Dr. Poggioli: Criminologist (The Lost Classics Book 14) Read online

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  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Poggioli’s Origins

  It all started with a Camay soap salesman. But I get ahead of myself.

  Thomas Sigismund Stribling is chiefly remembered today for two reasons. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for his novel of the previous year, The Store. And he won critical acclaim for his 1929 short-story collection, Clues of the Caribbees, quirky mysteries starring one Henry Poggioli.

  If Stribling hadn’t won the Pulitzer, it is doubtful that libraries today would still stock any of his books. Even with the Pulitzer, he is largely forgotten, even among collectors of 20th century literature.

  But the mystery world will never fully forget him. Clues of the Caribbees was recommended in the two most important guides to collecting detective fiction: “The Haycraft-Queen Definitive Library of Detective-Crime-Mystery Fiction” (compiled by Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen) and (Ellery) “Queen’s Quorum,” the latter honoring the best short-story collections in the detection field. A book included on either of those influential lists will always be sought after by collectors. Additional praise came from critic Anthony Boucher, who included Clues of the Caribbees in his “Silver 13” list of the 13 best detective short-story collections published between 1920 and 1945; and from James Sandoe, who included it in his “Reader’s Guide to Crime.”

  Though critically acclaimed, the book did not sell well. As Stribling explained in his autobiography: “I have at home a row of detective anthologies, each collection containing one of these [Caribbees] stories. They were never popular on their own as a single book, but they were quite popular torn all to pieces. Just what one would make out of that, I don’t know; are they the flavoring in the cake, or the drop of deplorably scented ambergris in the perfume vials?”

  In 1965, the year of his death (at age 84), Stribling stated: “I had a funny series of detective stories about one Henry Poggioli, Ph.D., LLD, Doctor of Criminology, and Professor of Criminology in the Ohio State University. The reason I made him from Ohio State was to prevent him being from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, not to mention the fact that I rescued him from the still greater dangers of Oxford, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne.”

  Now we come to the Camay soap salesman.

  Still in 1965, Stribling stated: “The actual reason why I ever started Dr. Henry Poggioli on his career of illustrious obtuseness was quite personal. A boy had come down to Clifton [Tennessee, Stribling’s hometown] from the North to visit my girl. When he was gone, I used the name Poggioli, which vaguely resembled that of the interloper, wrote these stories of dumbness, and read them to Louella. They amused her very much and we got married.”

  The interloper from the North was a traveling salesman who peddled Camay soap.

  The Original Five Stories

  Perhaps Stribling exaggerated. Or he repeated a legend that had evolved away from accuracy. For although the very first Poggioli story does indeed contain an unlikeable soap salesman, it isn’t Poggioli.

  The five stories in Clues of the Caribbees were first published in Adventure magazine in 1925 and 1926, and collected in book form by Doubleday, Doran in 1929. The stories, often with exotic elements, each take place on a different Caribbean island. The islands are brought to life by Stribling, who had visited South America earlier in the decade.

  The humor of the Poggioli series is evidenced on the first page of the debut story, “The Refugees”: “Deposed presidents flying out of Venezuela are a fairly ordinary phenomenon in the West Indies.”

  Set on the island of Curacao, “The Refugees” concerns a death by poison at the Hotel Saragossa, whose international guests include two Americans; one, a traveling soap salesman, upon hearing of the death, says: “It’s a shame we can’t go in and look at the body. I paid my three bucks a day here, and they told me it included everything.” The unnamed salesman later offers to defend the murder suspect, Pompalone, a deposed Venezuelan dictator. Upon learning the salesman’s business, Pompalone says: “I am afraid you lack the reasoning faculty if you are trying to sell soap in the West Indies. Is there anyone else?” That’s when Poggioli offers his assistance, and we get our first glimpse of him, as “a smallish dark-eyed gentleman of a certain academic appearance.” Poggioli is an instructor in psychology on sabbatical from Ohio State University.

