THE WORKS OF G. T. FLEMING-ROBERTS

by Monte Herridge

CHANCE WITHOUT A GHOST
by Monte Herridge

    “We’ll go to a hotel,” he said.  “Ames can’t do this to me.”

    He was thoughtful, plucking at his chin as though it were a beard.  He muttered, “Why would he do that?”

    “That’s what I want to know,” Merry padded around the bedroom barefooted, looking for her slippers.  I still think my idea to spend our wedding night in Grand Central Station was just peachy compared with this!”

    “Why would he hide his false teeth?”

    She found her slippers, straightened slowly without putting them on, stared at her husband.  “What are you talking about?”

    “Oh,” he said, startled, and grinned at her.  “Oh, I was talking about Leonard Van Sickle.”

    “Darlin’,” she pleaded, “you’re not going to let Inspector Ames drag you into another murder case, are you?”

    He shook his head.  “Of course not.  You get dressed as fast as you can.  We’ll go the Exeter House.”

    She gave him a sidelong glance.  “And why the Exeter?

    “The – er –” He looked at her sharply.  “The cuisine,” he said glibly.  “It’s superb, you see?”

    G. T. Fleming-Roberts (1910-1968) seemed to like writing about magicians for the pulps.  He not only wrote the Thrilling Group’s magician hero pulp stories about “The Ghost/Green Ghost” (published from 1940-1944) and the Diamondstone stories in Popular Detective from 1937-1939, but also wrote a series of seven stories about Jeffery Wren for Popular Publications’ Dime Detective.  These were published in that title between 1944 and 1946 and vary from 18 to 28 pages in length.  A number of the stories were favored by having the cover art for that month show a scene from the story.  These seven tales appear to be all that were printed in the series.

No Haunting Allowed	April 1944
The Spirit Was Willing	August 1944
A Sleight Case of Murder	October 1944
Scare a Man to Death	January 1945
He Couldn’t Stay Dead	May 1945
Medium Dead	November 1945
Feather Your Coffin	October 1946

    Why the series ended is not known, but Fleming-Roberts, like many other Americans, was in the military from the summer of 1945 to January 1946.  So he probably did not have time to write any stories during that period of his life.  The stories published in 1945 were in all likelihood written before he went into the military, and the 1946 story may have been written after his discharge.  It is also possible that the series just ran out of steam and the editors of Dime Detective did not want any more Wren stories.

    Fleming-Roberts made certain that this series character was different than many other pulp detectives by giving him distinctive characteristics.


        Jeffery Wren runs a novelty and magic shop in the Brill Building on West Ohio Street in Indianapolis, Indiana.  FOOTNOTE 1.   The magic part of the shop is up a flight of stairs found at the back of the novelty shop.  Here there is a door that has written on it “Wren’s Magic.”  Through this door is a reception room with Wren’s old vaudeville photographs covering its walls and furnished with chairs of chrome and leather.  From the reception room, double glass doors lead into the magic shop itself, which is filled with everything from practically invisible gimmicks to stage size professional illusions.

    Fleming-Roberts’ use of Wren’s vaudeville past is perfectly in line with the series’ time frame.  Vaudeville was very popular earlier this century, until competition from movies and radio came along.  The Great Depression finished it off.  Many of history’s popular radio performers came from vaudeville.  Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Fanny Brice, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Will Rogers, Ed Wynn, and many others all emerged from the vaudeville stage.  Practically everyone at the time of the Wren stories’ publication was very familiar with vaudeville.  There is little doubt Fleming-Roberts, when young, went to see vaudeville performers, including magicians.

    For those readers not familiar with vaudeville, it was a way of life for thousands of performers from around the time of the Civil War to the Great Depression.  Thousands of performers with every imaginable type of act appeared in regional and national circuits, performing in theaters before a live audience.  There were stand-up comedians, acrobatic acts, dancers, singers, magicians, and many other kinds of acts.  “In lavish ‘palaces’ and modest opera houses, located in towns and cities knit together by railroad-defined circuits that spanned the nation, vaudeville served a vast public.”  FOOTNOTE 2.   It was family entertainment; its cleanliness strictly observed.  Many vaudevillians appeared in small regional theaters and were considered “small timers.”  The more successful acts ran in good theaters and on national circuits such as the B. F. Keith circuit that Jeffery Wren worked in.  Thus  Fleming-Roberts’ fictional character was one of the more successful type of vaudevillians.  FOOTNOTE 3.

