Ellery Queen listed The Infallible Godahl as one of the most influential short story collections in the genre of detective and mystery fiction. The most entertaining of the six
Godahl tales, published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1913 and
collected in book form in 1914, is “The Infallible Godahl,” which features a Moonstone-like
jewel stolen from the eye of an idol, a satisfying instance of the biter bit,
and a reflexive confusion of an author with his character some might call
“postmodern.” Oliver Armiston is the author of the Godahl stories within
the Godahl stories, which celebrate the title character’s daring burglaries.
Armiston is flattered and fooled into casing a fortress of a mansion for a
burglary and then publishing a story in which his character Godahl shows how
the heist can be done. The real thief, who has set Armiston up, then follows
the Godahl plan and commits an equally real burglary the day after the story is
published. The police show up at Armiston’s door with some hard questions.
Godahl gives the blind Malvino the
Magician tips about the layout of his social club, the Pegasus, where the
magician is scheduled to perform (“Blind Man’s Buff”). He goes through his act,
and then, according to his contract, is locked up in the cloakroom with
everything he has managed to pick from the members’ pockets. He can keep it all
if he can get out of the cloakroom. He manages to do so by unpinning the hinges
from the exterior door (Godahl has tipped him that the doors open inward). One
twist is that Godahl shows up and says to the members that they have not got Malvino,
whom he has tied up and gagged and delivered to the police, after discovering
that he is not blind after all. The members bet him that they do have
Malvino and lose their money. Another twist is that the club members have
earlier attacked Malvino during his act and torn the blindfold from his face,
revealing that “It was horribly blind now, stripped of its silk ribbon.
Covering the eye sockets like plasters were great black disks larger than
silver dollars.” So has Malvino outwitted Godahl, who furnished him with an
alibi? How has Malvino managed to be in two places at once? Is he really blind?
The stories about Godahl “deserve to
be better known,” in Julian Symons’s words (Bloody Murder: From the
Detective Story to the Crime Novel), and Howard Haycraft (Murder for
Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story) noted the timelessness
and ingenuity of Anderson’s plots, calling him “one of the finest natural
American talents of the era.” The two comments are very representative of
Symons’s reserved and Haycraft’s effusive praise for writers they like.
In “The Night of a Thousand Thieves,”
Godahl finds a crank inventor who has raged against the burglar alarms in the
city’s businesses—and tried to sell them his own. Godahl bets the inventor he
can’t set off a couple of thousand alarms at once in the Manhattan
jewelry-maker’s district. When the alarms do go off, Godahl goes to the most
prestigious jeweler of all, Ludwig Telfen’s, and steals a few select items,
including a jeweled cross that he hangs, so the legend goes, near the spot on a
Canadian river where he had been saved from drowning. The gesture reminded me
of Chesterton’s master criminal Flambeau, who was introduced in the same
magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, three years before Godahl.
Appearing to be seeking stock tips
from an aging Wall Street mogul, Godahl breaks into his house and steals
instead an ancient zircon ring he imagines someday donating to the British
Museum. In this episode, “Counterpoint,” Godahl also bluffs and scares away a
State Department man who’s shadowing the old man, solving a musical score
cipher that directs the man’s attention to a mysterious Japanese traveller.
Godahl, with his passion for gold,
imagines a great coup equivalent to dredging up the gold coins from the Julius
Tower or the gold chain of the Incas at the bottom of a mountain lake.
Disguised as Dahlog, the expert Danish electrician, he has laid the groundwork
months earlier: “The Fifth Tube” leading into the seventh-floor tank where the
U. S. Assay office on Pine and Wall Streets refines gold by electrolysis, is
not a conduit like the others but a hollow siphon to remove the tank’s forty
gallons, which Godahl assays as “61,000 drops to the gallon, at ten cents a
drop.” As a “mud rat” or scavenger, Godahl drains the contents into a stolen
dump cart at the electrical conduit box on the street.
Godahl turns detective in the
concluding story, “An All-Star Cast,” when he realizes that “a stock company
composed of the most distinguished actors and actresses out of jail” is
performing in order to fool an audience of one bank official into giving up
some of the assets of the city’s most famous philanthropist. He calls the
police, but he allows the company’s mastermind to go free.