  The soap salesman’s arrogance to the native employees and offensiveness to the hotel’s management position him to become poison victim number two, but Poggioli saves his life just in time.

  During the investigation, Poggioli proves himself open-minded: “Not that I agree with Senor Pompalone, but I recognize his hypothesis as tenable.” Poggioli is thorough: “In solving a problem, it is our duty to pursue every line of evidence.”

  But Poggioli is not a patient man. As Stribling says: “The psychologist’s patience was of academic brevity.”

  Poggioli’s deductions, often brilliant, are not always correct; and even when correct don’t always lead to success. In “The Refugees,” after Poggioli solves the case and correctly proves Pompalone innocent, Pompalone commits murder and escapes the island.

  Poggioli then goes to Haiti in “The Governor of Cap Haitien.” To gain Poggioli safe admittance to the anti-government forces, the governor dubs Poggioli “the great American voodoo inspector” and sends him to the enemy’s camp. The explanation given to, and accepted by, the awe-struck populace is: “You know the Americans inspect everything.” In that tale, more novelette than short story, Poggioli shows an anti-imperialistic view, which he expresses to a man named Clay who represents the foreign interests on the island: “Had it ever struck you, Mr. Clay, that fifty or a hundred thousand [native] persons ought to be allowed to run their own country in their own way and not be forced to arrange their political life for the convenience of two dozen foreigners?” Once again Poggioli solves the crime but the case ends far from successfully; nobody but Mr. Clay gets what they want.

  Poggioli goes to Martinique, and after several mistakes neatly solves “The Prints of Hantoun,” featuring a Golden Age-style puzzle: how was it possible for the bank thief to have worn gloves and yet to have left fingerprints? During the case, Poggioli muses: “Who has investigated the influence of music on crime? It is quite possible that some tunes incite robbery, some murder, others assault. If we could learn this we might formulate laws forbidding certain airs and thus protect the morals of the people.” Three generations later, the U.S. Congress, to protect the morals of the people, would consider laws regulating the music industry because of crime-encouraging musical lyrics. Also in this tale, Poggioli confesses that he is a better crime solver when the guilty are rich: “I don’t know the psychology of the miserable. I am an American.”

  Poggioli goes to Barbados in “Cricket” and fails miserably at solving a murder; but it does get solved. In the next day’s newspaper, each person who contributed to the solution attributes their detections to Poggioli, who, ego overflowing, mistakenly believes he had brilliantly solved another.

  Poggioli goes to Trinidad in “A Passage to Benares” and ends up the chief suspect in the murder of a child bride. After being arrested and jailed, Poggioli solves this extremely s
uspenseful tale, in which his initial investigations turned up more and more evidence against himself, tightening the noose around his own neck. It shows Stribling and Poggioli at their finest; it was adapted for radio and broadcast as an episode of “Suspense” (on September 23, 1942). The third-from-last paragraph has Poggioli asking: “What did you mean, keeping me locked up here when you knew I was an innocent man?” The answer is as chilling as any ending in detective fiction history.

  In these five cases, Poggioli was a brilliant but fallible sleuth whose failures formed an ironic commentary not only on the standard deductive detective story but also on the limits of human reason. And, whatever else might be read into Poggioli’s failures, it was clear that “A Passage to Benares” allowed no room for further cases.

  The Second Cycle of Poggioli Stories

  From 1929 through 1935, nevertheless, Stribling published nine more Poggioli stories, which have all been gathered into the book you now hold. It is only the third Stribling short-story collection, ever.

  The new series began in 1929 when Adventure asked their most popular authors to contribute stories for its anniversary, and Stribling responded with a Poggioli tale, “A Pearl at Pampatar,” still set in the Caribbean and perhaps taking place before “A Passage to Benares.” This time Poggioli deduces the whereabouts of a stolen pearl on an island named Margarita, while trying in vain to persuade Mrs. Gelleman that it takes more than dreaming and wishful thinking to change an imitation pearl into a real one. For the rest of his recorded career, Poggioli would stay away from the Caribbean islands.