    In Wren’s magic shop, his store assistant is Horace, a “lean, bloodless-looking clerk,” who mans the novelty part of the shop and sits behind the joke counter.  He talks in a sloppy, off-hand manner, chews on a cigar he never lights, and has the attitude that the customer is always wrong.  On occasion, Horace is drafted by Wren for various detective jobs such as following people.  Horace seems to be more interested in women than anything else.

    Wren’s “sidekick snoop,” as the editors of Dime Detective described her, is Zoe Osbourn, a policewoman “assigned to snaring fortune tellers and fake mediums.”  Zoe Osbourn is a widow in her late forties with “vividly hennaed hair” who dresses in loud clothes, and her heavy build is somewhat muscular.  She has a husky, harsh voice with an emphatic delivery and uses blunt language which sometimes has a humorous turn.  Some of her outbursts when surprised are “Fry me for a banana!” and “Horse liniment!”  Her late husband was a police sergeant, and she keeps a picture of him in his uniform on the mantel of her white bungalow.  She seems to be similar to the better-known Bertha Cool, Erle Stanley Gardner’s female detective who first appeared in book form in 1939.  FOOTNOTE 4.

    Another regular in the series is the homicide detective, Sergeant Thomas “Tom” Hogan.  He was added to the series in the third story and can be found in the rest of the series, a total of five appearances.  He is mentioned as having known Wren for a long time.  Hogan always seems to be running into the magician in the course of his murder investigations and considers Wren to be a nuisance.  At one especially stressful point in the investigation entitled “Scare a Man to Death” (1/45), Hogan says, “I sometimes wish some people would go back into vaudeville, not mentioning any names.”  However, Hogan always finds that in the end, Wren comes up with the murderer that he himself cannot find or an alternate to the person he has wrongfully accused.

    Jeffery Wren is not the usual brawny, violent, gun-toting crime investigator that often appeared in detective pulp stories.  He is a sophisticated, middle-aged man of medium height with a heavy, squarish body.  He walks with a bouncing stride.  He is able to take care of himself in violent situations and has a well-developed sense of humor.

    Wren is portrayed as being very well-dressed; he wears a Homburg, rather than the usual fedora that so many other pulp detectives wore.  He also wears a black fleece overcoat during the winter and a white linen suit in the summer.  His appearance is described by the author as reminiscent of the Hollywood character actor Edward Arnold (1890-1956), best remembered today for his roles in three Frank Capra films – YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU (1938), MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (1939), and MEET JOHN DOE (1941).  Arnold also appeared as a detective in a number of movies, including Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe in 1936’s MEET NERO WOLFE (Columbia Pictures).   He also played Captain Duncan Maclain, a blind detective, in two excellent, underrated movies – EYES IN THE NIGHT (1942) and THE HIDDEN EYE (1945), both produced by MGM.  FOOTNOTE 5.

    The two Duncan Maclain movies are of a particular Hollywood type – the light mystery movie with doses of comedy– that flourished in the thirties and forties.  Light mysteries could be found on radio as well.  NBC’s The Adventures of the Thin Man ran from 1941 through 1948.  The series was modeled after the Nick and Nora Charles movies rather than Dashiell Hammett’s novel.  Another good example of the radio detective series with humor is Dick Powell’s Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1949-1953).

    Detective series were very popular in movies, radio, magazines, and books.  They especially abounded in the pulps, a reflection of the popular culture at the time.  A number of detective series overlapped in many of the mediums of the era – pulps, books, movies, comics, and radio.  Examples include The Saint, Philip Marlowe, Nick Carter, Philo Vance, Charlie Chan, and Sam Spade.

    The Jeffery Wren series was written for Dime Detective when Hollywood and radio were at their heights, before television had its devastating impact on both mediums and on the viewing and reading habits of the public.  The similarity of Wren to Edward Arnold was undoubtedly an attempt by Fleming-Roberts to increase the character’s appeal by linking him to a popular Hollywood actor.

