George Harmon Coxe

• Born: April 23, 1901
• Birthplace: Olean, New York
• Died: January 30, 1984
• Place of death: Old Lyme, Connecticut

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; inverted; police procedural; private investigator; psychological

Principal Series: Jack “Flashgun” Casey, 1934-1964; Kent Murdoch, 1935-1973

Contribution

The crime novels of George Harmon Coxe offer a marked departure from the hard-boiled school of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Although the action is brisk and the dialogue crisp, Coxe’s stories are never sensationally violent, tending more toward carefully constructed plots that follow a more workmanlike approach to criminal detection. There is a decided emphasis on clearly developed characterization and a meticulous depiction of physical setting. It was Coxe who introduced into detective fiction the newspaper photographer as amateur sleuth, a refreshing variation on the familiar former-cop-turned-private-eye pattern.

Biography

George Harmon Coxe was born on April 23, 1901, in Olean, New York, the son of George H. Coxe and Harriet C. Coxe. After attending public schools in Olean and the Free Academy in nearby Elmira, Coxe spent the academic year of 1919-1920 at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. The following year, he attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Coxe left Cornell without finishing and drifted into a variety of odd jobs, including work in a lumber camp and later on an automobile assembly line. During this period he also wrote two stories, which he sold to Detective Story Magazine.

Moving west in 1922, Coxe became a journalist for the Santa Monica Outlook and later joined the Los Angeles Express. Moving back to New York, Coxe worked for the Utica Observer-Dispatch, the New York Commercial and Financial Chronicle, and the Elmira Star-Gazette. In 1927, Coxe left newspaper work and wrote and sold advertising for Barta Press, an agency in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1929, he married Elizabeth Fowler.

In 1932 Coxe gave up advertising and became a full-time writer, turning out crime and detective stories for Black Mask and other pulp magazines. From 1932 until the publication of his first crime novel in 1935, he published more than fifty detective stories. From 1935 to 1976, he published sixty-three crime novels, twenty-one of them featuring the exploits of photographer Kent Murdock. From 1936 to 1938 (and briefly in 1944-1945), Coxe worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter. He shared screen credit for Arsène Lupin Returns (1938) and for The Hidden Eye (1946), for which he had written the original story.

During World War II, Coxe wrote scripts for a radio series, The Commandos, and an audition script for Casey, Crime Photographer, a radio drama based on the Flashgun Casey stories. In 1945, he served as a special war correspondent in the Pacific theater. After the war, Coxe expanded his interests, writing stories on subjects other than detective fiction for more sophisticated magazines such as Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. In 1952, Coxe was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America, and in 1964 he received the organization’s Grand Masters Award. Largely inactive after the late 1970’s, he died on January 30, 1984.

Analysis

George Harmon Coxe’s brief career as a newspaperman proved a determining factor in the style and structure of his detective fiction. Avoiding the more scientific, logical approach of the Arthur Conan Doyle school, Coxe concentrated on the development of characterization, personality, and human fallibility. His victims generally die in conventional ways: They are shot, stabbed, or occasionally, as in Eye Witness (1950), bludgeoned to death. A cast of characters is assembled; they are then tracked and observed by the detective hero. The plot proceeds like a journalism primer, raising and gradually answering a series of who, what, when, where, why, and how questions.

“Return Engagement”

Coxe had been publishing detective stories for more than two years when he sold the first Flashgun Casey story, “Return Engagement,” to Black Mask in the spring of 1934. The idea of a news photographer as a detective hero was a genuine innovation in the crime-fiction market, then largely the province of sleuthing lawyers, reporters, and private investigators. It came directly from Coxe’s personal experience. From his own days as a reporter, he knew that “while the reporter with his pad and pencil could describe a warehouse . . . fire from a safe distance,” it was the photographer who accompanied him who “had to edge far closer to get a negative that would merit reproduction.” For Coxe, it was a case of giving the photographer his due.

