Pulp Pages: "The Duchess Pulls a Fast One" by Whitman Chambers

“The streets were dark with something more than night.” - Raymond Chandler

In a quick little genderized addendum to Chandler’s dictum, may we assume that down these mean streets a woman, too, must go who is not herself mean? And just as importantly — for getting the job done — one who is also intuitive and sly?

Among the many pulp stories of Whitman Chambers (1898-1968) — a now overlooked author of more than 20 crime and mystery novels, as well as a notable screenwriter for such films as The Come-On (1953), and Manhandled (1949) — “The Duchess Pulls a Fast One” is one of several written for Detective Fiction Weekly that features Katie “the Duchess” Blaine, a reporter for The Sun who uses an innate sense of smarts to investigate crimes while researching her articles. Indeed, the independent Duchess — the creation of whom was Chambers’ best effort in the production of an appealing series character — could “produce hunches faster than a cigarette machine turns out coffin nails.”

Not that she’s letting on early in this September 19, 1936 DFW story when she and a couple of rival big-boy reporters, Spike and Pinky, respond to a suspicious chemical plant fire - in fact, she comes off as an in-the-way tag-along, and even resourcefully jumps on a pumper as it hits the road “with bell clanging and siren wailing.” But once she gets her transportation, she goes on her own journalistic way, no matter what the quick consensus may be.

A consensus that, as know-it-all Spike and Pinky later and condescendingly explain, sees the fire as an arson-set insurance hoax known as a "Schwartz" — “Duchess, don’t you know a Schwartz when one jumps up and spits in your face?” — one implicating the chemical company’s owner, Kurt Bergstrom, another employee, John Hamlin, and his wife. The Duchess is perfectly willing to listen patiently, but when their particular nonsense jumps up and spits in her face, she is just as ready to indicate as such:

“And who was the man they found in the laboratory?”
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Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores. Email him and he'll stop talking in the third-person.
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