“The streets were dark with something more than night.” - Raymond Chandler
If you like your pulp fiction writer to walk the walk, T.T. Flynn (Thomas Theodore Flynn) is your man. “I believe a fiction writer deals with life as a whole and he or she should know it from all angles,” he declared in Detective Fiction Weekly. The adventurous Flynn had been a hobo, clerk, carpenter, traveling salesman, had worked in a railroad shop and as a locomotive inspector, shipyard, steel mills, on ships in the engine and the fire rooms, among other rugged stints. He didn’t have time to talk the talk. But the Indianapolis individualist, born and raised a Hoosier in 1902, eventually did find the time by his mid-twenties to prolifically put pen to paper, and publishing by his death in 1978 countless westerns and mystery stories and seven novels, including It’s Murder in 1950 and 1951’s Murder Caravan. The western paperback The Man From Laramie was filmed as a movie, directed by Anthony Mann and starring James Stewart in 1955. 
A regular contributor to Detective Fiction Weekly, Flynn was asked to write stories for the debut private eye mag Dime Detective, many of which featured — after a revolving-door series of assorted and sundry protagonists — bookmaker and crime solver Mister Maddox. But two of Flynn’s most appealing characters teamed up for a series of humorously hardboiled tales of mystery and investigation. Mike Harris and Trixie Meehan, working for the Blaine International Agency, almost scream ‘30s stereotypes, but you wouldn’t want it any other way.
Redheaded Mike cracks wise and is Cagney tough when he has to be, but he’s insightful and has a soft spot or two, including one for trustworthy Trixie, impertinent and pretty, “with a leer on her lovely little face ... and luscious-looking to all big strong men.”The personalities of Mike and Trixie are shown to full effect in “Brother Murder,” which was first published as a story in the December 2, 1939 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly. Mike Harris, in a familiar beginning, is about to leave for a vacation when he’s halted in his tracks for a fast-breaking case:
So I drove back to Los Angeles to meet murder…
…There’s a cold-blooded touch to murder. Crooks, thieves, and swindlers are mostly ordinary people with ordinary weaknesses. A lot of us would like to collect from life the easy way.
But we’re all born knowing murder is out of bounds. And you never know what angles a murder case will turn up. Dangerous angles sometimes. Two murders can’t draw much worse penalty than one murder. Long ago I’d decided that after the first murder, a second one comes easier - so look out for murder, Mike.
Cliches, cliffhangers, and local color abound, replete with requisite rogue detectives and dumb cops (“this is ... Larry Sweet, who helps Jake think”) in a convoluted tale that’s a tall order of Southern California social history with a twist of tinsel town dream gone nightmarishly bad. The assignment involves a young woman from “back East,” who makes that California trip, stumbles into a much-loved and steady job as a script girl, then inexplicably turns up dead as an apparent suicide, somehow caught up in one of L.A.’s many questionable and quasi-mystical religious sects. In one character‘s assessment, “She’s a poor little girl who came out to Hollywood on a visit and got on the track of the Great Truths of Life.” Only the “Great Truths of Life,” headed up by seemingly spiritual Father Orion, involved not only the aforementioned crooks, thieves, and swindlers, but also, ironically, suicide. Well, the family isn’t buying it, the Blaine International Agency isn’t buying it, and neither is Mike, who takes great painstaking efforts to infiltrate the Great Truths of Life by flying to Chicago and back again with a cover story about amnesia that gains him admission to the compound, after which he must maintain his subterfuge and dignity in the flowing white robes the that passes for the dress code. Meanwhile Trixie, typically, comes flouncing cavalierly in on her own by pulling a couple strings. In her right mind. And, thinks Mike, looking far lovelier in her robe. No time for that kind of thinking, though: Both Mike and Trixie will have to be single-mindedly levelheaded and lucid to get the lay of the land, and to surreptitiously detect the doings of the dough-raking con-men running the Great Truths of Life, and Father Orion who too disconcertingly espouses his omniscience, and the brainwashed and off-putting converts, “animals yapping with fanatical joy” as they’re being taught the “Great Truth.”And, when Mike and Trixie's cover is blown — as these things inevitably happen — a balancing act of action ensues, with taut suspense increasing the tension, a myriad of reinforcements kicking up the chaos, guns out in full force and blazing and — for good measure and for the true mystics — reefer and hashish broken out, too, with Father Orion in refuge from the carnage, sitting cross-legged in a loin cloth like “an Oriental, holding the mouthpiece of a water pipe.” Elsewhere, Mike’s “seething anger suddenly wild and reckless” is ratcheted up a couple notches whenever Trixie is in trouble. And a self-sacrificing Gal Trixie is always hand-wringing over Mike.These confrontations of criminal commotion don’t always wrap up prettily, but after a few bad buys are caught and some loose ends are tied, a little penultimate appraisal by Mike puts a few things in perspective: “Turn in a riot call and collar the whole bunch!” I panted. “It’s murder and torture, kidnapping, blackmail and God knows what. It’s big - and you’ll have to move fast to get everyone!” It’s big, all right. But maybe the biggest upshot of all is that we may have learned the real truth about the “Great Truth” - about what was being taught to everyone by Father Orion. Or did he just talk the talk?
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