Unearthing buried treasures from pulp literature’s yesteryear!
I’m not sure why I feel this way, but I wish I could recommend PHILO GUBB, CORRESPONDENCE-SCHOOL DETECTIVE more fervently than I can. Maybe this attitude springs just from the title, which is what drew me to it in the first place. I grin every time I think of it.
Maybe it’s the fact that the book scored #61 on QUEEN’S QUORUM, Ellery Queen’s list of books that rate as significant contributions to the history of the detective story, even though as mysteries, the tales in this collection are pretty thin broth.
The thing is, they were never intended to be real, live whodunits at all, but humorous parodies of the kind of bumpkin detectives exemplified by Melville Davisson Post’s Uncle Abner and later by Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s Asey Mayo. Author Ellis Parker Butler was a well-liked and widely published humorist who was responsible for literally thousands of short essays and stories, none of which are must-read classics, although a story called “Pigs Is Pigs” stuck around longer than did anything else Butler wrote. Philo Gubb first entered the scene in REDBOOK magazine in 1913.
From 1918, PHILO GUBB, CORRESPONDENCE-SCHOOL DETECTIVE is a collection of tall tales about a professional paperhanger in a small Iowa town who sends off for the Rising Sun Detective Agency’s Correspondence School of Detecting’s Course of Twelve Lessons. In one of the better stories, “The Chicken,” Gubb is hired by a farm woman to find out who’s been stealing her chickens. In the course of his “detecating,” as he insists on saying, our Surehick Holmes meets a city feller from Chicago who is hiding out after bumping off a Chi gunman known as “Chicken.” Yeah, you can see where this one is headed. They talk to each other at cross purposes. When the hood offers Gubb a bribe to keep mum, Philo asks for $5, which he intends to give to his client as payment for her missing hen. The gunsel thinks he’s getting off pretty light.
The pattern of many of the stories is the same: Gubb is visited by someone who hires him to solve some piddly little mystery and, in the course of taking care of business, the detective stumbles over a real crime and nabs the perpetrators, sometimes getting a reward.
Butler’s sense of humor hasn’t aged well. If you think he might be an undeservedly forgotten Mark Twain, forget it. He sometimes, however, allows a touch of pure absurdity into the proceedings. In “The Two-Cent Stamp,“ Gubb climbs a ladder so he can wallpaper the ceiling — that’s what I said: “wallpaper the ceiling” — and while he’s up there, a series of people enter the room one after the other to hire him, either to find some lost booze and move it or destroy it or do something else with it. He spends the entire story on the ladder, accomplishing nothing, but somehow managing to satisfy every one of his clients and receive payment from all of them.
I’m never quite sure why, but Gubb insists on speaking with a false fanciness. Maybe he’s trying to imitate Dr. Watson’s style. “’Mr. Wiggins is at present in the custody of the county jail for killing H. Smitz with intent to murder him,’ said Mr. Gubb.” That’s from “Philo Gubb’s Greatest Case,” in which Butler spends a couple of pages in allowing Philo to explain that a man found sewn into a burlap bag and floating in the Mississippi River is probably not a suicide. It’s a bit that would be funny in a paragraph, but not stretched out as long as it is.
The book’s best bit of silliness comes when Gubb, hard at work on a case, meets Syrilla Madderbrook, the 1,000-pound fat lady in a traveling carnival, who will become his true love. Their romance continues throughout the course of several cases, as she continually writes to him to let him know how much weight she has lost. (They are both thrilled when she makes it all the way down to 950.)
I don’t think anyone should sit down with the intention of reading all 17 of these stories in a row. I dipped into them at the rate of about two a week and derived just enough pleasure out of them to keep my enthusiasm and hope up whenever I began a new one. They’re not great by any stretch, but they are interesting examples of early detective-fiction parody.
And lest you think I’m just being snobby or don’t really respond favorably to antiquated humor, let me repeat for you one of my all-time favorite one-liners, from a contemporary of Twain’s who signed his work Josh Billings: “There is only one good substitute for the endearments of a sister, and that is the endearments of some other fellow’s sister.”
And with that I bid you a fond farewell.
Farewell. —Doug Bentin
Related posts:
- The Occult Detective
- The Crazy School
- The Phantom Detective: August 1935
- Ender’s Game: Battle School / Ender’s Shadow: Battle School
- The Adventure of the Missing Detective and 19 of the Year’s Finest Crime and Mystery Stories
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Humm, that’s one I never heard of, Doug. I would have probably picked it up for such a neat looking jacket though, if I’d ran across it. Thanks for the review!
I came across the first story, “The Hard-Boiled Egg” all by itself and was so charmed, I’m adapting it into an episode of my audio drama series. Then found out there’s a whole series, and while i may or may not keep up with adapting, I definitely plan to read the whole set.