    Jeffery Wren is a confirmed bachelor, and has a fear of being entrapped by predatory women, especially widows.  He lives in a hotel suite somewhere in Indianapolis, and usually leaves it promptly at 8:30 AM to catch a bus to his downtown magic shop, arriving there within a half hour.  He doesn’t have a driver’s license, and doesn’t seem to have an automobile, but he does know how to drive.

    Wren doesn’t carry a gun, but comes across them in his investigations and can use them effectively.  He uses sleight-of-hand a number of times to deprive people of their guns.  He likewise uses magic tricks when questioning people, sometimes pulling a rubber ball from someone’s mouth or making cigarettes appear from nowhere.  He may also use his magical expertise when he needs to distract attackers so he can defend himself.

    Wren has an intense dislike of spiritualists.  He is the author of a book entitled The Dead Don’t Talk, an expose on fraud spiritualism.  He mentions in the stories that it is “a notoriously poor seller.”  He also works with the Indianapolis police in cleaning “spook crooks” out of the city.  Fraud spiritualism was used to good effect in the pulps.  A good example is Walter Gibson’s early Shadow novel “The Ghost Makers” (10/15/32).  FOOTNOTE 6.

    Jeffery Wren is hired occasionally as an investigator of spirit mediums and other so-called occultists because his detective ability is known.  He invariably becomes involved in cases of murder tinged with occult mystery.  None of these turn out to be truly supernatural; all have a rational explanation.  This is a fallback to the basic idea behind many of the weird-menace stories of the thirties, where supposedly supernatural occurrences were almost always rationalized away.  As G. T. Fleming-Roberts himself wrote many stories for the weird-menace pulps, he was very familiar with this style of plot.

    The first Jeffery Wren story was “No Haunting Allowed” (4/44), and the characters are naturally not as well-developed as in the later entries in the series.  Wren mentions at the beginning of the story that it is his first murder case, calling it “My baptism in murder.  Or call it a ducking.”  The victim is murdered in the magician’s presence and Wren almost becomes victim number two.  As is usual in each of the series’ stories, money is at the root of the murder.

    “The Spirit Was Willing” (8/44) is the second story.  It involves a crooked medium who has avoided legal troubles by maintaining “The Church of Life Everlasting” and taking contributions rather than charging fees.  The medium’s assistant is murdered and the motive is unknown.

    As mentioned earlier, the third story, “A Sleight Case of Murder” (10/44), introduces homicide detective Sergeant Thomas Hogan, probably injected to add a little more conflict into the series.  The plot involves a missing elderly woman, a disappearing body, a seance, a spirit hand made from paraffin, blackmail, and a rooming house full of strange characters.

    “Scare a Man to Death” (1/45) is the fourth story of the Wren series.  The magician suspects that a supposed locked-room suicide is actually murder.  The victim had written several wills, leaving his fortune to a different person in each document.  He even leaves his money to Satan in one of the wills.  The ingenuous murder method in this story is described in an article Fleming-Roberts published in the April 1951 issue of Writer’s Markets and Methods.  According to this essay, the author and his wife spent an entire evening working out the murder to make certain it could actually be done.  Fleming-Roberts often used inventive murder methods in his stories, but seemed to choose ones that could actually occur.

    In the fifth story, “He Couldn’t Stay Dead” (5/45), Wren is involved in a case of murder where a large inheritance is at stake. This story has an unintentionally humorous aspect to it due to the placement of several advertisements.  The first victim is murdered by means of a poisoned tobacco pipe.  In the original printing of the twenty-five-page story, there are two advertisements for competing brands of tobacco pipes.  A funny coincidence, but did the advertisers see it as such?

    “Medium Dead”  (11/45) is the sixth story.  It begins on a hot July day.  Wren is hired to investigate strange happenings among the wealthy Oakley family.  The patriarch of the family is acting very odd and has been supposedly playing tic-tac-toe with a ghost.  This scene is portrayed on the cover of Dime Detective, showing an old, stern-looking man playing the game with a skeletal figure while a young woman in the background looks on in fear.

