Gun in Cheek by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online

Indian kept inside the room. This was not the result of an accidental discharge, as everyone is supposed to believe, but through the machinations of a typical Wells murderer: while he was a guest in the victim's house some time earlier, the culprit manufactured a trapdoor leading from the attic into a grilled cabinet inside the Indian room; this enabled him to let himself down into the cabinet by means of a rope, from where, being an expert archer, he fired the fatal arrow through one of the grill openings. That the cabinet in question is barely large enough for a man to fit in, and that a considerable amount of space is required to maneuver a bow and arrow, are conveniently ignored by both the author and Fleming Stone.
    Miss Wells also created another private detective of note, one Pennington "Penny" Wise, who appears in seven novels, foremost among them The Man Who Fell Through the Earth (1919). Although one of the characters in this book says that Penny Wise is not "the usual Smarty-Cat detective" and has "none of the earmarks of the Transcendental Detective of the story-books," he is and he does. Under all but the closest scrutiny he appears indistinguishable from Fleming Stone.
    The Man Who Fell Through the Earth is concerned with a double disappearance from a locked New York office. One of the - men exited the office by means of a secret elevator; the other walked out in front of a not very reliable witness, only to vanish again during a howling blizzard outside. The second man is subsequently found alive in the icy East River, having "fallen through the earth, perhaps all the way from the Arctic." Or so he claims at first, in his delirium. What really happened is this:
    Â 
"And as I took a step—I went down an open manhole into the sewer.
". . . I fell and fell—down, down,—it seemed for miles; I was whirled dizzily about—but still I fell—on and on—interminably. I felt my consciousness going—at first, abnormally acute, my senses became dulled, and I had only a sensation of falling—ever falling—through the earth!
"There my memory ceases. . . . My realization of falling only lasted until I struck the water in the sewer. That, doubtless, knocked me out for good and all—mentally, I mean. I have to thank my wonderful vitality and strong constitution for the fact that I really lived through the catastrophe. Think what it means! Hurtled through that rushing torrent of a sewer half filled with melted snow and water—flung out into the river, dashed about among the floating cakes of ice, and all with sufficient force to tear off my clothing—and yet to live through it!"
    Â 
    While Fleming Stone and Penny Wise were engaged in such goings-on, the hard-boiled detective as defined by Hammett and Carroll John Daly was beginning to prosper in the pages of Black Mask in the 1920s. Hammett's Continental Op was based on his own experiences with the Pinkerton agency and his intimate knowledge of how twentieth-century private detectives went about their business; and it was his genius that gave the American fictional investigator the one vital element he had been lacking: realism. And it was realism, or the illusion of it, that completed and cemented the mystique of the private eye.
    Yet although Hammett is the acknowledged patriarch of the modern tough-detective school, in truth he must share that distinction with Daly. Daly's rough-and-tumble, somewhat sadistic shamus Race Williams first appeared in "Knights of the Open Palm" in the June 1, 1923, issue of Black Mask , five months before Hammett's initial Continental Op story was published. (Daly's first story, "The False Burton Combs," a hard-boiled tale about a "gentleman adventurer" who makes his living battling lawbreakers, appeared in Black Mask in 1922; and two weeks before Race Williams made his debut, another Daly private eye, Terry Mack, began shooting folks in a novelette called "Three Gun Terry." Also, Daly's first