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Hank Hyer

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Kurt Steel
Pseudonym of Rudolf Hornaday Kagey
(1904-1946)

Now here’s a weird one: you’d think Kurt Steel would be the private eye’s name, and HANK HYER would be the author.

Nope.

It’s Hank’s creator who’s got the unlikely moniker of Kurt Steel. Then again, that’s just a pseudonym of Rudolf Hornaday Kagey. So I guess Kurt Steel is an improvement, after all.

Hornaday? Really?

But I digress…

According to the very helpful information provided by the Dell paperback edition (love those mapbacks!) of Judas, Incorporated (1939), Hank’s a “tough and well-muscled private investigator,” a former boxer who “takes himself and the world with adequate salt, and rarely allows sentiment to intrude upon the fundamentals of life. Hyer likes things stirred up and is not adverse to giving fate a stimulating prod. Only a fat fee check can lure him from Broadway.”

He works out of a Greenwich Village apartment on Bank Street, and he’s not hurting for bucks — he’s been known to charge up to $10,000 a case.

In other words, a typical hard-boiled dick of the era, albeit an early one who actually predates the novel-length debut of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe by a few years (Chandler, of course, had been writing short fiction for Black Mask since 1933). And Steel saddled Hyer with an interesting background: he’d been a brilliant welterweight boxer at one point.

The author, at one time a Columbia University philosophy professor, was born in Tuscola, Illinois, and was a long-time supporter of the Labor movement.  He was, perhaps not surprisingly, an admirer of Hammett, and his books show a marked distaste for gentlemanly sleuths and brainiac detectives. They’re generally fast-moving, and he’s got some nifty dialogue and character development.

The series seemed to be a little more political (or at least more aware of politics) than most hard-boiled books of the era, and given his background, it shouldn’ty shock anyone that he generally leaned to the left. In his 1944 article “The Ethics of the Mystery Novel” Anthony Boucher notes that Judas Incorporated was “a pro-union labor novel,” while in Ambush House (1943), Hank adopts a young girl, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War.

Altogether, Hank (sometimes Henry) appeared in nine novels in the thirties and forties, and proved popular enough to inspire at least a couple of B-films from Paramount. 1937’s Murder Goes To College, was based on his novel of the same name, published the previous year. It featured Lynne Overman as Hyer and Roscoe Karns was added as Sim Perkins, providing comic relief as a bumbling, booze-swilling reporter, and was promptly followed by Partners in Crime, also 1937, also apparently based on Murder Goes to College. This second film might be most notable for an early appearance by Anthony Quinn.

OUCH!

Although his books were generally well-received, and popular enough to spawn at least two fims, not everyone was a fan. Ever-cranky Raymond Chandler in a 1939 letter to George Harmon Coxe, dismissed a couple of Steel’s books as “oh-so-irritating wise-guy crap.”

TRIVIA

UNDER OATH

NOVELS

SHORT STORIES

FILMS

FURTHER INVESTIGATIONS

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith, with an important lead from Bill Kelly. Thanks, Bill.

 
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