  Like their predecessors, the eight 1930s Poggioli stories are laced with humor and permeated with psychological insights and philosophical musings. But the 1930s stories are less exotic, less adventurous, less panoramic. Poggioli no longer runs around foreign lands. Only once do we see him at Ohio State. He stays where Stribling stayed. Stribling lived in Tennessee and Florida and occasionally visited New York or Mexico. Poggioli’s post-Caribbees cases take place in Tennessee and Florida, with an occasional trip to New York or Mexico. The 1930s tales are confined, neat, narrow in scope though deep in story, character, and psychology.

  The post-Caribbean stories begin with “Shadowed,” which in dealing with the survival of the soul may have been Stribling’s way of bringing Poggioli back after the devastating conclusion of “A Passage to Benares,” but, with its mystical elements, “Shadowed” defies simple explanation or straightforward summary. Here’s what little I dare tell you: it is set in Columbus, Ohio, and is the only story where Poggioli can be found working at Ohio State University; it is the tale that prompted Ohio State and Poggioli to part ways; it has a different voice than the earlier tales, for instead of third-person omniscience we are given Stribling as the chronicler of events based upon his examination of the written record of the case (but not as someone who participated in or witnessed the events, nor even as someone who necessarily knows Poggioli firsthand). In “Shadowed” the impossible happens with great regularity and without neat resolution; Poggioli makes physical and psychological deductions galore; he pithily waxes philosophic (“Cynicism is a shield, not a sword.”); but in the end the case defies credible solution, so Poggioli gives us an incredible solution. “Shadowed” is the most ambitious (though not the most satisfying) of the Poggioli tales; it is simultaneously Poggioli’s strangest case, his greatest case, and his fall from grace.

  The remaining stories follow the model of fictional detection more closely. “The Shadow” is tightly written. It contains only two characters—Poggioli and a bank clerk, plus a cameo appearance by a process server. Poggioli rattles off psychological deduction after psychological deduction. Some seem far-fetched. But the pace is fast, just about every sentence is in dialogue, and the clues are all psychological, never physical.

  Not so with “Bullets,” which touches upon the then-relatively-new science of ballistics. But, as ever, psychological deductions carry the day; such as how fear of being accused of theft would influence the behavior of an innocent Negro in a white man’s store in the deep South. Indeed, as I shall point out shortly, this powerful story depends on Stribling’s knowledge of racism.

  “The Cablegram” is the most taut Poggioli story I have read. It is extremely confined and would require hardly any effort to be turned into an effective oneact play. The cast includes Poggioli, a Miami customs official named Slidenberry, and our old friend Pompalone—the exiled dictator cleared of murder by Poggioli a decade earlier in “The Refugees.” This time the suspected crime is smuggling. The tale is brilliantly constructed. The culprit outwits Poggioli, who reaches the true solution too late.

  Sequels, though common enough in novels, are rare in short stories. But Stribling twice penned sequels to his Poggioli tales. The first sequel, “The Newspaper,” picks up where “The Cablegram” leaves off, with Poggioli and team continuing their pursuit of the smuggler and eventually cracking a dope ring. (His second sequel would appear eleven years later, when “A Note to Count Jalacki” followed the superb “Count Jalacki Goes Fishing.”)

  “Private Jungle,” gloriously illustrated by John F. Clymer in its original Blue Book appearance, shows Poggioli in sharp form, saving a life, preventing an act of vengeance, and possibly ending a feud. This time our sleuth deftly fuses clues both psychological and physical. There is a funny misunderstanding between Poggioli and Jim R., who believes a criminologist is someone who helps people commit crimes.

