Created by Julius W. Long
(1907-1955)
“The D.A.’s bundler carrier, that’s me. I crack the cases, and Keever gets the headlines.”
— “Blind Bogey”
Prolific pulpster Long–he seemed to be everywhere in the forties, with his name frequently splashed on pulp covers– had two ongoing series. He wrote  about Clarence Darrow “Corpus Delecti” Mort, a slightly seedy, and often drunk, defense attorney for Dime Detective,  and BEN CORBETT, chief inspector for the DA’s office, for Black Mask.
He may have been an official law enforcement officer, with an official badge and everything, but Corbett considered himself a mere “bundle carrier,” and had far more in common with other hard-boiled private ops of the era– Mike Grost in fact makes a pretty compelling case that likens Corbett  to none other than Hammett’s Continental Op, and not just because of their shared status as a lone wolf investigators who tend to fly solo while toiling for larger organizations.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A lifelong resident of small town Bellefontaine, Ohio, from where he practiced law, the ubiquitous Julius Long seemed to be everywhere in the 1940s pulps, a mainstay of the crime and detective mags, primarily Black Mask, Dime Detective and Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, with his name–if not his stories–featured prominently on any issue in which one of them was included. By the late forties, however, his fiction output began to slow. His only novel, Keep the Coffins Coming, came out in 1947, and presumably he devoted the rest of life to his on-going legal practice and non-fiction articles, possibly on legal matters and others about guns and gun collecting for Field and Stream.
SHORT STORIES
- “Merely Murder” (July 1944, Black Mask)
- “Blind Bogey” (November 1944, Black Mask)
- “Leave Your Killing Card” (January 1945, Black Mask)
- “Goon My Way” (March 1945, Black Mask)
- “Carnie Kill” (May 1945, Black Mask)
- “The Witch of Endor County” (July 1945, Black Mask)
- “Over My Dead Booty” (September 1945, Black Mask)
- “Never Kid a Killing” (November 1945, Black Mask)
- “Date with Dynamite” (January 1946, Black Mask)
- “Flowers for Flanagan” (February 1946, Black Mask)
- “Forgive Not Our Trespassers” (March 1946, Black Mask)
- “Murder by the Carton” (May 1946, Black Mask)
- “Crime Is Bustin’ Out All Over” (July 1946, Black Mask)
- “This Is Murder” (September 1946, Black Mask)
- “I Remember Murder” (January 1947, Black Mask)
- “One Life to a Customer” (May 1947, Black Mask)
- “Call in the Coroner” (November 1947, Black Mask)
- “The Machine That Murder Built” (November 1948, Detective Tales)
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- Julius Long
From Mike Grost’s always impressive A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page.
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
