Odor of Violets Read online

  THE ODOR

  OF VIOLETS

  BAYNARD

  KENDRICK

  Introduction by

  OTTO

  PENZLER

  AMERICAN

  MYSTERY CLASSICS

  Penzler Publishers

  New York

  OTTO PENZLER PRESENTS

  AMERICAN MYSTERY CLASSICS

  THE ODOR OF VIOLETS

  BAYNARD KENDRICK (1894-1977) was one of the founders of the Mystery Writers of America, later named a Grand Master by the organization. After returning from military service in World War I, Kendrick wrote for pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective under various pseudonyms before creating the Duncan Maclain character for which he is now known. The blind detective appeared in twelve novels, several short stories, and three films.

  OTTO PENZLER, the creator of American Mystery Classics, is also the founder of the Mysterious Press (1975); Mysterious-Press.com (2011), an electronic-book publishing company; and New York City’s Mysterious Bookshop (1979). He has won a Raven, the Ellery Queen Award, two Edgars (for the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, 1977, and The Lineup, 2010), and lifetime achievement awards from NoirCon and The Strand Magazine. He has edited more than 70 anthologies and written extensively about mystery fiction.

  INTRODUCTION

  ONE OF the most beloved characters from the Golden Age of detective fiction and beyond was Duncan Maclain, a tall, dark, strikingly handsome, and immaculately dressed and groomed former intelligence officer who moves with astonishing ease and self-assurance in spite of his total blindness.

  Although injured while serving in World War I, Mclain has been able, through ceaseless effort, to master his handicap by developing his other senses. He turned to the profession of private detective—and has found that his resources have been challenged to their utmost but his tenacity has brought him success.

  Maclain lives in a penthouse apartment twenty-six stories above 72nd Street and Riverside Drive on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His hobbies are reading (in Braille), listening to music on his phonograph records, and assembling jigsaw puzzles, which he does by fingering a piece and then searching for its companion. He has taught himself to shoot, guided only by sound. He is assisted at the detective agency by his best friend and partner, Spud Savage, his secretary Rena, who is married to Spud, and his two seeing-eye dogs, the gentle Schnucke and the not so gentle Dreist.

  Captain Mclain is the creation of Baynard Kendrick, one of the giants of the American Golden Age of detective fiction. Choosing a blind detective was no mere whim but the nearly inevitable result of his military service.

  In World War I, Kendrick was the first American to enlist in the Canadian Army—exactly one hour after that country declared war—and served in the Canadian Expeditionary Forces. When he visited a hospitalized fellow Philadelphian who had been blinded in battle, he met a blind British soldier who had the remarkable ability to tell Kendrick things about himself that exceeded what a sighted person might have known. The experience impressed him and eventually enabled him to create a believable, if somewhat idealized, blind character.

  During World War II, Kendrick was a consultant to the staff of the Old Farms Convalescent Hospital for Blinded Veterans (for a dollar a year).

  Long interested in the problems of the blind, Kendrick was an acknowledged expert on the subject. He once served as the only sighted advisor to the Blinded Veterans Association and was its organizer and chairman of its board of directors. He held honorary life membership card number one and received a plaque for this work from General Omar Bradley in July 1940.

  Kendrick’s experiences provided him with the source material for his series hero, Captain Duncan Mclain, and for a non-mystery novel, Lights Out (1945), which was filmed as Bright Victory (1951), a romantic drama set during World Warr II about a soldier blinded by a German sniper; it was directed by Mark Robson and starred Arthur Kennedy, who was nominated for an Academy Award, and Peggy Dow.

  One of the founding members of the Mystery Writers of America, Kendrick carried membership card number one. He served as the organization’s first president and was named a Grand Master in 1967.

  Kendrick was born in Philadelphia in 1894 and educated at the Tom School, Port Deposit, Maryland, and the Episcopal Academy, Philadelphia. He married Edythe Stevens in 1919 and, following her death, married Jean Morris in 1971. He traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East and lived in almost every part of the United States. A lawyer and certified public accountant, he had several jobs in the business world before becoming a full-time writer in 1932. His first mystery novel, Blood on Lake Louisa, was published in 1934 and the majority of his subsequent fiction was in the same genre.

