Odor of Violets, Baynard Kendrick [best short novels .txt] 📗

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