A later collection of Anderson’s
stories titled Book of Murder (1930), consists of ten stories published
in The Saturday Evening Post during the latter half of the twenties, of
which seven feature the team of NYPD Deputy Commissioner Parr and Oliver
Armiston, “the extinct author,” of the Godahl tales. In the first, “Beyond All
Conjecture,” they are helped by a good medical examiner and a beat cop named
John Terry whom Parr has promoted to detective school because of his astute
observation. They all track, and Terry collars, a grudge murderer who thinks
he’s pulled off the perfect crime. Armiston is an “extinct author” because he
was finally persuaded to stop writing crime stories that were being used as
templates for real crimes. In the first story in an earlier collection, The
Infallible Godahl, discussed above, Armiston was tricked by a con man into
writing a jewel robbery story that gave the con man important information about
how to steal a real jewel, which he then proceeded to do. Howard Haycraft listed Book of Murder as one of "The 125 Most Important Detective-Crime Fiction Books" in his "Definitive Library of Mystery Fiction."
“The Wedding Gift,” the second story
in Book of Murder, features Morel, Parr’s able assistant, who pursues
the case and the couple who are planning insurance fraud. In “The Japanese
Parasol,” Morel and another valued assistant of Parr’s named Pelts cause a
small fire at the abandoned Dilks mansion, where they discover the body of
Barry Dilks. Then Armiston and Parr invite in Dilks’s brother-in-law for some
staged telegraph messages from the field that seem to disconcert him.
Three
of the stories feature rural crime solvers, farmer Jason Selfridge (who has a
degree in an unnamed field of technology, and seems very well informed about
the ways of water) and Orlo Sage, the country constable in a sparsely populated
area, somewhere in New England. The first of the Jason/Orlo stories is the
fourth in the collection, “The Dead End,” in which Jason’s Aunt Ivy, generally
considered crazy because she believes her drowned son Leander is coming back
someday, is vindicated. The next one, “The Magician,” features Jason and Orlo,
but the solving of a local murder is done by a stranger whose automobile
wanders into Jason’s yard by mistake, whom the dog decides not to bark at, and
who manages to milk Jason’s most recalcitrant cow. The third story featuring
the pair of Jason and Orlo is “A Start in Life,” concerning a secret meeting of
politicians and tycoons in a house owned by one of the group in Orlo’s county.
A death—possibly a murder—is ruled as by natural causes by the medical officer,
who has been summoned by a former judge, now a member of Congress. Jason and Orlo
are parties to these proceedings.
In
the seventh story we are back in New York with Parr and Armiston. “Big Time” looks at first like Cuyler
Braxton’s first chance to defend a client in a “big-time murder” case, but it
turns into a show, carefully stage-managed by Parr and Armiston, to expose the
real murderer. The milieu is that of world-class couturiers, musicians, and
music coaches. The next story, “The Recoil,” is actually solved by Arthur
Vachen, an old schoolmaster of Armiston’s, who points out that the overcharged
gun would obviously leave damage on the hand that fired it. For a while, the
story looks a little like “The Problem of Thor Bridge.” In the penultimate
story, “Gulf Stream Green” is the color that the diva Leocadie will make known
and desired just by wearing it. Unfortunately, she dresses a young girl in her
green outfit to divert the attention of gawkers, putting the girl in danger.
In
the last story, “The Door Key,” Jason and Orlo team up with Parr and Armiston (Jason,
Parr, and Armiston are old fishing buddies) to solve the disappearance of one
of Jason’s neighbors and the murder of a woman. It’s a bit of a reach for a
unifying device for the two groups of otherwise unrelated stories, but it’s
worth mentioning that the characters Parr and Armiston, as well as Parr’s
assistant Morel, appear in other stories aside from the two collections I
discuss here. In a collection titled The Notorious Sophie Lang (1921
which appeared between the Godahl collection and Book of Murder, Parr
and Armiston first team up, and Morel appears in a story probably published the
year Anderson died.