  That first novel was a stand-alone mystery that was followed by a couple of novels featuring Kendrick’s first series character, Miles Standish Rice, The Iron Spiders (1936) and The Eleven of Diamonds (1936), who also was the hero of fourteen stories that appeared in Black Mask, the most prestigious pulp magazine in the detective fiction world, between 1937 and 1942. Rice, generally known as Stan, worked as a private detective who, uncharacteristically for P.I.s in this era, had a close relationship with the police. Earlier, he had been a deputy sheriff in Florida, where all the stories are set. The third and final novel in which Rice appears is Death Beyond the Go-Thru (1938), but by then Kendrick had created Captain Duncan Maclain, who became a more popular crimefighter.

  The first novels in which Maclain and his service dogs, Schnucke and Dreist, appear are The Last Express (1937), The Whistling Hangman (1938), and The Odor of Violets (1941), which is regarded by many as his finest book. It was reissued several times under the title Eyes in the Night, the title of the 1942 film that featured Edward Arnold as Maclain, Ann Harding as Norma Lawry, and Donna Reed as Barbara Lawry. Schnucke was renamed Friday for the film, which was directed by Fred Zinneman.

  Intended to be a long-running series of detective movies following the success of Eyes in the Night, M-G-M made a sequel, The Hidden Eye (1945), also starring Arnold, but it did not do well at the box office and the series idea was abandoned.

  The tone of Kendrick’s novel was darker than most of his work, no doubt due to the fact that the world was at the brink of war and the book combined the pulp-inspired tropes of the hard-boiled private eye story with a spy story, which are seldom light-hearted—and certainly not with the reality of war in the air. Maclain’s career as a licensed private investigator make him an ideal choice to work in United States Intelligence when the threat of Nazi spies and their plots of sabotage are suspected.

  Although The Odor of Violets is a genuine whodunit, its plotting has its roots in the pulp fiction magazines of the time, with a protagonist who has many of the characteristics of such pulp heroes as Doc Savage. Not only is Maclain highly intelligent, but his other faculties have been so profoundly enriched that they appear other-worldly. Add to that his highly attractive physical appearance and his ability to easily dispatch adversaries in fights, and he becomes as close to a super-hero as the Golden Age detective can be.

  In all, Kendrick wrote twelve novels about Duncan Maclain but they have been largely forgotten and out of print for many decades. The television series Longstreet, which ran for twenty-four episodes in 1971-1972, was created by Stirling Silliphant and starred James Franciscus as Mike Longstreet (an identical twin to Maclain), and Marlyn Mason as Nikki Bell, his secretary. Kendrick is given acknowledgment for his work as the inspiration for the Longstreet character, but some difficulties in the negotiations did not permit Paramount Television or ABC to use the Maclain name as the title.

  —OTTO PENZLER

  FOREWORD

  THE FIRST short story ever written about my blind detective charac
ter, Captain Duncan Maclain, appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in January 1953 (there has only been one other, which also appeared in Ellery Queen’s). That was more than fifteen years after the first full-length mystery, The Last Express, about Captain Maclain, who was a fictional U.S. Army officer blinded at Messines in World War I. It was published by the Crime Club in 1937. Following is the introduction to this short story, written by Frederic Dannay, co-writer with his cousin, Manfred B. Lee, under the pseudonym “Ellery Queen,” who, like this writer, is one of the Grand Masters of the Mystery Writers of America, Inc.:

  Ernest Bramah is generally credited with having invented the first modern blind detective, Max Carrados, but the most famous exponent in the contemporary field of blind detection is, without doubt, Captain Duncan Maclain, created by Baynard Kendrick. Mr. Kendrick acknowledges that it was the earlier blind detective who started him writing about Maclain—but for curious reasons . . . in Mr. Kendrick’s opinion, Max Carrados had very strange powers that went far beyond the limits of credibility. For example, Carrados could run his fingertips along the surface of a newspaper, feel the infinitesimal height of the printer’s ink over the paper itself, and “read” any type larger than long primer. Mr. Kendrick questions that feat, and we must say we are inclined to side with Mr. Kendrick. . . .

