“The streets were dark with something more than night.” —Raymond Chandler
“If a character caught on,” the prolific but now oddly under-the-radar short story writer, novelist, screenwriter, and movie director Richard Sale once noted, “then you knew they would ask for more. A popular series sold a lot of copies . They’d get letters from readers asking for more about so-and-so.”
In the case of Sale, who had knowledge of tough, fast-talking big city news hounds, pulp fans were asking for the wisecracking so-and-so Joe “Daffy” Dill, reporter at the New York Chronicle, and not invariably his attractive colleague Dinah Mason (hard-shell, squeamish center at the sight of corpse-like substances). The stories, published by Detective Fiction Weekly, were part and parcel of the mysteries, horror tales, exotic adventures, war stories, and sea stories the “Dumas of the pulps” — in a 10-year period Sale published nearly 500 stories, nearly one a week — turned out as one of pulp’s celebrated million-words-a-year speed fiends of the 1930s and '40s.
The “march of crime,” as Dinah puts it, advances in “Three Wise Men of Babylon,” (published in the April 1, 1939 issue of DFW), though very tentatively at first, as Big Apple Daffy has reservations about what seems to be an editor of a mid-western town rag asking for collaboration on a hotel knock-off. Things get curiouser and curiouser, however, as the bodies pile on. Meanwhile, the murderer may be deaf, and the rural editor, who has announced himself as arriving in New York, may not be who he says he is. “The thing is really beginning to get hot,” Daffy exclaims. To make sure the heat is seemingly on and stays on, Sale keeps the twists and turns coming to the end, the suspenseful tensions taut throughout, and the narrative flowing naturally from one paragraph to next:
"We had better luck here, though. Dr. Kyne said that Penn had been dead for at least thirty-six hours and that the slug was a .32, and undoubtedly the same gun which killed Hanes had killed Penn. I reminded myself to check with John Harvey of the Babylon Gazette on the slug which which had killed Wilbur Penn. There was an avenging angel on the trail somewhere and it would be a good idea if we stopped him. Murder is a habit when you do too much of it, the killer might easily leave a line of dead behind him, getting scared and more scared on the way. It’s fear that makes murder, in one way or another.
Martin Penn had been a shrewd man, so shrewd that even in death he had pointed out a clue to his identity of his killer."
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