This is the first collection of Hanvey stories, followed by Detours (1927) and Scrambled Yeggs (1934) collecting all of the stories about the very fat detective (“Down these mean streets a man must waddle,” quipped Kevin Burton Smith in his blog, “The Thrilling Detective”) with the disconcerting, sleepy eyes and the slow-motion blink. The seven stories here appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and The Chicago Tribune.
Hanvey solves the first crime by accident, while working on another case; his “Fish Eyes” so disconcert the bank embezzler that he confesses. These stories are inverted mysteries in which we are told whodunnit at the beginning and even watch the crime being committed. In the second story, “Homespun Silk,” Hanvey and the jewel thief, Arthur Sherwood, are on the most genial of terms. “Outside of the underworld,” Cohen tells us of Hanvey, “he had no intimates.”
Cohen’s diction in these stories is often Latinate and occasionally circumlocutious. Sometimes the effect is exaggeratedly comic, as when he says Hanvey’s was “a face of incarnadined complexion.” Sometimes the effect is just purple, as in a view of Central Park at dusk: “The shadowy walks under the trees were dislimning in softly gathering gloom.” But he is capable of succinct and direct narration.
Hanvey is even more palsy with the malefactor, Billy Scanlan, in “Common Stock.” Scanlan is out to get a stock proxy from a courier who’s carrying it from a big stockholder in L. A. to the stockholder’s meeting in New York. But Hanvey, traveling with the courier, is one too many for Scanlan.
Hanvey not only has remarkably small “fish eyes,” but he blinks in slow motion, keeping them lidded for a full second before opening again. He smokes foul-smelling cigars and turns down the offer of good Havanas in favor of them. His favorite piece of personal jewelry is a gold toothpick that is apparently encased in some sort of spring mechanism; the device is always on his watchchain. Perhaps Hanvey’s greatest asset is his knowledge of the criminal world. He boasts that there is no crook with any reputation in the United States that he doesn’t know. Many of these crooks are his friends, even ones he has sent to prison.
“Helen of Troy, N. Y.” asks Hanvey to help keep her husband straight. Hanvey tries, but also keeps his eyes open in case things are not what they seem. In “Caveat Emptor,” he really does help another crook’s wife keep her husband from an unjust conviction for stealing jewels. Hanvey’s friendship with a thief who stole a valuable set of pearls enables him to set up the nasty jeweler who set up the husband.
Hanvey’s psychological skills are tested as he is hired to separate a smitten daughter from the conman she has fallen in love with; the story is “Knight’s Gambit.” And in the concluding story, “Pink Bait,” Hanvey outwits a smooth and cultured grifter who wants to fence some very special pearls. Ellery Queen included the Hanvey stories in his list of the most important short story collections in the first hundred years or so of the mystery and detective genre. Some of the stories are more like capers, and Mike Grost has gone so far as to say that these are not detective stories at all (“Michael Grost’s Class Mystery and Detective Fiction Blog”). But most of them involve some detective work, and a few are quite of the orthodox detective mystery type. And they all entertain.
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