The other fictional creation for which Coxe is known is Kent Murdock. Both Murdock and Casey are Boston newspaper photographers, but it was Casey who brought Coxe a strong following from the time of his debut in Black Mask. Closer to the hard-boiled school of Hammett and Chandler than is Murdock, Casey is frequently isolated by self-induced conflict, having antagonized editors, police, and the criminal element. For all of his rough edges, however, Casey is a highly appealing character, both compassionate and sentimental. Like Murdock, he is a combat veteran, having served as an American Expeditionary Force sergeant in France in 1918. Both Casey and Murdock are for the most part uncynical and, when the question arises, patriotic. Although wartime combat seems a sine qua non, Coxe’s emphasis lies in developing his two most memorable creations, shaping interesting, clearly delineated characters, rather than in portraying action and violence.

Murder with Pictures

Kent Murdock first appeared in the 1935 novel Murder with Pictures and is what Coxe himself has termed a “smoothed-up version” of Jack Casey—the Boston photographer polished and reshaped for an expanded audience. Coxe’s reasons for the reshaping were more practical than they were literary. He believed that Murdock, “not unlike Casey in many ways . . . but better dressed and better mannered,” would be “more appropriate for a book.”

Ironically, Casey has been the more enduring of the two. Although only six novels were written about him, Casey appeared in dozens of short stories as well as a radio series and two feature films: Women Are Trouble (1936) and Here’s Flash Casey (1937). One of the reasons many readers may have identified with Casey is that unlike most fictional detectives, he ages over the years. At his inception he is about thirty-two. By the time he appears in Deadly Image (1964), his hair is graying and he has put on weight. By Coxe’s own reckoning, Casey in the final book is about forty-five, but his wit and perception remain as sharp as ever.

For a time, Coxe apparently entertained the possibility of a Mr. and Mrs. Kent Murdock as a detective team, perhaps along the lines of Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles. Joyce Murdock, bright, independent, and self-reliant, appears in Mrs. Murdock Takes a Case (1941), but she evidently proved to be more dominant a personality than Murdock, or Coxe for that matter, could endure. By the time The Jade Venus (1945) was published, Joyce Murdock has been dropped by the author, a similar fate having befallen Hestor, Murdock’s estranged first wife, who appeared in Murder with Pictures at the beginning of the Murdock series.

Coxe developed other series, although none of them was quite as popular as the Murdock/Casey ventures: Paul Standish, medical examiner; Sam Crombie, a stolid but persistent investigator; Max Hale, a somewhat reluctant detective; and Jack Fenner, Murdock’s fearless but good-natured sidekick. Fenner is a private eye who appears in Four Frightened Women (1939) and The Charred Witness (1942). He is featured in three of the last five of Coxe’s novels, most notably in Fenner (1971), in which he takes center stage.

Approximately half of the novels Coxe wrote are not series novels; nevertheless, they are characteristically well structured, if somewhat predictable. Often the non-series books are set in exotic locales. Sixteen novels alone are set in the Caribbean, most notably Murder in Havana (1943), One Minute Past Eight (1957), and Woman with a Gun (1972).

Black Mask Magazine

Coxe’s development as a writer of mystery and detective fiction gained its greatest impetus from his connection with Black Mask magazine, an association that began early in 1934. Coxe had been writing for pulp magazines for several years, and he had produced more than thirty short stories for publications such as Top Notch, Complete Stories, and Detective Fiction Weekly; it was not until his association with Joseph Thompson Shaw, who edited Black Mask from 1926 to 1936, however, that he further developed and enhanced the lean, economical style and the rigorous, stoic image of the central character that would become primary characteristics of his novels. Coxe was one of the writers whom Shaw was particularly proud of recruiting, along with Frederick Nebel, Paul Cain, and Lester Dent. Yet among Shaw’s more notable prizes in his stable of writers were Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner. Hammett in particular was the example Shaw held up to Coxe and other Black Mask writers, specifically requesting them to study the economy of his prose. Coxe’s style was thus developed through the process of imitation, an imitation of the better aspects of the prevailing pulp standard. Through this observation of his colleagues’ work, Coxe perfected the ability to write a distinctively American prose, developing an acute sense of the rhythm and idiom of the urban American vernacular.

