Frank Gruber toiled unsuccessfully for years trying to break into the writing game. Late in 1934, editor Rogers Terrill asked if he could supply a 5500-word filler story for Operator 5 magazine by the next day. He did, and his career began to boom. He wrote over 300 stories for 40 pulp magazines, published over 60 novels, selling more than 90 million copies, and wrote 65 screenplays and hundreds of television scripts. Gruber created three television series: Tales of Wells Farge, The Texan. and Shotgun Slade. Among his most popular detective characters were the team of Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg, featured in fifteen nvels. Fletcher and Cragg are small-time scam artists, eking out a living trying to sell books about physical culture, using the brawny Cragg as an exemplar. Other popular characters were the human encyclopedia Oliver Quade and his sidekick Charlie Boston, the flashy Otis Beagle, and Simon Lash. Gruber published two dozen western novels, beginning with Peace Marshal (1939); the book, rejected by every New York agent at the time, became the successful Richard Dix film The Kansan, and went on to sell more than a million copies.
The French Key was scripted by Gruber and based on his first Johnny Fletcher-Sam Cragg mystery. Fletcher and Cragg skip out of their low-rent room, sneaking back to pick up their trunks. They find a body in the room -- a man holding a gold coin. Fletcher learns from a numismitist name Vedder (Vedder was one of Gruber's pen names) that the coin is a supposedly rare Spanish one. Turns out there's a gold smuggling ring melting down the stolen gold into rare coins. Not only do Fletcher and Cragg have to solve the murder, they have to located the stolen gold. Albert Dekker stars as Johnny Fletcher and muscleman Mike Mazurki plays Sam Cragg. Evelyn Akers is onboard as eye candy. Playing the incompetent Detective Fox is Three Stooges' "Curly Joe" DeRita. Walter Colmes directed. This was the only Fletcher-Craig story filmed, although a Johnny Fletcher radio series ran for six mnonths on ABC in 1948. In addition, Gruber wrote one episode of the television anthology series Suspense featuring Sam Cragg, sans Johnny Fletcher.
Enjoy this wise-cracking mystery comedy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Xn54ZeGsjc
So many unfamiliar actors. I forget there was a thriving B business. Did these films play the back end of a double bill?
ReplyDeleteUsually, the shorter "B" films/features appeared before the "A" or higher-budget and longer films in most theaters.
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