SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: SLAY RIDE TO ETERNITY

 "Slay Ride to Eternity" by Tedd Thomey  (first published in the Australian edition of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, May 1957; then reprinted in the American edition of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, June 1957, followed by the United Kingdom edition of the magazine, September 1957; reprinted in the British paperback anthology Crime Squad, 1968, purportedly edited -- as one of four such anthologies -- by "Ed McBain" [Evan Hunter] -- and perhaps it actually was)

Jim Holt is an oil rigging worker just returned from Saudi Arabia.  On the journey back to the States, he had the misfortune to get into a game of craps in which he lost all the  money he had saved.  Now broke, he ran into Bill Tropp, a man he had worked with in the oil field in nearby Signal Hill two years earlier; Tropp lent him five bucks to tide him over and, more importantly, introduced him to Vern Stickle, who then hired him to work as a pipe racker on one of his wells.  Holt remembers getting into Stickle's car, and then...nothing.

Holt woke up sore, confused, and unable to move.  Slowly he realized that he was lying on the floor of an old derrick.  Barely opening his eyes, he saw Stickle in the distance arguing with two people, a tall man and a young woman.  The tall man grabbed Stickle and dragged him to working derrick; the woman saying, "You can't back out now!  If you had been more careful two years ago..."  The tall man pinned Stickle to the floor of the derrick and held him as the derrick's heavy counterweight came don like a hammer, crushing Stickle's skull.  Holt was horrified but still unable to move.  The woman took Stickle's cracked, bloody glasses and placed them in Holt's hand; then she threw the glasses into the distance where authorities would find them.  Holt -- still immobile -- could feel the woman searching his pockets.  He was then lifted and thrown into the back seat of Stickle's car.  Holt was slowly getting control of his body back as the pair plotted to drive the car, with Holt, off a cliff.  He suddenly recognized the voice of the tall man:  Vic Emerson, who had been one of his bosses two years before.

Holt managed enough control of his body to open the car door and drop out onto the side of the road.  He began to slide down the cliff, slowly at first, then rolling uncontrollably until he slammed kinto a shed at the bottom of the cliff.  Badly damaged, again he found himself unable to move as Emerson and the girl inched their way down the mountainside toward him.  The headlights of an oncoming car stopped them and they scurried back to the top and drove off in Stickler's car.  Holt eventually got control of his body enough to get up and stumble toward a building in the distance, whose lights proclaimed it to be a bar.  There he could call the police.  Then Holt checked his pockets.  He had Stickler's wallet filled with cash, in addition to Stickler's distinctive ring and watch.  Holt was being set up.  He did not know why Stickler was murdered, why he was being framed, or who the mysterious woman was.  He did not dare call the police.  Could things get any worse.  Of course they could.  Holt decided to talk to Bill Tropp, who had also worked with Emerson to years before.  Maybe Tropp could give him some information about Emerson.  Bur when Holt got to Tropp's home, the door was open and Tropp lay dead, stabbed with a knife.  on the wall was a crimson message:  HOLT STAB M.  then Tropp's wife came, screaming...

Holt also learned that he had supposedly died two years before in an explosion that killed two other people, a blast that reduced all three bodies to jelly,  An accident supposedly caused by Holt.

A murder scheme from two years before could have unraveled merely because Jim Holt returned to the area from the Arabian oil fields.  But how to prove it?  The evidence against Holt in the murders of Stickler and Tropp was overwhelming.

A fast-paced, doom-laden story worthy of Cornell Woolrich at his pulpiest.

Tedd Thomey (1920-2008 -- "the second 'd' in Tedd was an affectation, added by a young man hoping to be noticed") published more than half a hundred crime and detective stories in the pulps and digest from the late 1940s through  the 1950s.  He wrote a  number of crime novels, mainly paperback originals, including Killer in White , And Dream of Evil, and Flight to Tokla-Ma.  His biggest-selling book appears to an "as told to" written for Mrs. Florence Addland, The Big Love, detailing her teen-age daughter Beverly's sexual relationship with actor Errol Flynn -- a huge scandal in its day.

The June 1957 issue of Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine can be read online at the Luminist Archive.