  Indeed, Mr. Kendrick found it so difficult to swallow Max Carrados’s supersensory accomplishments that he determined to create a blind detective of his own—a completely believable sleuth who could deduce by touch, hearing, taste, and smell, with no reliance whatever either on sight or sixth sense. And the simple truth of the matter is that while Baynard Kendrick has spent fifteen years of his life unearthing extraordinary things done by the totally blind, he has never had his blind detective do anything which he, Kendrick, had not actually seen done by a living blind man, or had fully authenticated.

  When it came to developing the character of Duncan Maclain, Mr. Kendrick again went to the highest authority—real life. He patterned the character of Maclain on that of a real person—a young blind soldier in St. Dunstan’s Home in London, who by touching the emblems on Kendrick’s own uniform, accurately traced four years of Kendrick’s Army career.

  Canada declared war on Germany on August 8, 1914, four days after Great Britain. I was living in a boardinghouse in Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit, and left a lunch table to go downtown to the Armory and enlist. So far as can be ascertained I was the first American to join up with the Canadian forces in World War I. After a few weeks’ training at Valcartier, Quebec, I became No. 6468, Private Kendrick, B.H., 1st Battalion, 1st Brigade, No. 1 company in No. 1 Section. Since even then I was six feet two inches, I was the tallest man in my company and became flank man on the line. This was a hair-raising experience inasmuch as I was forced to pace 33,000 men in a review before Sir Sam Hughes, of whom the Canadians gleefully sang, to the tune of “John Peel”: “Do you ken Sam Hughes, the enemy of booze. The first champeen of the dry canteen. And the camp so dead you have to go to bed, but you won’t have a head in the morning.”

  The first expeditionary force sailed from Gaspe Bay on the twenty-first of September and the 1st Battalion of 1,200 men was on board the White Star liner Laurentic. Thirty-three ocean liners crossed in that convoy in three rows of eleven each—the largest convoy to that date that the world had ever dreamed of or seen. There was certainly no tinge of patriotic fervor in my enlistment. I was twenty years old and the idea of putting an ocean between me and Detroit, where I had once been arrested for vagrancy for sleeping out in Grand Circuit Park, and drawing $1.10 a day plus food and clothes and medical expenses looked like paradise.

  If this autobiographical prologue seems prolix and redundant I will have to plead guilty as I put it here for just one purpose—to make the point that not until 1917 when I was twenty-three and blindness confronted me face to face, had I ever given it a passing thought. By that time I had served in France, Egypt, and Salonica and had spent over two years in army hospitals. Subconsciously, I believe, like ninety-nine percent of the people in the world, I blotted the condition from my mind beyond relegating it to the shadowy realm of the tin cup, pencil, and street-corner school.

  In the winter of 1917, when I had been marked “C-3” by a medical board (light duty), I was stationed in London working as a pay sergeant in the Canadian Pay Office at 7 Millbank. There, quite by accident, I learned that a boy with whom I had gone to school in Philadelphia had joined up with the Canadians a year after I did. I’ll call him Paul Henderson, which was not his name. He had been blinded at Vimy Ridge several months before and at that moment was in St. Dunstan’s Lodge, the hospital for blinded soldiers in London.

  I took to visiting St. Dunstan’s in Regents Park regularly on Saturday afternoons to have tea and play the piano. Once having overcome my initial ingrained fear of the blind, I continued these visits for many months after Paul Henderson had been invalided back to Canada and resumed his U.S. citizenship—as I did later, in December 1918. It was on one such visit that Captain Duncan Maclain was born, although I had no inkling of it at the moment and it was twenty years later—in 1937—before he came to life in print in The Last Express. The conditions at St. Dunstan’s for the training and welfare of the blind—while modern for World War I—seemed antiquated when compared to Valley Forge, Dibble, or Avon Old Farms. Mobility was given little thought and the grounds of St. Regents Park were festooned with strings for the blinded veterans to follow, and knots marked the benches. When I was visiting there the lodge was so overcrowded with veterans and personnel that it had been necessary to move the piano out in the hall. There was little amusement since radio and talking books were unheard of—the big moments came when some noted entertainer, such as Sir Harry Lauder, Sir George Robey, or Alfred Lester, dropped in for an evening from one of the music halls.

