Jack Webb (writer)

• Born: January 13, 1916
• Birthplace: Los Angeles, California
• Died: February 12, 2008
• Place of death: Coronado, California

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; hard-boiled; police procedural; private investigator

Principal Series: Father Shanley and Sammy Golden, 1952-; Cy Clements, 1955-

Contribution

Jack Webb’s principal series of mystery novels, the Father Shanley and Sammy Golden books, features a Catholic priest with a church in a Hispanic neighborhood of Los Angeles who teams up with a Jewish police detective. As a result, Webb places heavy emphasis on ethnic characters and their attitudes and problems, an unusual approach that ran against the grain of the culturally cautious 1950’s, when all but the last book in the series appeared. Even more unusual than the characters who appear in Webb’s novels are his warm approach to human problems (even criminals are sometimes sympathetically viewed as victims of forces beyond their control), his emphasis on higher moral issues (usually raised by Father Shanley), and his frequent references to music, art, and literature.

Biography

Jack Webb was born as John Alfred Webb on January 13, 1916, in Los Angeles and has lived most of his life there, except for military service and a period of residence in Phoenix, Arizona, from 1957 to 1966. He attended Occidental College in Los Angeles and was graduated with a degree in English literature in 1937. For the next two years, he worked at the San Diego Zoo and developed an interest in animals. During World War II, he served as a lieutenant with the Office of Strategic Services as part of a Signal Corps unit stationed near Chungking, China.

Webb was married to his wife, Nell, in 1950, and they have two children and a large collection of animals. During his time in Arizona, he established an aviary and a natural history library. He was most active as a writer during the 1950’s, when the majority of his work appeared. He worked at a series of jobs, including a position at an advertising agency, before becoming manager of the Technical Information Unit of the General Electric Company. Although he retired from that company in 1986, he continued to work as a consultant.

Analysis

Although mystery writer Jack Webb is often confused with Jack Randolph Webb (1920-1982), who produced and starred in the popular television series Dragnet, it is difficult to see how the mystery novels of Webb could be considered the work of the television star. Dragnet and other series produced by television’s Jack Webb are noted for a tough, no-nonsense approach to crime that emphasizes the boring and tedious elements of daily police work, debunks the conventions of detective fiction, and makes direct and simple, sometimes simplistic, moral judgments. By contrast, the mystery novels of the Jack Webb discussed here make heavy use of the conventions of detective fiction (unusual characters, elaborate plots, and abundant violence) but are also remarkable for their humor and frequent literary allusions, qualities for which the other Jack Webb is not noted.

The Big Sin

The unlikely pair of Father Shanley and Sammy Golden was introduced in The Big Sin (1952). Father Shanley, a rose-growing, pipe-smoking priest in his thirties, asks for the help of the police in solving the case of the death of one of his parishioners, Rose Mendez, who was ruled by the police to have committed suicide in the office of a nightclub owner. As a suicide (the “big sin” of the title), Rose may not receive the sacraments of the Church and may not be buried in consecrated ground. Father Shanley is at first attracted by a moral problem. Although Rose was a dancer in the club and lived on the fringes of the gangster world, the priest does not believe that she was a corrupt person or that she would kill herself. At the police station, he tries to arouse the interest of Sammy Golden, a plumpish Jewish detective in his thirties. Not only has Sammy been around the streets of Los Angeles, but he has also been action in World War II in North Africa, Salerno, and Anzio. Although he at first regards the priest’s request as motivated by naïve sentimentality, he soon becomes interested in the case; indeed, his sense of morality is as intense as that of the priest, although the detective tries to mask his humanity under a hard shell. When someone attempts to cover up certain aspects of the case, Sammy becomes fully committed to helping Father Shanley. The priest and the detective eventually solve the case, save the reputation of the girl, and uncover a scandal that reaches to the highest level of the city’s government. All the while, Father Shanley remains faithful to his priestly obligations; he says a prayer aloud, for example, as he and Sammy do some breaking and entering during their investigations.

The main weakness of the Webb mysteries is their elaborate and sometimes confusing plots. The Big Sin, Webb’s first book, has a labyrinthine structure that suggests that its author was unsure whether there was enough mystery and so kept adding plot twists. Webb’s later entries in the series are sparer and more effective.