  The humor in the Poggioli tales is character-driven and has aged well. In “The Resurrection of Chin Lee” Poggioli’s host asks him to keep private whatever murder solution he might arrive at, because it would be bad publicity for the community—unless the killer or victim was very rich, in which case a lot of tourists would pop in for the trial. Humor also reigns when Poggioli asks the night watchman if he heard the shot; the watchman explains that when he’s on duty it takes more than a pistol shot to wake him up. This tale contains a rare example of a Golden Age detective (Poggioli) making reference to the Great Depression going on around them.

  The Depression rears its head more prominently in “The Pink Colonnade,” in which Poggioli investigates the psychologically strange disappearance of a man who once was worth ten million dollars but who can no longer afford gasoline for his speedboat. This tale suggests Poggioli regards himself more as a criminologist and a psychologist than as a detective.

  The Final Stories

  The autumn of 1941 marked the debut issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the first issue of which reprinted “The Cablegram.” Its editor, Frederic Dannay (one-half of the Ellery Queen writing team and a huge fan of Poggioli), requested that Stribling begin a new series of Poggioli tales. Stribling undertook the challenge and in 1945, after a ten-year hiatus, new Poggioli stories began to appear. Amazingly, Stribling’s only published pieces of new fiction from 1940 onward were the 23 Poggioli short stories that appeared from 1945 to 1957. Although Stribling continued to write fiction for the rest of his life and completed several more novels, those novels were never published.

  Stribling got along well with Dannay, a hands-on editor, and allowed him consid erable leeway in shaping the final versions of the Poggioli stories. As a result, Poggioli himself developed. In the words of Stribling biographer Kenneth W. Vickers: “Under the tutelage of Fred Dannay, the erstwhile bumbling former professor of psychology and amateur criminologist became a sleuth of near superhuman ability....Poggioli’s brilliance reached the level that he read the morning papers looking for clues to crimes, solved the mystery, and then waited for one of the principals in the case to come to him for help.”

  Stribling himself commented on the evolution of Poggioli: “All the other detectives were so brilliant I thought a dunce would be a relief to thousands of earnest who-dun-it readers. Now a mystery writer may start out with the most honorable intentions of making his protagonist a punk, but the first thing he knows practice will make his hero grow brighter and brighter until in no time at all he know
s far more than his author does. That is what happened to me and Poggioli. I now stand in awe of him. I shudder to offer him the semblance of a clew for I know that he will unravel my whole mystery in the twinkling of a ballerina’s toe; then I—I—will have to construct more mystery to make the story long enough to sell. It’s a dog’s life catering to such a genius.”

  The final 23 stories differ greatly in one way from all the previous Poggioli tales: instead of the standard third-person narration that was used to follow Poggioli through the 1920s and 1930s (with a slight variation for “Shadowed”), Stribling now inserted himself into the tales as Poggioli’s friend, companion, and chronicler, telling the tales from the point of view of a secondary character. In effect, Stribling becomes Watson to Poggioli’s Holmes. Given the characters’ personalities, a better comparison would be Stribling becomes Captain Hastings to Poggioli’s Poirot. The unnamed Stribling character in these tales, though an accomplished writer, is even more a simpleton than Hastings. Witness this exchange from “The Mystery of the Chief of Police”:

  Poggioli: Miss Eliot lost new fresh bills. The police department returned dirty bills. What caused that?

  Stribling: Mm—mm . . . well . . . the thief got her bills dirty.

  In “A Note to Count Jalacki” the Stribling character is referred to by the others as “a man of no talent whatever.”

  The observations of the Stribling character, and the interplay between him and Poggioli, give these tales an extra appeal; we get closer to Poggioli by seeing how he treats (or mistreats) his friend; and having a slow-to-comprehend sidekick gives Poggioli more reason to vocalize his deductions.

  Fifteen of those later tales were collected into one volume in 1975 by Dover Publications, but several remain uncollected. I heartily recommend three of those later tales as prime examples of vintage Poggioli— “The Mystery of the Chief of Police,”