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

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 character, 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