Joe Gee

Created by Wyatt Blassingame
Pseudonyms include Van Cort & William B. Rainey
(1909-85)

New Orleans private eye JOE GEE was one of those creepy but fascinating  “defective detectives” from the gloriously incorrect weird menace pulps of the thirties and forties, such as Strange Detective Mysteries, Detective Mystery Magazine and especially Dime Mystery. Unlike many of his disabled brethren, though, Joe’s affliction seems —at first —to barely qualify, amidst the hordes of disabled, suffering everything from blindness, hemophilia, missing limbs and polio.

His big handicap? He has insomnia.

Big deal, right? Poor baby can’t sleep.

But it’s a big deal to him. When he’s on case, particularly one that interests him, the endless sleepless nights weigh on him mightily, leaving him haggard, bloody-eyed, cross and irritable, muttering to himself, and barely able to function. He’s also not winning many friends in the process.

He’s not a reporter, but he does background investigation for a local paper, The Democrat, and gets the job done. Joe stayed awake in half a dozen stories in Dime Mystery and Strange Detective.

And who could sleep with stuff like this going on, anyway?

“Weltering in a corner was a thing blackened and charred and heaving wetly like hot bubbling tar”?

Or the dude who was “no longer recognizable as a man, but just a bloated tangled mass of slimy vegatation”?

Yikes!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wyatt Blassingame was yet another of those prolific pulpsters with a slew of series characters to his name, including reporter Bishop, FBI Agent Joe Fall, magician turned G-Man The Ghost, and private eyes Allen Foster, Necessary Jones, The Thin Man, and John Smith, a once-blind detective with  super hearing who proved to be his longest-running and most popular character. The publisher Ramble House, who have released several collections of Wyatt Blassingame’s work, tagged the author  a “Lost Master of the Weird Tale.”

UNDER OATH

• “Blassingame’s first series detective Joe Gee faces the same sort of terrors as those that plagued the heroes of earlier stories in Terror Tales and Horror Stories. A bit of the mood is relieved as we readers know that a series character isn’t going to get killed off, but in Blassingame’s case he more than made up for it with what happened to the supporting cast!”
  — John Pelan

SHORT STORIES

• “Mistress of the Worm-Men” (February 1940,  Dime Mystery Magazine)
• “Princess of Burning Death(March 1940, Dime Mystery Magazine)
• “The Whistling Dwarf Brings Death” (March 1940, Strange Detective Mysteries)
• “Beware the Boneless Death!” (May 1940, Dime Mystery Magazine)
• “The Doctor Says—Die!” (July 1940, Dime Mystery Magazine)
• “Death’s Sky-Writing” (January 1941, Dime Mystery Magazine)

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

• The Defective Detectives
  Handicapped Heroes

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.