Jack Fenner

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Created by George Harmon Coxe
(1901-84)

JACK FENNER is a rough-around-the-edges Boston private eye who originally popped up in several novels as the hands-on sidekick to the more genteel and refined Kent Murdock, a crime-solving crime photographer for The Boston Courier-Herald, way back in the thirties.

Not that Fenner was exactly hard-boiled, especially in the later books, but compared to the smoother, slicker  and imminently respectable Murdock, well…

In fact, sometimes the line gets pretty blurry as to which is a Fenner novel and which is a Murdock novel. The two play patty cakes in many of the earlier books, with the good-natured Fenner mostly in the background, playing second fiddle.

It wasn’t until 1971 that Fenner finally got top billing in Fenner. As Bill Pronzini opines in 1001 Midnights, “Although published in 1971, (the novel Fenner) has the feel of the Forties… Action-oriented readers may find Coxe’s work dull; there is virtually no violence, but rather a charming concern for decorum (another hint of bygone days).”

Fenner appeared after that in The Silent Witness (1973), and by 1975 he was truly the star of the show, in No Place for Murder, with Murdock reduced to a minor walk-on.

It was, unfortunately, Fenner’s his last appearance.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Coxe created a slew of other private eye and private eye-adjacent detectives, including Sam Crombie, Max Hale, Paul Baron, and Leon Morley, but he’s best known for his two crime photographers/amateur sleuths, Flashgun Casey and Kent Murdock, who are basically private eyes with cameras.

UNDER OATH

  • “Coxe was a pretty good writer. Even when the exposition got really wordy he kept things flowing along smoothly.  Too bad he’s mostly out of print these days. Tthere are a few current mystery writers who could take a lesson or two from him.  One thing that jumped out at me was the amount of social drinking that went on in the story.  If modern characters hit the booze that often or that casually, they would’ve all been browbeaten into rehab by the end of the book.”
    — David Nobriga

NOVELS

 

COLLECTORS NOTE

  • The 1943 reprint of the Kent Murdock/Jack Fenner novel Four Frightened Women (Dell #5, to be exact) was the very first Dell “mapback,” with a front cover by Gerald Gregg and of course featured a map on the back. So you can imagine how much collectors will cough up for it.
    P.S. You can’t have my copy.

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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