    In “Feather Your Coffin” (10/46), the last story in the series, Wren has become well-known as a trouble-shooter of unusual mysteries.  This story begins with a locked-room murder with no body.  Those involved ascribe the events to a poltergeist, something the magician-detective sets out to disprove.  FOOTNOTE 7.

    At the time of the Jeffery Wren stories in Dime Detective, the magazine published many continuing series featuring various kinds of detectives.  Many of these characters were quite unusual and did not fit the usual mold for pulp detectives.  Jeffery Wren fit right in with these oddballs.  For example, in the October 1944 issue of Dime Detective there is not only the Wren story, “A Sleight Case of Murder,” but also a Bill Brent story by Frederick C. Davis and an Inspector Alhoff story by D. L. Champion. 

    Brent is a romance columnist involved in criminal investigations while Inspector Alhoff is an eccentric, ill-tempered, bad-mannered crank who is missing both of his legs.  Other unusual pulp detective characters in Dime Detective during 1944-1946 included Lawrence Treat’s Edward Asa Scott, an artist who investigates murders, T. T. Flynn’s Mr. Maddox, a traveling racetrack bookmaker, Dale Clark’s “High” Price, a private eye, and D. L. Champion’s Mariano Mercado, a Mexican private detective who wears outrageously colored clothes and is a hypochondriac.

    G. T. Fleming-Roberts wrote many hero and detective stories for the pulps.  In addition to Jeffery Wren, quite a few of the author’s detectives practiced the art of magic.  The series featuring The Ghost/Green Ghost is the best known.  The longer stories in this Thrilling pulp gave the author room for a good deal of story development.  Later, the Green Ghost yarns were about the same length as the Jeffery Wren stories and some aspects of the series were left out due to space considerations.

    In an article published in the May 1943 issue of Writer’s Digest, Fleming-Roberts discusses how he came up with an idea and plot for a Green Ghost story:


    The six-story Diamondstone series, published in Standard’s Popular Detective from 1937-1939, preceded the Jeffery Wren series and is quite different.  The action in the Diamondstone series is much faster and the stories are more violent.  There is a physical resemblance between the two characters, but Diamondstone is considerably younger and much more agile than Wren.

    Diamondstone also seems to have some similarities, none of them physical, to George Chance, the Ghost.  He is a professional magician who retired young and wealthy like Chance.  He only takes cases that interest him and does not charge a fee.  Whereas the Ghost frequently uses disguises, Diamondstone and Jeffery Wren never do so.

    The last of the Diamondstone stories appeared in the June 1939 issue of Popular Detective.  With Standard’s The Ghost debuting with the January 1940 issue, most likely the Diamondstone stories were discontinued in favor of the new series.

    As late as 1947, G. T. Fleming-Roberts had a story published in which the main character was a magician who ran a magic store.  He was not a detective as was Jeffery Wren, but was forced by circumstances to investigate a crime.  This twelve-page story, “Slay ’em in the Aisles!” appeared in the October 1947 issue of Popular’s Detective Tales.  It seems the author could not let magician-detectives go without at least one more story.

    There were other magician-detectives in the pulps, Walter Gibson’s Norgil and Clayton Rawson’s Don Diavolo being two of the best known.  FOOTNOTE 8.  So Jeffery Wren did have some company.  Although G. T. Fleming-Roberts’ character didn’t have a long run nor attract as much attention as his fellow sleight-of-hand artists, he was a detective different than most and a well-thought-out character worthy of more stories.

    _______

FOOTNOTE 1.   Indianapolis as a site for this series was not just a random choice. Fleming-Roberts was born in Lafayette, Indiana in 1910, and moved to Indianapolis in 1934.  He lived there for over ten years, so he knew the city well.  He seems to have had a fondness for setting stories in either Indianapolis or somewhere in Indiana, as many of the hundreds of stories he wrote are placed there.

FOOTNOTE 2.  Alan Havig (1990), Fred Allen’s Radio Comedy, page 30, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

FOOTNOTE 3.  To get a good idea of what vaudeville was like, look for the PBS American Masters special “Vaudeville.”

FOOTNOTE 4.  Gardner, as A. A. Fair, wrote 29 Bertha Cool novels between 1939 and 1970, including two per year during 1940-42.  A total of nine adventures featuring Cool and Donald Lam, her partner, had appeared through 1944, the year the Wren stories debuted in Dime Detective.

