This is the final book in the Doan and Carstairs comic private eye series. I absolutely loved the first novel, The Mouse in the Mountain (1943), but I was more lukewarm about Sally’s in the Alley (1943), which is the follow up title. So, I think my expectations going into the third book were a little lower, but I remained keen to complete the trilogy. The first two mysteries were reviewed in The Saturday Review, but this final book does not seem to have made the cut. However, Anthony Boucher reviewed all three titles for the San Francisco Chronicle. On the 26th December, looking back on the fiction of 1943, Boucher included Norbert Davis as one of a ‘dozen admirable new writers, who landed near the very top on first try and from whom we may well expect the absolute bests of the 1944 […]’. Boucher was therefore disappointed when no mystery novels were forthcoming from Davis in 1944 or 1945. When Oh, Murderer Mine came out a year later Boucher described it thus:
‘The beauty business and the academic life meet startlingly. Result: assorted murders for plump detective Doan and his bored Great Dane Carstairs. Homicidal humour is a matter of personal taste, but to me Mr Davis is one of the very few writers besides Alice Tilton [Phoebe Atwood Taylor] who can be exceedingly funny in the midst of murder.’
This latter sentiment is echoed by Bill Pronzini who said Davis ‘was one of the few writers to successfully blend the so-called hardboiled story with farcical humour’. Moreover, Tom and Enid Schantz (who reprinted this story in their Rue Morgue Press series) opined that ‘the third book in the trilogy, is easily the most farcical of his books’ and they further added that it was originally ‘published by Handi-Book Mysteries, a literary refuge for many of the low-rent private eye writers of the 1940s.’
Synopsis
‘Doan, a chubby private eye with a fondness for weak women and strong drink, and Carstairs, his enormous Great Dane sidekick, have been hired by 54-year-old but still glamorous beauty maven Heloise of Hollywood to make sure that no young lovely tries to steal her 26-year-old hunk of a husband, Eric Trent. Shortly thereafter, Trent, a meteorologist at a local college) and known in the magazines as “Handsome Lover Boy”) steals the office of young anthropologist Melissa Gregory, shots are fired, Carstairs runs wild in a beauty salon, and bodies start falling.’
Overall Thoughts
The opening of the story feels akin to a comedy romance movie where the female lead (in this case Melissa Gregory) and the male lead (Eric Trent) meet for the first time and instantly take a dislike to one another, yet you know somehow they’ll fall in love, despite the fact Melissa has a wet blanket of a beau and Eric is married. Melissa’s fury at Eric is at least understandable as he has gone over her head, using his clout with the college president to have her turfed out of her new office (with the only private ladies’ powder room) so he can use it instead. Suffice to say Eric acts like a jerk.
It only takes a few pages for Doan and his canine assistant Carstairs (who upon reflection feels like the animal version of Leo Bruce’s Lionel Townsend) to appear. Melissa’s first encounter with them is a little unnerving:
‘She had gone about ten paces when something stirred sluggishly in the shadows. Melissa stopped with a startled gasp. It was too early yet for students to be lurking about, and anyway this couldn’t possibly be mistaken for one. It was a dog. It was the most enormous dog Melissa had ever seen. It sat right down in the hall in front of her in a leisurely and self-possessed way and proceeded to look her over from head to foot in a manner that was not far from insulting.’
Carstairs’ snobbish attitude towards humanity is one of the sources of humour in this trilogy. It is in this scene that Doan also points out that Carstairs is a great distraction tool as no one sees Doan coming, as they are too fixated on the dog.
Davis does not hang around nor delay unleashing the chaos as by the end of chapter one the plot has already taken quite a dark turn. Melissa returns, one evening, to her university rented apartment (which it seems she will get chucked out of shortly for you know who) to find a figure clad in black rummaging in her drawers. This intruder then immediately decides to attack her. Whilst Melissa does not lose her life, the same cannot be said for someone else.
The tension gives way to humour as the local cop in charge of the case, Humphrey, has a grudge against Doan (as Carstairs once humiliated him) and he is determined to arrest Doan for any crime going. The case has nebulous beginnings, but Doan does start to build something out of it. That said, I would say this tale is more farce than mystery, which is exemplified by the beauty salon sequence, where Carstairs’s marauding antics cause pandemonium. Whilst a corpse is discovered at the end of it all, the previous events are B-movie comedy fodder, with Melissa struggling to maintain control of Carstairs and her towel.
A surprising feature of this narrative is that although Heloise of Hollywood is the one who hired Doan to “protect” her husband from other women, we do not see her on the page until the second half of the book. Nevertheless, her presence is felt throughout the plot, which her decisions shape. It is she who prevents Doan from being arrested in the chapter two, but it is also her who forces the body in her salon to be deemed a suicide (an impossibility given the person was strangled). Personally, I don’t think we spend enough time with Heloise for her to be truly villainous. However, due to the obstacles, she throws out, Doan’s adventures take a tangential turn. More than one character has an agenda, and Doan is happy to let the situation develop before intervening. All in all, I would say the narrative is hard to predict or map out.
This is a quick and short read. The denouement requires a large amount of explaining from Doan, based on supposition more than concrete clues in some places, but to enjoy this book you need to treat it as a mad caper. It is not to be taken seriously and at 128 pages it does not outstay its welcome. Given some of the comic scenes included I wonder if Davis wrote it with a view to having it filmed. The final scene in particular has vintage comedy film written all over it.
Rating: 4/5 (I enjoyed this book more than I thought I would, but I think that might be because I took it on its own terms.)