The Naked Angel

The moral problems that Father Shanley encounters are interesting not only from the perspective of a priest but also from that of an ordinary reader. In The Naked Angel (1953), the priest hears police detective Mike Shannon call one of his parishioners a “greaser” and learns of his roughing up Mexican American suspects. Father Shanley believes that he must fight the detective to defend the honor of his flock and teach Shannon a lesson; the priest is good with his fists, an important skill to have considering the trouble that he and Sammy encounter. Father Shanley teaches the neighborhood boys to box and reminds Shannon that a priest started the Golden Gloves tournament. The priest lands some punches, but Shannon knocks him down, though not without regret. Later, confronting in an alley one of the Latin suspects in the naked angel case, Shannon remembers what he did to the priest, hesitates, and in that unguarded moment receives a knife in the belly. In the hospital, he asks to see the priest and dies cursing him, unrepentant, leaving Shanley to consider the practical difficulties of maintaining Christian civility in a fallen world.

The love interests in these mysteries are left for Sammy Golden to handle. (Father Shanley is so genuinely righteous that if he is ever attracted to a woman, the reader never discovers it.) Sammy’s work does not allow him to meet many law-abiding people, so the women with whom he becomes involved are usually on the wrong side of the law or tramps with hearts of gold. When a “good” woman does come along, such as Barbara Mendez, the sister of the murder victim in The Big Sin, Sammy considers her out of his league. Even so, Sammy usually becomes fond of one of the women involved in the mystery and by the end of the novel has become very close to her. Nell Wharton, a high-class lady of the evening who appears in The Big Sin, falls in love with the detective, and there is talk of marriage between them at its close. When The Naked Angel begins, however, Nell is footloose again, and Sammy is carrying the torch for her. In that book, Sammy becomes involved with Myra Merrick, who proves to be part of a scheme to compromise him. Webb finally gave Sammy a more permanent liaison in The Damned Lovely (1954), where he meets Elizabeth Songer (with whom he is saved from death by Father Shanley), who becomes a regular girlfriend and appears in several other cases until she departs to get married. Sammy’s activities beyond normal police procedure sometimes get him in trouble: At the end of The Naked Angel, he is demoted to patrolman, and in The Deadly Sex (1959), he seriously considers joining a beautiful female thief and fleeing to the Caribbean.

Webb does not stress Sammy’s ethnic background as strongly as that of the priest, although the reader finds in The Naked Angel that the detective’s mother and father operate a delicatessen. At the end of The Brass Halo (1957), when Father Shanley says that God will listen to the prayers of the murderer caught by the detective team, Sammy remarks, “Your God is a kinder one than mine.”

One for My Dame and Make My Bed Soon

Webb gave the priest and detective a rest at the end of the 1950’s before bringing them back for a final appearance in The Gilded Witch (1963). Each of the two books between The Deadly Sex and The Gilded Witch, One for My Dame (1961) and Make My Bed Soon (1963), concerns different characters, and each allows Webb to explore two of his favorite interests, animals and literature. Rick Jackson, the protagonist of One for My Dame, runs a pet shop and has three pets who figure in the plot (a Great Dane, a mynah, and a squirrel monkey). When Rick becomes involved with the kidnapped daughter of a Mafia chieftain, he is able to withstand a considerable amount of punishment by the mob because he had been a prisoner of war in Korea and had already been tortured by experts. Rick is beaten so frequently in this novel that the effect is finally comic, and Webb’s intent may be satiric.

Make My Bed Soon also has a main character who is knowledgeable about animals, Al Duffey. He presents a theory about the crime with which he is involved as part of a discussion of the mating ritual of the Argus pheasant in relation to the theory of evolution as developed by Charles Darwin from his observation of the finches found on the Galápagos Islands. Make My Bed Soon is also the most strongly literary of Webb’s books; the title comes from the English ballad “Lord Randal,” and there are references to William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Keats, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, William Blake, and Omar Khayyám. The most literary book before this work had been The Delicate Darling (1959), which featured Juan Delicado, a Cuban poet and revolutionary who was clearly modeled on José Marti; this book not only gave Webb an opportunity to indulge his penchant for Latin characters but also allowed him to smuggle some poetry into a mystery novel. In One for My Dame, the kidnapped girl compares Rick Jackson to Don Quixote, whom he greatly resembles, for after he frees the two of them from her captors, she drops back and is recaptured so that he may escape, but he returns to free her again. The emphasis on animals in these two books parallels that in an earlier series of three books, written under the pen name of John Farr, about a zookeeper who is called in to solve crimes apparently committed by animals. Another John Farr book is Webb’s only essay in the hard-boiled detective field: In The Deadly Combo (1958), a seedy private eye tries to track down the murderer of a jazz trumpet player.