What distinguishes Coxe from the others, however, is the delineation of his hero. The heroes in the plots of the stories and novels of his Black Mask colleagues often went Hammett one better, having a hero who not only accepted but also exulted in violence. Each beating and shooting of a “hood” gave clear satisfaction because it was done in support of what was “good.”

The world of Black Mask crime and detection was essentially nihilistic, a place where people could exert no real control over their existence. Stoicism and violence were often depicted as the only alternatives in a life that seemed to offer little of significance beyond the passing of time. Coxe’s protagonists made their way in this world, and although formidable and ready for action, they also seemed to subscribe to a code of unwritten but civilized behavior and values—the code of a gentleman. Clearly, Coxe’s heroes owe something to such rugged but refined and polished crime fighters as Richard Harding Davis’s Van Bibber and the heroes of the adventure novels of John Buchan.

The Big Gamble

The hero of a Coxe novel, while considerably less hard-boiled than the typical tough guy found in the work of his contemporaries, possesses all the more admirable requisites of the pulp-fiction hero of the day: chivalry, personal loyalty, and unremitting physical courage. Violence is generally a defensive reaction, a secondary rather than primary solution to a problem, always limited to what is necessary—and no more. Consider the following example, from The Big Gamble (1958), which is typical of the way in which a Coxe protagonist (in this case, Murdock) handles himself in a tight spot. Having discovered a man searching his apartment, Murdock apprehends him. As Murdock escorts him to the door, the man, whose name is Herrick, pulls a punch

that would have floored Murdock if he hadn’t been warned by the look he had seen. It was not a clever move because it was a roundhouse punch that started too far back and took too much time. Murdock pulled his chin back. The fist missed by two inches, the force of the blow pulling the big man off balance, and leaving his shoulders and head partly turned. Before he could recover, Murdock stepped in and slammed the side of the gun against the side of Herrick’s head, not savagely but with authority.

Herrick leaves peacefully, having been restrained “not savagely but with authority,” a phrase that sums up the standard method of operation for a Coxe protagonist in a desperate situation.

Some critics have found Coxe’s work anachronistic, viewing the novels of the 1950’s through the 1970’s as artifacts of the 1930’s. For many of Coxe’s followers, however, that fidelity to the pace and structure of an earlier time is part of the author’s appeal, and his loyal readers are familiar and comfortable with the pattern. His novels are always reliable entertainment: fast-paced, sharply detailed, cleverly plotted, consistently plausible. They are, in the final analysis, detective stories told in a style that is formal yet deceptively simple. Coxe’s readers know what to expect, and he rarely disappoints them.

Principal Series Characters:

• Jack “Flashgun” Casey , a photographer for the Boston Globe, later joins the Boston Express. Casey weighs in at 215 pounds and stands six feet, two inches tall. A hard-drinking, quick-tempered, but thoroughly professional newspaperman, Casey has a profound contempt for phonies and an energetic and persistent loyalty for a friend in trouble.
• Kent Murdock , the picture chief for the Boston Courier-Herald, is about thirty years old when he first appears; throughout the series, he never goes beyond the age of forty. Darkly handsome, cultured, and sophisticated, he is primarily a cerebral detective, although by no means of the Sherlock Holmes/C. Auguste Dupin school. Murdock handles himself well in a fight, but he fights only as a last resort.

Bibliography

Cox, J. Randolph. “Mystery Master: A Survey and Appreciation of the Fiction of George Harmon Coxe.” The Armchair Detective 6 (October, 1972-May, 1973): 63-74, 160-162, 232-241. Serialized overview of Coxe’s writings paying homage to the skill and importance of the author.

Haining, Peter. The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000. Discusses Coxe’s work in the pulps and the role of pulp fiction in American culture.

Knight, Stephen Thomas. Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Broad overview of the important trends and developments in two centuries of detective fiction. Emphasizes the trend toward diversity in the characterization of detectives in later fiction, which helps readers understand Coxe’s decision to make his detectives newspaper photographers.

Margolies, Edward. Which Way Did He Go? The Private Eye in Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, and Ross Macdonald. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982. This study of the major hard-boiled detective writers mentions Coxe briefly and provides a background from which to understand Coxe.