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.
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