  It was on a blustery, freezing December afternoon in 1917 when I first became conscious of the fact that while a blind man might have lost his sight, he hadn’t necessarily lost his mind. I had seated myself at the piano and given my usual introduction by leading off with “Tipperary” and the coterie of blinded British Tommies quickly gathered around me. There was just one straightback chair to the right of the piano next to double doors in the vestibule (always closed since a rear entrance was used) that led out onto the grounds. I had shed my cap and greatcoat and put them on that chair.

  The Tommies were packed in almost solidly around me and one British Tommy was standing with his hands lightly on my shoulders while I went through half a dozen pieces. When I had finished and some requests were made, he moved around to the right of the piano, picked up my cap and greatcoat from the chair, sat down and laid them across his knees. I noticed while I was playing that he was giving them a thorough going-over with his fingertips (“brailling,” although it turns a noun into a verb, has become the common term today).

  A bell rang and I was suddenly deserted by my captive audience as they poured into an adjoining lounge for afternoon tea. Only the Tommy to the right of the piano remained. He stood up, replacing my cap and greatcoat on the chair, and started in with a preamble, as though something had been burned into his brain.

  Then he said: “You certainly have been around in the Canadian army, haven’t you? You’ve been in nearly every bleeding outfit in it. You came over here in nineteen fourteen with the First Battalion, went out to France with them, were invalided back here to England and then joined up with the Fourth General Hospital from Toronto and went out to Salonica with them. You were invalided back from Salonica through Egypt and landed back here at Netley Fever Hospital at Southamption—that big pile of bricks with the corridors a quarter of a mile long.

  “When you were discharged from Netley you went to 134 Shorncliffe to the C.C.A.C. [Canadian Casualty Assembly Center]. There you faced another medical board which marked you ‘C-3’ and transferred you to the Canadian Army Service Corps on light duty instead of sending you back to Canada as you had hoped. Wh
en they found out that you couldn’t even lift a Ford motor, let alone carry one around on each shoulder, the sergeant in charge of the machine shop kicked to the C.O. that he was tired of being sent walking corpses marked ‘C-3.’ So they sent you up to this cushy job with the Canadian Army Pay Corps here in London where you will stay for the duration of the war.”

  I stood with my mouth hanging open, staring at him intently until I was positive that I had never seen him before. Then I blurted out, “I suppose you got all this dope from Paul Henderson who was invalided back to Canada from here a couple of months ago.”

  “Never heard of him,” he said smugly. “He was before my time. I have only been in here just over a couple of weeks. I was blinded in the big tank push at Cambrai.”

  “Then where the hell did you know me and get all my army history? You sound like you had taken it from a sheet in the Canadian Record Office.”

  “I don’t know you, never saw you, and never will,” he grinned delightedly. “Sir Arthur Pearson spoke to us here last week about how much a blind man can really see. I decided to try it out on you. Your army history that I just gave you is written all over your uniform.”

  I took a closer look at his heavily bandaged eyes and decided that even if he had some vision left, it was obvious that he couldn’t see. “Okay,” I said. “Start at the beginning and spell it out. I’m certainly listening.”

  “Well, first,” he said, “you have blue shoulder straps sewed on the khaki ones on your tunic.”

  “Blue?”

  “Sure, you’re wearing brass C-1’s—that is a ‘C’ with a bar under it and a ‘1’ attached underneath. That was your original unit, the First Battalion of Infantry, and all the infantry in the first contingent in nineteen fourteen wears those blue shoulder straps. The Medical Corps wears red. You were invalided back from France because you have a gold perpendicular wound stripe on your sleeve. Right?”