One for My Dame and Make My Bed Soon not only suffer from overly elaborate plots but also present another problem—strangers who appear at just the right time to help the hero. In One for My Dame, Rick Jackson takes refuge in a model tract house and finds it inhabited by a television actor who helps him and, coincidentally, holds a grudge against the criminals Jackson is chasing. Al Duffey, the hero of Make My Bed Soon, is befriended by a Mexican shoeshine boy who knows all about the people trying to kill Duffey and leads him to a boat where the crooks are hiding. Later, Duffey is fished out of the Gulf of California by a man who happens to be from Duffey’s army unit in Korea. Furthermore, the plot of Make My Bed Soon, which involves a double-crossing woman who helps thieves smuggle cars into Mexico and smuggle drugs out, and which ends in that country, is quite similar to the plot of The Naked Angel, which involves a deceptive woman and a used-car dealer who smuggles drugs from Mexico, where that book’s climactic scenes occur.

Humor

Webb’s mysteries are often enlivened by humor. The highlight of The Deadly Sex is a fight at a bar: A diamond thief, a corrupt bar owner, Sammy Golden operating undercover, a widow who is trying to get information about the men who killed her police-officer husband, members of a Chicano motorcycle gang, another undercover police officer, and Father Shanley all arrive at the bar at the same time, with hilarious consequences. In addition to the usual banter between the characters, there are inside jokes that suggest that the author does not take himself too seriously. In The Naked Angel, people are watching a film titled High Mesa—the title of Webb’s only Western novel, published in 1952 and issued under the name Tex Grady because his publishers thought that readers would be skeptical of a Western written by Webb. The Broken Doll (1955) has a joke about Sergeant Joe Friday, and in The Delicate Darling, Sammy describes a character as “overcome by her Thursday night television.” Thursday was the night when Dragnet appeared.

Fans of pure mystery are sometimes alienated by the blend of humor, literature, and philosophy that gives the Webb books their distinctive character. Like Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, Webb regarded the mystery as merely an instrument for evoking an atmosphere or making a psychological or philosophical point.

Principal Series Characters:

• Father Joseph Shanley is the priest of a Catholic parish in a poor section of Los Angeles, where he suspects or encounters crimes and seeks the help of the police in solving them.
• Sammy Golden , a Jewish police detective sergeant, is a friend of Father Shanley and takes charge of the cases brought by the priest, often getting himself into more trouble than expected.
• Red Adams , Sammy’s partner on the police force, figures in a number of the Shanley-Golden adventures, as do
• Bill Cantrell , the detectives’ boss;
• Tom Meigs , a reporter who assists the pair with research and publicity; and
• Liz Songer , one of Sammy’s girlfriends.
• Cy Clements is a zookeeper who uses his knowledge of animals to solve several murder cases involving animals.

Bibliography

Brean, Herbert, ed. The Mystery Writer’s Handbook. New York: Harper, 1956. Guide to writing mysteries with examples of successful writers, including Webb.

Breen, Jon L., and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Synod of Sleuths: Essays on Judeo-Christian Detective Fiction. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990. Discusses important Jewish and Christian religious figures in detective fiction; provides perspective from which to understand Webb’s works.

Erb, Peter C. Murder, Manners, and Mystery: Reflections on Faith in Contemporary Detective Fiction—The John Albert Hall Lectures, 2004. London: SCM Press, 2007. Collected lectures on the role and representation of religion in detective fiction; sheds light on Webb.

Keating, H. R. F. Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense, and Spy Fiction. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982. General overview of the conventions and practitioners of British and American crime fiction; provides background for understanding Webb.

Penzler, Otto, et al., eds. Detectionary: A Biographical Dictionary of Leading Characters in Detective and Mystery Fiction. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1977. Reference work by detective-fiction editor contains information on Webb’s Father Shanley.