Octavus Roy Cohen

• Born: June 26, 1891
• Birthplace: Charleston, South Carolina
• Died: January 6, 1959
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Types of Plot: Private investigator; amateur sleuth; police procedural

Principal Series: David Carroll, 1919-1922; Jim Hanvey, 1923-1934; Max Gold, 1945-1947; Marty Walsh, 1948-1950

Contribution

Although he was more famous for his southern black dialect fiction of the 1920’s and early 1930’s, which he considered neither biased nor derogatory, Octavus Roy Cohen also created a memorable detective. Jim Hanvey, Detective (1923), the collection of short fiction that first recounted the adventures of the big, slow-moving, cigar-smoking sleuth, was considered by Ellery Queen to be “a book of historical value with a high quality of literary style.” Two of the short stories, “Common Stock” and “Pink Bait,” were later chosen by Eugene Thwing as part of his anthology of mystery fiction, The World’s Best One Hundred Detective Stories (1929). In addition, Cohen’s work represented one of the early, minor crossovers to the more realistic detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Biography

Born and reared in Charleston, South Carolina, Octavus Roy Cohen attended Porter Military Academy, from which he was graduated in 1908. After receiving his bachelor of science degree from Clemson College in 1911, Cohen worked first as a civil engineer, then as a journalist, before he passed the bar in 1913. Two years later, he decided to become a writer full time. In October of 1914, he was married to Inez Lopez; they had one son, named for his father. In 1935, the family moved to New York, where Cohen continued his writing career; later, they moved to Los Angeles.

Cohen’s first book, The Other Woman (1917; with J. U. Giesy), marked the beginning of his prolific literary career. According to The New York Times, at the time of his death he had written at least 250 short stories and contributed fiction to The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s magazine as well as producing “more than sixty books [and] five plays.” In addition, he had written for the highly popular Amos ’n’ Andy radio show from 1945 to 1946. One of his plays, Come Seven (pr. 1920), which was adapted from his novel of the same name, had a run of more than seventy performances on Broadway. Cohen died of a stroke at the age of sixty-seven in Los Angeles.

Analysis

Critics have received Octavus Roy Cohen’s detective fiction with mixed emotions. Anthony Boucher considered Cohen, in his early phase, one of the precursors of “the tough, realistic school”; others have been less sure of his contribution.

The uncertainty stems in part from the fact that Cohen was not an innovator. Rather, he was a skilled re-creator of an established formula who used some interesting variations that seem to prefigure other later techniques. His best-known creation, Jim Hanvey, remained squarely within the tradition of what Julian Symons calls the detective as “Plain Man.” Unlike the detectives modeled on Sherlock Holmes, the Plain Man had no superhuman powers of ratiocination; nor did he share the Holmesian detective’s lack of “emotional attachments and . . . interest in everyday life.” Hanvey is a clever and resourceful man, but his investigative ability—like that of Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe—is more the result of a large store of common sense, an excellent memory for faces, and an acquaintance with most of the important members of the criminal world.

Even his childlike enjoyment of the simple things—especially all things related to eating—precludes his membership among Symons’s “Superman” detectives. The crude Hanvey can often prove embarrassing to his more refined companions. In “Common Stock,” for example, Gerald Corwin, whose “every cultured gesture” marks him “unmistakably a gentleman,” is appalled by Hanvey’s habit of “sitting by the hour toying with his [gold] toothpick.” When someone mentions that “the weapon might better be concealed,” Hanvey is honestly surprised that anyone would want to hide “absolutely the swellest toothpick in captivity.” Then, too, his table manners are less than desirable, since “eatin’ ain’t no art with me. It’s a pleasure.”

The Crimson Alibi

The Crimson Alibi (1919), the first novel in the David Carroll series, contains—although the suspects all seem to be wronged innocents, who, in the best tradition of mystery fiction, would be more than justified in killing the unpopular and unscrupulous Joshua Quincy—a backbone of corrupt, highly placed citizens and tough-minded investigators that would later be fleshed out in the American subgenres. Quincy’s lawyer, the eminent Thaddeus Standish, though less than fully involved in his client’s less savory schemes, nevertheless knew of them—though not “in an official capacity.” The police, though considered honest public servants, delight in grilling suspects and using snitches.

The murder, too, foreshadows those of later fiction. Neither mysterious poisons nor other exotic manners of dealing death are employed: Quincy is felled by a silver dagger, his own possession, which has been wiped clean of fingerprints.

Love Has No Alibi

Particularly in his later works, Cohen could define a character or create an atmosphere with a few sure strokes; little time is wasted on extraneous details. In Love Has No Alibi (1946), for example, one of the least likely murder suspects, Dr. Arthur Maybank, is a mousy little man, rejected even by the army, who has “scraped and struggled and sweated and slaved” to survive; his sparse hair and slumped, skinny shoulders belong to a man who has never had “even the hope of having something.” When accused of murder, he is “bewildered,” like a man in a trance or “a shock victim.” The club where most of the action of the novel takes place has a cabaret in which the dancers are “young and beautifully proportioned and . . . lovely unless, or until, you [happen] to look at their eyes, which [are] hard and wise and blank”—a proper setting for a group of citizens who almost all are hiding shady pasts.

