The MacHarg O’Malley stories may
have less backstory than any in detective literature. O’Malley, whose first
name we never learn, is a Manhattan police detective whose “affairs”—that is,
his cases, are told by a completely nameless narrator who may be a journalist
or in some other literary field. In “Scotty Dog,” O’Malley remarks “no
newspaper has ever give me the right initials yet,” suggesting he might be
known by initials rather than a first name, but we never learn what the letters
might be. The stories—thirty-three of them—are very short, with word counts of
about 1500 to 3000 words, and were published in Collier’s beginning in
1930. An O’Malley’s case usually begins, as Mike Grost has noted, with
O’Malley’s pointing out the hopelessness of figuring it out; when he has
successfully solved the case and been congratulated by the narrator, he is
equally pessimistic about getting any credit for cracking it (“A Guide to Classic
Mystery and Detection,” mikegrost.com/classics.html ).
O’Malley’s powers of observation rival those who came before him in detective fiction, but he is less showy about them. The fact that he often keeps them to himself until late in the story means that these stories are not of the “fair play” sort where the reader has all the information he needs to anticipate the detective’s solution. He uses tried and true devices: in “The Ring,” he places an ad in a newspaper that reels the malefactor in like a big-game fish. But he is also inventive; when he is frustrated at the failure of the usual police ploy of getting x to confess by pretending that his pal y has already cracked and implicated x, O’Malley invents an account of the crime y has supposedly spoken while asleep (“The Sleeptalker”) and uses that to get x to talk. In another tale, “The Man in the Truck,” O’Malley pretends the murderer confessed and implicated the murdered man’s wife while under gas at the dentist’s. The original hackneyed device of simply telling one malefactor that his buddy has confessed and implicated him is used in “The Widow’s Share.” To quote Mike Grost again, the stories “emphasize the ideas of the detective, whether they consist of novel ways to get the killer to confess, or finding ways to track down suspects from the slenderest of clues. Almost none of them glamorize the ‘routine police work’ beloved of the…school of police procedurals.”
Some of O’Malley’s methods use animals to get at the truth. The “Scotty Dog” always goes home to get fed after O’Malley releases him in various places in town, but when he releases the dog in one part of town, the dog goes to the penthouse apartment of the murdered man’s mistress, who helps solve the crime. The “Dumb Witness” is another dog: O’Malley telephones all the suspects and lets the dog listen to the answering voice; only one gets the dog excited. More deviously, in “The Cat’s Eyes,” O’Malley tells the suspects a story about scientists being able to analyze the brain of the cat who witnessed the crime to find out what the cat knows. The murderer isn’t sure if it's a joke or a myth, but he kills the cat, and O’Malley gets him to confess.
In “Almost Perfect” and “The Right Gun,” O’Malley uses supposed psychics or clairvoyants to spur the murderers into action and give themselves away; in both cases it’s by trying to get rid of a gun they hid shortly after the murder. Neither they nor O’Malley really believe in such people, but with a little trickery O’Malley gets them to think they daren’t take a chance by ignoring the so-called psychic.
The Affairs of O’Malley impressed Ellery Queen enough to make it onto his list of most important collections of detective mystery short stories. Thirty years before this book was published, MacHarg had teamed up with Edwin Balmer to write stories about a psychologist who uses instruments like the modern polygraph to solve crimes, in The Achievements of Luther Trant (1910), which also made Ellery Queen’s list. Nothing could be less scientific than O’Malley’s methods, but he also catches the crooks.
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