Kent Murdock, ace news photographer for the Boston Courier-Herald, is sent on an assignment to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, supposedly to get some photos of the local university’s new head footfall coach, who is a longtime Boston sports hero. But this is just an excuse to get Murdock there, because his real mission is a personal one: he’s supposed to facilitate a reconciliation between a wealthy Boston lawyer who’s a friend of Murdock’s editor and the lawyer’s niece, who once interned at the Courier-Herald and is a friend of Murdock’s. It seems that the young woman is estranged from her uncle, who controls the trust fund she’s going to inherit, because a couple of years earlier she married a shady character the uncle disapproves of. She’s come to realize now that the marriage is a failure, and before she gets a divorce, her uncle wants her to forgive him for his meddling in her life.
Complicated enough for you? Just wait.
No sooner does Murdock get in his hotel room before a shady agent who handles nightclub entertainers barges in. That unexpected visit is followed by a beautiful blonde piano player. Murdock also gets mixed up with a seedy, down-on-his-luck private eye, a gangster who owns the nightclub where the blonde plays, a cheating wife and her gun-toting husband, and assorted other colorful characters, none of whom can be trusted. Then there’s the matter of the murder that takes place in Murdock’s hotel room. The cops are convinced at first that he’s the victim, but then when it turns out he’s not, they peg him as the killer!
EYE WITNESS was published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf in 1950, reprinted in paperback by Dell in 1956, and remains available today in an e-book edition. It falls just about in the middle of George Harmon Coxe’s long-running series about Kent Murdock, a series that’s arguably Coxe’s most successful work. I say arguably because Flashgun Casey, Coxe’s earlier, more hardboiled news photographer character, appeared not only in numerous pulp stories in BLACK MASK and a handful on novels but also was adapted into a radio series and a short-lived TV series in the early days of television. But just from the standpoint of novels, Murdock was certainly Coxe’s most popular creation.
And deservedly so. I’ve read quite a few of the Murdock novels and always enjoyed them. Coxe was a contemporary of Erle Stanley Gardner, and his books remind me of Gardner’s with their very complicated plots and tough but not overly hardboiled tone. One difference is that Kent Murdock usually isn’t two or three steps ahead of the reader the way Perry Mason and Donald Lam always were. Murdock seems to figure out the mysteries at about the same pace as the reader does. He always nabs the killer, though, and does so in a very entertaining fashion.
I had a fine time reading EYE WITNESS. It’s not the best book I’ve read in the series, that’s still THE JADE VENUS, but it’s a very good one and well worth your time if you’re a fan of well-plotted, medium-boiled mystery yarns. It’s a shame they didn’t make movies starring John Payne out of the Murdock books. I think he would have been perfect in the role.
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