“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.”
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