SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: THE MURDER GUN

"The Murder Gun" by Frank Gruber  (first published in Clues Detective Stories, January 1941; reprinted in All Fiction Detective Stories, 1942, and in Detective Stories, Vol. 6 #6, 1953 as "The Case of the Murder Gun")

"It had blazed a path of death in the days of Western pioneers; now it was on its murderous way again -- this time on swanky Park Avenue!"

Sam Vedder considers himself a tough guy and a pretty good detective, although his boss at the Blight Detective Agency, Captain Billy Blight, disagrees.  Lovely and wealthy Evelyn Walker hires the agency to retrieve an incriminating letter from blackmailer Adam Lord.  Vedder is to pay Lord off with $5,000, retrieve the letter, and then force Lord to give the cash back -- a substantial part of the cash would be the agency's fee   All goes well, except that Vedder is beaten up by Lord, but he manages to get away with the money and the sealed envelope with the letter.  Alas, the envelope contains only a blank sheet of paper, and Lord now threatens Evelyn Walker that she pay him $10,000 for the letter.  Now all Vedder has to do is find Lord, who is hiding out somewhere in a very big city and retrieve the letter before Lord will turn it over to Evelyn's husband.  Using several ingenious methods, Vedder tracks Lord down, but Lord's apartment is apparently empty.  Someone sneaks up behind Vedder and knocks him out in the bedroom.  When Vedder regains consciousness, Lord is in the living, shot dead, with and antique gun by his side.  To complicate things, while Vedder was unconscious, Evelyn had entered Lord's apartment. found the body, picked up the gun and then dropped it leaving her fingerprints.

So far, all of this is standard pulps and television fare.  Then comes the twist.  the gun was actually one once owned by Jesse James.  James, who once rode with Quantell's raiders, had given the gun to a fellow comrade.  The gun then made its way to Adam Lord's grandfather, who also rode with Quantell.  He in turn gave it to Lord's father, and eventually Lord inherited the piece.  Lord sold it a rare gun collector Roscoe Underwood.  Underwood claimed the gun had been stolen the month before, stating that he thought it was taken by Stuart Canfield, a millionaire and fellow rare gun collector, who's offer of $20,000 for the Navy Colt had been rejected by Underwood.  Canfield denies having stolen the gun.

So who killed Lord?  One obvious suspect was Vedder himself, who had had a public altercation with him just hours earlier.  Or could it have been his beautiful client, who could not risk an incriminating letter get to her husband.  Or what about the two rival gun collectors, neither of whom had any love for Lord?  Or perhaps it was Evelyn's unseen husband determined to keep Evelyn's secrets secret?  And what about the two thugs who tried to kidnap Vedder after he left the gun collectors?  

There are a number of other twists and turns before Vedder managed to wrap up the case in a tight bow.

Frank Gruber (1904-1969) was one of the more successful pulp writers, writing more than 300 stories for the pulps.  His most popular characters were Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg, who appeared in fifteen novels over fifteen years.  Other detectives included Oliver Quade ("The Human Encyclopedia"), Simon Lash, and Otis Beagle (originally by "Charles K. Boston"), as well as minor series characters (often used as fillers for the hero pulps) such as Jim Strong, T. T. Todd, Jud Stanton, John Vedders, Douglas March, Samuel Deering,   He also wrote about two dozen popular western novels -- one of which, Peace Marshall, sold over one million copies and was filmed as The Kansan, starring richard Dix.  Late in his career, Gruber wrote several well-received suspense and thriller novels.  He also penned biographies of Horatio Alger and Zane Gray, as well as a highly recommended memoir of his days as a pulp writer, The Pulp Jungle.  Gruber was also a successful Hollywood screenwriter, credited with nearly three dozen films, including The Mask of Dimitrios, Johnny Angel, and Dressed to Kill.   Among his television work was the creation of three series -- Tales of Wells Fargo, The Texan, and Shotgun Slade.

Sam Vedder appeared in only three short stories from 1940 and 1941.  Gruber must have enjoyed the name; earlier he wrote eleven stories about "John Vedders" as backup pieces for the pulp magazine Operator #5.  Four years after publication of "The Murder Gun." Gruber published the novel The Last Doorbell under the pseudonym "John K. Vedder."  Gruber also used a major plot point from "The Wrong Gun" six months after that story appeared in the Johnny fletcher and Sam Cragg novel The Navy Colt, in which, once again, the famed gun once owned by Jesse James comes into play.

The 1942 issue of All Fiction Detective Stories, an annual containing reprints from various Street & smith detective magazines, which also includes stories by William E. Barrett, Norbert Davis, Steve Fisher, Ellery Queen, Walter Ripperger, and Edward Ronns, can be found at the link:

https://archive.org/details/all-fiction-detective-stories-1942