Unearthing buried treasures from pulp literature’s yesteryear!
Perhaps only connoisseurs of vintage detection fiction or B-crime movie series know who Sapper was. In the beginning, he was Herman Cyril McNeile. In the British Army during World War I, he sent back from the front short stories of life in the trenches. Like Rudyard Kipling’s, some of them were humorous, some were not, but all were good enough to catch readers’ attention. A newspaper publisher even requested McNeile’s release from the Army so he could become a war correspondent. It didn’t happen.
There was a rule on the books that writers in the Army shouldn’t attach their real names to their work, so McNeile took the pseudonym “Sapper,” military slang for an engineer who could do everything from building bridges for our side to blowing up bridges on theirs. So famous did the name Sapper become, McNeile kept it for the rest of his writing career. He died in 1937 at the age of 49.
In 1920, Sapper created Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond, a soldier from the Great War who found civilian life boring and decided to hire himself out as a detective. Sapper wrote 10 Drummond novels — I’ll tell you about the first one later — but he was as well-known for his short stories as he was for longer tales.
WHEN CARRUTHERS LAUGHED AND OTHER STORIES was published in 1934. The volume contains 12 yarns, and while all of them are worth reading, one immediately jumped onto my list of great ghost stories. That is “Touch and Go,” about a young woman who finds herself sleeping alone in a house haunted by the spirit of a man who murdered his wife by chopping off her head with an ax. She awakens to discover a man in her bedroom who is seated in front of the fire, mumbling and staring at something about the size of a soccer ball resting on the floor at his feet.
“The Loyalty of Peter Drayton” is gruff, but sentimental. In it, a young man who has obviously seen better days saves a gal from an armed robber. We discover in her backstory that her brother went missing during or soon after the war, having run off to find adventure with a lower-class pal of his who was rude, uneducated and just this side of dishonest. Whether or not the pal’s loyalty was worth more than breeding is left to us to decide.
In “The Snake Farm,” a young woman allows herself to be bitten by a cobra in order to prove her love for a man she once despised.
Not all the stories are as high-profile as these. Several are about country-house jewel robberies, and the title tale is about murder committed at a jungle plantation because someone insists on playing the same phonograph record over and over again.
Critic David L. Vineyard wrote, “Sapper may not have been subtle, but he had a fine eye for melodrama.”
The journalist Richard Usborne coined the term “clubland heroes” for the characters in books by Sapper and a few other writers. Most of the stories in this volume are told by a man sitting with a drink in his hand and chatting with his pals at the club. You know the sort of thing: “That reminds me of something that happened, oh, it must have been 10 years ago, when I was visiting a banana plantation in Bongo-Bongo … ” Outside of genre fiction, Henry James and Somerset Maugham used to use that technique. Even Ian Fleming’s James Bond short story “Quantum of Solace” is a clubland tale.
Sapper likes this way of beginning a story. No matter what the content, this formula lends an aura of sophistication to the telling. You can hear it in the dialogue as well: “’The man who monkeys round with another man’s wife is asking for trouble,’ said the ship’s doctor. ‘And sooner or later he’ll get it. He may even have to marry her.’”
The Bulldog Drummond series was continued after Sapper’s death by his friend Gerard Fairlie, who once described McNeile as ”unremittingly hearty” and “not everybody’s cup of tea.” When a friend describes you that way, casual acquaintances probably use harsher terms. But whether or not Sapper was a splendid chap, his fiction, as represented by the stories in this book, makes for a good vintage read. —Doug Bentin
Related posts:
- The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour, Volume Six: The Crime Stories
- The Adventure of the Missing Detective and 19 of the Year’s Finest Crime and Mystery Stories
- DOUG’S DIGS >> I Should Have Stayed Home
- The Gutter and the Grave
- More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol. II
