Created by Roger Torrey
Pseudonyms include Sam Drake, Samuel Drake, John Ryan, R.D. Torrey
(1901-46)
Put another dime in the juke box, baby…
Ex-Marine and WW1 veteran JIM DOUGHERTY is yet another of pulpster Torey’s seemingly endless supply of almost interchangeable one-off private eyes. His sole appearance, as far as I can tell, was in the short story “They Carried Him Out” in the October 1946 issue of Detective Story Magazine.
On the surface, his eyes seem almost indistinguishable from each other — they were all tough, suitably hard-boiled dicks, not exactly angels but generally all right, who favored first-person narration, and usually sported Irish-American surnames (Halloran! Keogh! McWhatever!). He even has the obligatory secretary — in Dougherty’s case, the disapproving “thin, fiftyish and far from good-looking” Amanda Miller.
Like many of Torrey’s PI tales, it kicks off with the detective in his office, grilling a new client — in this case Dan Houston, a former Marine recently returned from from WWII and the owner of a Purple Heart, a reform school past and a new job as wealthy Big Bill Farnham’s chauffeur. But Dan’s in a jam — Farnham suspects him of stealing $50,00 and possibly murdering his seventeen-year-old son. He wants Dougherty, whom he’s known since he was a child, to help him clear his name.
When the boy calls his father from a Chicago hotel, both Dougherty and Houston go to fetch him — and the missing money.
Only problem, neither the kid or the money are there…
I tell ya, maybe if Torrey had simply used the same name for all his private eyes, one of ’em coulda been a contender.
SHORT STORIES
- “They Carried Him Out” (October 1946, Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine)
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- The Eyes of Roger Torrey
A Preliminary List
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