FOOTNOTE 5.  Captain Maclain, blinded by gas while serving as an intelligence officer in World War I, was created by Baynard H. Kendrick.  The stories were inspired by a blind Canadian soldier the author had met during the First World War.
    The character debuted in 1937 in the novel The Last Express (filmed by Universal a year later).  Kendrick wrote ten more books featuring Maclain, including a 1947 collection of short stories entitled Make Mine Maclain.  According to William DeAndrea’s Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (Prentice Hall, New York, 1994), “The tall and handsome private eye is a man of action and, with and without the (seeing eye) dog, prevails in numerous fights” (page 222).

FOOTNOTE 6.   Spiritualism was very popular earlier this century, especially with such proponents as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.  Many people believed in the ability of spiritualists, and many such believers were well-educated people.

FOOTNOTE 7.  This story has an inside joke that only those readers familiar with Fleming-Roberts’ pulp-detective stories would catch.  He has Wren mention a detective agency based in Indianapolis named the Oberron Agency.  Pat Oberron was the lead of another Fleming-Roberts detective series whose one-man agency was based in the Hillary Building, a seedy building with eccentric tenants, all of whom are on the make for a fast buck.  These stories appeared in Popular Publications’ Big-Book Detective and New Detective.

FOOTNOTE 8.  Gibson’s Norgil stories were published under the name of Maxwell Grant and appeared in Street & Smith’s anthology title Crime Busters.  The Don Diavolo or Scarlet Wizard adventures were attributed to Stuart Towne when originally published by the Frank A. Munsey Company in Red Star Mystery.

    Back in the fall of 1988, pulp fan and historian Albert Tonik hopped into his motor home to tour the country and search out its pulp roots.  One of the stops along his way was Nashville, Indiana, home to the law office of James T. Roberts and to Agatha Reed, James’ mother and the former wife of writer G. T. Fleming-Roberts.  Albert had been led to Nashville by a letter from Roberts published in the sixth issue of DC Comics’ The Shadow, dated August-September 1974.   He described his visit to Nashville in Tom and Ginger Johnson’s Echoes 43, published in June 1989.

    “Nashville is a quaint town with an artist colony and tourists walking the main street shopping in all the boutiques.  Jim said he would lead me to his mother’s house.  He jumped in his Corvette and zoomed out of sight.  When I rounded a curve in the road, he was waiting for me.  The Roberts had lived in a beautiful house built out of rough hewn logs, called the Witch House because it resembled the witch’s house in the illustrations for “Hansel and Gretel.”  Agatha has since remarried to Dick Reed.

    “Five years after Tommy (G. T. stood for George Thomas) died she had destroyed his records, but kept his magazines in an old steamer trunk.  I went through the six hundred magazines, put them in chronological order, and copied the table of contents.”

    In addition to compiling a bibliography of the late author, Al Tonli also conducted an interview of the woman he had married in 1939, the former Agatha Halcyon Amell, Mrs. G. T. Fleming-Roberts, later known as Agatha Reed.  The interview was recorded on September 17, 1988 at the Witch House, the home of Agatha and Richard Reed.

A WRITER’S WIFE
 
A Interview with Mrs. G. T. Fleming-Roberts
conducted byAlbert Tonik.
 
Introduction by
Monte C. Herridge.

    During the past ten years, I have had my workshop on the second floor of my home, on the first floor, and, at this writing, I am relegated to the basement.  So far as I know, there is nothing lower in this life.  I think I could play this into something emotional – me, cast into the basement like an old anything after ten years of faithful service – but to be perfectly honest, this is a very nice basement with a supposedly sound-proof ceiling, knotty pine walls, an asphalt tile floor, fluorescent lighting, comfortable furniture.  It has an all but invariable temperature the year round, and I like it.

    The menace nowadays has to be something common and familiar…  Adults are reading the magazines – kids dropped them in favor of comic books – and you can’t scare grownup mystery readers with a slinking figure in a black cape or a nasty old clutching hand.

 THE INTERVIEW (conducted on September 17, 1988)