SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: THE MONKEY MURDER

 "The Monkey Murder" by Erle Stanley Gardner  (first published in Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine, January 1939; reprinted in Gardner's collection The Bird in Hand and Four Other Stories, 1969; reprinted in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, edited by Otto Penzler, 2007 (the section of this book in which "The Monkey Murder" appeared was also published as Pulp Fiction:  The Villains, 2007) 

Prolific author Erle Stanly Gardner wrote hundreds of stories for the pulps before (and after) he hit it big with his first Perry Mason novel, using at least a dozen different pseudonyms, and featuring a slew of series characters -- among them Ed Jenkins, the Phantom Crook; crusading lawyer Ken Corning; desert rat Bob Zane; The Patent Leather Kid; Senor Lobo; Speed Dash, The Human Fly; The Man in the Silver Mask; Fish Mouth McGinnis...and one of his most popular characters, Lester Leith.  

Leith, a modern day Robin Hood, appeared in more than seventy novelettes from 1929 to 1943.  Leith robbed from the guilty, giving much of his gains to charity while keeping small portion for himself.  He lived a life of ease in a penthouse apartment with his servant Beaver, whom he always called Scuttle to irritate him.  Scuttle was no ordinary servant, but was a police informant installed in Leith's household by police sergeant Ackley in the hopes of finally nailing Leith for his many suspected crimes.  Leith, of course, knew of Scuttle's true identity, but kept that knowledge to himself.

Leith's M.O. was to scan the daily papers for stories of crime, the more bizarre and inexplicable the better.  He claimed this was a mere intellectual pursuit , and that merely by reading the newspaper articles, he would be able to solve many of the crimes.  Often to prove his point, he would send Scuttle to do unusual errands, allowing him to keep one step (or more) ahead of Ackley and Scuttle.  Leith's adventures are uniformly fast-moving, glaringly enigmatic, and -- for Ackley and Scuttle -- totally baffling.  The joy to the stories is in trying to figure put exactly what Leith is doing and why.  In the end, Ackley has egg on his face and Scuttle is no closer to proving Leith a crook.  It's a formula that works surprisingly well.

In "The Monkey Murder," Leith's attention is brought to a news item about -- you guessed it -- the murder of a monkey.  Peter Mainwaring, a world traveler and suspected smuggler, returned from India with a monkey, which supposedly came from a temple dedicated to the Monkey God Hanuman.  The temple had a huge statues of the Monkey God, covered in gold leaf and containing large emeralds for the monkey's eyes and nipples.  The emeralds were stolen and Mainwaring is suspected by the police of having smuggles them into the country.  Customs officials found no trace of the emeralds when Mainwaring reentered the country.  Because of the monkey's association with the temple, both thugee and monkey priests would exact a death penalty from any monkey that deserted the temple.  And so, a bandit held up Mainwaring's car and shot the monkey in the head, then proceeded to slice open its body with a blade.

Both the reader and Leith are smart enough to realize that the monkey had been made to swallow the emeralds and had been cut open to get the gems from the monkey's stomach.  So who has the emeralds now?

Leith sends Scuttle out for two specially constructed canes, four imitation emeralds, a package of cotton, and a gum-chewing secretary.  Yes, a gum-chewing secretary, one with great legs, and the more obsessive about the gum-chewing, the better.  The actual advertisement Leith dictated to Scuttle read:  "A position at good salary is open for a pulchritudinous young woman with shapely means of locomotion. amiable, easygoing, good-natured, acquiescent young woman preferred, one who never becomes nervous under any circumstances, a proficient, adroit, expert, and inveterate gum chewer, preferably a careless parker, must be able to pop her gum loudly.  Salary, three hundred dollars per month with all traveling expense."

And then the fun begins...

I advise spacing out any reading of the Leith stories.  The formula may become a bit predicable over time, but an occasional Lester Leith story can be an invigorating tonic.