had brought the boy in, in the prowl-car, shifted uncomfortably. The Marquis’ cobalt-blue, small eyes sought them out. “You picked him up in the Park?”

  “Yeah. Central Park, Marquis.”

  A doctor scurried in. The Marquis waited in silence, the end of his small, round jaw moving slowly, almost imperceptibly, from side to side. When the doctor straightened up finally, to say there was nothing broken, the Marquis nodded to the plainclothesman. “Let him clean up here and get his clothes fixed. Doctor, paint out that goog so he can go to work. Give him anything he wants. I’ll pay.”

  He went out of the back room, through the musty, creaking deskroom of the precinct, to the street. Thre
e blocks over, Broadway glowed, multicolored, in the darkness. He walked silently, unhurriedly.

  FRANKIE MAY’S gambling-house was a short distance above Longacre Square, on the third floor of a three-story building, above a popular cabaret. Entry was by long stair-climbing. That did not deter the crowds. In the heart of the white-light section, it was, beyond doubt, the richest place of its kind in Manhattan.

  No one thought of stopping the Marquis—neither the man at the foot of the boxed stairs, or the man on the door at the top—and he strolled into the immense, low-ceilinged room. Green-shaded drop-lights, hazed with smoke, hung down over billiard tables and circular wooden tables, as far as the eye seemed able to reach. The low hum of croupiers, of stickmen spieling, of the thick crowds at play, the restless shuffling of five hundred pairs of nervous feet, made a din that beat in waves on the Marquis’ ears, as he stood just inside the door, for seconds, before turning toward the two doors set in the same wall as the door from the stairs through which he had come.

  Before he could cover the twenty feet to the nearest of the two doors—the office of Frankie May—Ginger, the red-headed man-of-all-work, Frankie May’s right hand, materialized out of thin air and stopped him, beckoning to a white-coated porter.

  The red-headed assistant grinned widely. “Doggone snow takes all the press out of your clothes, if you let it melt,” he explained, as the porter arrived with the whisk.

  With delicate touch, the Negro feathered the Marquis’ tight black-silk scarf, his neat black Chesterfield overcoat, the bottoms of his carefully pressed dark trousers and, with a rag, unclouded the high polish on his small black shoes.

  The Marquis gravely removed the hard hat from his rubbly, salted black hair, tendered it in his gloved hand. “Easy on it, John. Twenty-four dollars.”

  Ginger looked down quickly, a still wider grin on his loose, white face. “Times must be good.”

  The Marquis pursed his lips. “Well, I’ve got to be sure no one mistakes me for a cop.”