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George Harmon Coxe

kevinburtonsmith

(1901-1984)

George Harmon Coxe was a journalist, prolific pulp writer, and novelist; an early star of hard boiled crime fiction, and one of Cap Shaw‘s beloved Black Mask Boys.

In a long and prolific career, Coxe put his name to over sixty novels, the last being published in 1975, and hundreds of short stories. His work was adapted for film, radio, television, omics and even a play, and was associated with MGM for a while as a writer. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and he won the Grand Master Award in 1964.

Unfortunately, his name and literary work have drifted into the passages of time and remains largely (and undeservedly) forgotten.

Coxe (pronounced like “cokes”) was born in Olean, New York in 1901. He graduated high school at Elmire Free Academy, attended Purdue for one year following his graduation and shifted his curriculum from engineering to literature, and moved on to Cornell University. For “four or five years”, beginning in 1922, he was a journalist in California, Florida and New York for the Los Angeles Express, the Utica Observer Dispatch, and Santa Monica Outlook, among others.

An admirer of pulp fiction, Coxe — while working his day job at various papers — began writing for them. It was nickel-and-dime stuff, and to maximize his earnings, he initially wrote in many genres, including romance, sports and adventure. But he was especially fond of crime fiction and soon made it his specialty — at the ripe old age of twenty-one.

And he was off! By 1923, Coxe had already sold two stories to Detective Story Magazine, and by the thirties, he was cranking them out regularly for Street & Smith’s Top-Notch, as well as Clues All Star Detective Stories, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, Thrilling Detective, and Argosy.

He would go on to write hundreds more, but his breakthrough came in 1934, when he cracked the Black Mask market for the first time, with “Return Engagement” appearing in the March 1934 issue.

Leaning heavily on Coxe’s background in journalism, the story introduced newspaper photographer Jack “Flashgun” Casey, and it was an almost immediate hit. There had been previous pulp appearances of newspaper reporters who routinely solved crimes, but nobody had tried casting a photographer as the detective. Initially, Black Mask editor “Joseph “Cap Shaw had discouraged Coxe from creating a recurring character, but he later admitted that the character was so well constructed that the series soon became a reader favorite. In fact, Shaw chose the Casey story, “Murder Mixup,” for inclusion in his now-legendary Hard Boiled Omnibus (1946).

A total of twenty-four Flashgun Casey stories eventually appeared in Black Mask, running from 1934-1943, while a final story, “The Man Who Died Too Soon,” made its way into Star Weekly in 1962.

Some of the Black Mask stories were eventually collected in a 1946 Avon paperback Flash Casey, Detective published in 1946 as an Avon paperback. In addition to the short stories, there were five novels starring Flashgun Casey between 1942 through 1964. Those were Silent for the Dead, Murder for Two, Error of Judgment, The Man Who Died Too Soon, and Deadly Image.

Additionally, a couple of films based on Casey were released, Women are Trouble (1936) and Here’s Flash Casey (1938), although fans of the hard-boiled Black Mask Casey may have been disappointed. Still, a well-respected, much-loved radio show was broadcast for years starring the Staats Cotsworth as Caseyc. Also, between 1951 through 1952, the series was adapted to a TV show titled Crime Photographer and starred Darren McGavin.

Another pulp character that Coxe created was Paul Baron, a hard-boiled private detective who was assisted by a scrappy side kick named Buck O’ Shea. Baron appeared in four stories in Black Mask in 1936.

But Coxe quickly saw a future beyond the pulps, and heady with the success of the Flashgun stories, promptly whipped up Kent Murdoch, who became his other best known character. A cleaned-up version of Flashgun, Murdoch was also a photographer for a Boston paper, but whereas Casey was decidedly rough-and-tumble, Murdock was more polished, more urbane and infinitely more suited, Coxe felt, for the more profitable novel market. Murdock did appear in a few stories in the slicks, but he truly flourished in full-length novels — both in hardcover and paperback. The first Murdoch novel was Murder with Pictures, published in 1935, little more than a year after the first Flashgun. 22 more followed.

In Paperback Confidential, Brian Ritt describes Kent Murdoch as being a smarter version of the Flashgun Casey series. Murdoch has a formal education, he’s sophisticated and well-mannered. He’s married to a woman named Joyce and they work as a team solving crimes in Boston’s upper crust. In the Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes, Jess Nevins summarizes the character as a photographer for the Boston Courier-Herald. Because he is more intelligent than the police he can solve the crimes. However, many times he has to clear his own name after being accused of being a participant in the crime. Murdoch’s wife Joyce plays a prominent role in the first six books and then disappears for the rest of the series. Murdoch also teams up with a hardboiled private-eye in this series named Jack Fenner. This Fenner sidekick would star in his own novels as well.

Another pulp character that Coxe created was Dr. Paul Standish, who appeared in ten stories and one novel from 1942 to 1966. The stories appeared in glossy magazines like Cosmopolitan, Liberty, and the American Magazine. Standish was a medical examiner who delved into mysterious deaths. He was aided by a police lieutenant and a nurse secretary. In July, 1948, CBS ran a short-lived radio broadcast starring the character.

Coxe, while succeeding with amateur detective characters like Standish, had a few other professional detectives in his arsenal.

Private eye Max Hale appeared in Murder for the Asking (1939) and The Lady is Afraid (1940). Hale was a wealthy New Yorker who attended the State Police Academy and then just doesn’t have any motivation to solve crimes. He is sort of roped into crime-solving by his secretary Sue Marshall.

Another private investigator, Sam Crombie, appeared in two novels, The Frightened Fiancée (1950) and The Impetuous Mistress (1958).

Coxe also wrote a number of stand-alone thrillers and mysteries that were published by a variety of publishers in both hardcover and paperback, with many of them set in exotic tropical locations, including Cuba, Barbados, Panama, Guyana, Trinidad, Caracas,  and Manila. In the 1930s, Cox’s writing had become so popular that MGM took notice. They hired Coxe between 1936 until 1938 to write screenplays. However, Coxe preferred writing books and stories, and so he kept at it.

It was a wise decision. Always more interested in character development than a clever plot twist (although he had plenty of them in his work), Coxe was at home in novel-writing.

In the March 11, 1971 issue of The Island Packet, Eugene Able interviewed Coxe and he had this to say about his literary work and career:

“When you get my age and have written as many book and stories as I have, you have to be careful not to be repetitive. I like to write a book that has a good story with believable characters. If a reader figures out the mystery halfway through the book, I want the story to be good enough and the characters real enough to make them want to finish it. The trickier you get with your ending, the more you sacrifice the story.”

Coxe had married Elizabeth Fowler in 1929 and they were wed until his death on January 31, 1984 in Old Lyme, Connecticut, survived by Elizabeth, their two children and an impressive body of work.

   

UNDER OATH

SHORT STORIES & NOVELLAS (Partial)

NOVELS

COLLECTIONS

FILMS

RADIO

TELEVISION

COMICS

AUDIO CDS

REFERENCE

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Eric Compton of The Paperback Warrior, with a little tweaking and additional info by Kevin Burton Smith.

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