Cohen’s crime fiction is an odd cross between the pure-puzzle and the more character-oriented genres. Cohen rigorously followed the fair-play rule of giving his reader all the information necessary to solve the case; all that remains necessary is the kaleidoscopic twist—a clue placed in its proper context—for the case to be solved. A Bullet for My Love (1950) hinges on a married couple’s special way of telling time, mentioned early in the story, for its solution, while “Common Stock” seems to be a straightforward account of a failed job, until Hanvey reveals that he has been hired to carry the all-important proxy instead of merely acting as guard to the ostensible messenger, Gerald Corwin.

Nevertheless, some psychological development has its place. The denouement of Love Has No Alibi focuses on the step-by-step manner in which an ordinary citizen begins a series of murders, almost by accident, while “Pink Bait” tells the story of Tommy Braden’s “perfect” con based on the ordinary person’s desire to name-drop. A nice touch to the latter work is that Cohen tells it entirely from the con artist’s point of view. In addition, even though Jim Hanvey foils Tommy’s scheme, the detective’s sense of justice allows him to watch over his foe’s interests as well as his client’s—he warns Tommy that it is dangerous to cash a bad check written by his “victims.”

In his later work, Cohen released the reins on his tendency toward sentimentality. Increasingly, his relatively tough-minded police and private investigators gave way to “the slick glamour” of bumbling but good-hearted all-American heroes who unexpectedly manage to solve the crime; noble, innocent heroines; fallen women with hearts of gold; dyed-in-the-wool villains, who are not necessarily the murderers; and polite police officers. As Boucher notes, Cohen wrote about “a set of characters with too much money, too much charm and too much beauty,” making them likable and telling “their story at . . . a smooth, fast tempo with . . . lightly amusing dialogue.”

Dangerous Lady

Throughout most of his career, perhaps as a result of his journalistic and later dramatic experience, Cohen wrote crisply and clearly. Little time is wasted on extraneous details; he is sparing of words, and those he uses he uses to great effect. Unlike The Crimson Alibi, which occasionally becomes mired in descriptions, the “glamour” novels have almost no descriptive passages. Details are either implied or given in conversation. In Dangerous Lady (1946), for example, the oddities of a relationship between an heiress and a fortune hunter are related not by an omniscient narrator but by the torch singer who loves “the louse”: “All of a sudden he slapped her. Smacko! Twice. And hard. She took it. Then she walked around the car and climbed in . . . and they drove off.”

Although Cohen was not a major innovator in the detective genre, his extensive canon provided considerable entertainment to legions of mystery readers, and his minor variations on an established formula proved durable, appearing later in the hard-boiled subgenre. Jim Hanvey proved to be a popular and unforgettable figure; in addition to his printed adventures, he appeared in a film, Jim Hanvey, Detective (1937), and in a radio play, The Townsend Murder Mystery (1933). Although much of Cohen’s work is now nearly impossible to find, it deserves its place in the annals of detective and mystery fiction.

Principal Series Characters:

• David Carroll , the slender, boyish, blue-eyed star detective of Berkeley City, is a nationally famous private investigator. He respects the methodical procedures of his police counterparts and sometime allies, but his own gifts lie in the use of psychology and intuition.
• Jim Hanvey , a large, somewhat pear-shaped man with disturbing fishlike eyes, is deliberate of movement, though not as slow-witted as he appears. A large gold toothpick, which was given to him by one of his favorite criminals, hangs on a gold chain from his vest; when not otherwise occupied—with food, observation, or “figgering”—he constantly plays with it.
• Max Gold is a black-eyed, black-haired detective with the New York City Police Department’s homicide squad. Laconic, yet unfailingly polite, he methodically eliminates false leads, refusing to jump to conclusions, although he usually does not arrive at the solution solely through his own efforts.
• Marty Walsh , of the Los Angeles Police Department, looks more like a real estate salesperson than a police detective. He is “short and slender and neat,” but his keen eyes belie his innocuous appearance.

Bibliography

Bailey, Frankie Y. Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction. New York: Greenwood, 1991. This discussion of how African American characters were handled in crime fiction contains some discussion of Cohen’s work.

Barfield, Ray. Listening to Radio, 1920-1950. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996. Barfield describes old-time radio, including the Amos ’n’ Andy series.

Beidler, Philip D. “Introduction: Alabama Flowering I.” In Many Voices, Many Rooms: A New Anthology of Alabama Writers, edited by Philip D. Beidler. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Cohen is one of four Alabama writers compared in this essay, which precedes his “The Fatted Half.”

Panek, LeRoy Lad. The Origins of the American Detective Story. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Study of the beginnings and establishment of American detective-fiction conventions, focusing especially on the replacement of the police by the private detective and the place of forensic science in the genre. Provides a context for understanding Cohen.

Priestman, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Chapter on black crime fiction provides a contrast to Cohen’s early works and provides perspective on Cohen.

Van Dover, J. K., and John F. Jebb. Isn’t Justice Always Unfair? The Detective in Southern Literature. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996. Critical examination of the tradition of Southern detective fiction. Sheds light on the context in which Cohen wrote.