Review: Eye Witness - George Harmon Coxe

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.

The Fifth Key - George Harmon Coxe

Kent Murdock, ace crime photographer for the Boston Courier, is the protagonist of George Harmon Coxe’s longest-running mystery series. Actually, he doesn’t stay a crime photographer throughout the series. By the time THE FIFTH KEY takes place (1945), Murdock is the head of the Courier’s photography department, but he still takes on some assignments himself, like the one in this novel that takes him to New York City to shoot some publicity photos for a radio drama called Sob Sister. The series’ creator (the beautiful Sheila Vincent) and its director Owen Faulkner are both former newspaper people who Murdock knew when they worked for the Courier.

The series is on the verge of getting a big deal with a sponsor, which means that agents and advertising men are also involved, as are a washed-up Hollywood leading man who plays one of the major roles on the show and an up-and-coming actress who plays the lead. It’s a group of brittle personalities who drink a bunch and verbally snipe at each other, and no one who’s ever read many mystery novels will be surprised that one of them winds up dead fairly early in the book. However, some unfortunate circumstances make Murdock the one most likely to take the fall for the killing, unless he can untangle all the strands of hate and avarice and turn up the real murderer.

George Harmon Coxe was an old pulpster who really knew how to keep a yarn racing along. Although Kent Murdock isn’t as hardboiled as Coxe’s other major series character, Flashgun Casey, he can throw a punch, dodge a bullet, and get knocked out, all of which he does in this book. The plot is complicated, involving false identities, fugitives from the law, the question of who really created and wrote the radio series (an element that always comes up in mysteries that have any sort of creative media background), a shady private eye, blackmail, and more murder and attempted murder. It’s not quite Erle Stanley Gardner-level complicated, but almost. Of course, Coxe makes everything fit together neatly in the end, after a nice suspenseful scene in which Murdock confronts the killer.

I’ve mentioned before that Coxe had one stylistic quirk that bothers me: he sometimes summarizes conversations instead of quoting the actual dialogue between the characters. A little of that is all right, but I think he overdoes it. And it’s not because he can’t write dialogue, because his snappy patter is great. It’s not enough to keep me from reading his books because the hardboiled tone, the plots, and the characters are all top-notch. But if you haven’t read his work before, it can be a little jarring.

You should also know that Coxe doesn’t always play fair with the reader. Murdock will read an important document or notice an important clue, but Coxe sometimes doesn’t let us in on what Murdock finds out until later. If you know that going in and it doesn’t bother you, that’s fine. I’m okay with it, but that, along with the way he handles dialogue, keep him from being one of my all-time favorites. I still read his books, though, because their strong qualities outweigh the minor annoyances.

When I was a kid, every public library had a couple of dozen George Harmon Coxe books in their mystery section, and deservedly so. He was a major writer in the hardboiled mystery field for a long time, and don’t let my quibbling scare you off from his books, many of which are still available as e-books, like THE FIFTH KEY. There’s a paperback edition available from Wildside Press, as well. I had a good time reading this one, and if you’re reading this blog, you’d probably enjoy it, too.