ALMOST SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: MURDER PICTURE

[Having nearly completed a lengthy post on George Harmon Coxe's "Flashgun" Casey story "Murder Picture" (Black Mask, January 1935), my computer ate it with no hope of retrieval.  I'm too frustrated to rewrite the entire post, so this little bit will have to do.

[Casey was Coxe's first newspaper photographer crime-fighting hero -- tough, glib, and not afraid to use either his gun or his firsts.  He appeared 23 times in Black Mask through 1943, and once (in a novel abridgement}in the Star Weekly in 1962.  There have been five novels and two short story collections about the character, as well as two films, a television series (1951-1952), a radio series (1943-1955, under a variety of titles), a three-act play, an audio CD, and a comic book (four issues 1949-1950).  Casey was also the main character in Edward S. Aarons' Dead Heat (1951, published as by "Paul Ayres").

[Only a year after creating Casey, Coxe repurposed the character aa the milder ( although still tough as nails when needed) crime photographer Kent Murdock.  Murdock was a cleaned-up version of Casey and was created for the book marker, appearing in 23 novels from 1935 through 1973, and only one short story (from 1947).  Murdock appeared in just one motion picture (1936), as well in a digest-sized paperback graphic novel adaptation of Murdock's Four Frightened Women (1950, with the dubious claim of being the very first graphic novel)

[Coxe (1901-1984) published 63 novels from 1934 to 1975.  Among his other popular characters was Dr. Paul Standish, who was played by Gary Merrill in a short-lived summer replacement series on CBS Radio in 1948.  Coxe was named a Grand Master by The Mystery Writers of America in 1964, and had served as that group's president in 1952.  Like many other very popular mystery writers of the time -- including fellow MWA Grand Masters Baynard Kendrick, Judson Philips, and Aaron Marc Stein --  Coxe may well be considered a "forgotten writer."]

"Murder Picture" is a pivotal story in the Flashgun Casey opus and it is the one where Casey leaves the Globe for The Express.  There's gangsters, a murder, an escaped girl prisoner, and the son of the new owner of the Globe (and the brother of the paper's managing editor) who happened to get on Casey's camera being where he should not have been.  It's a tangled mess and Casey is right in the middle of it.

"Murder Picture" was also reprinted in Otto Penzler's The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (2007).  Check it out.