Created by Tedd Steele
Other pseudonyms include Ted Stelle, T.A. Steele, Theodore Steele, David Benedict, Jack Benedict, David Forrest, Gerald Laing, Jack Romaine
(1922-??)
Mothers, don’t let your sons grow up to be private dicks.
The hours are awful and so few require their services. Consider Artists Models and Murder (1956) a cautionary tale.
It’s been two months since STEVE BLACK left New York to set up shop in Metropolis and he’s still awaiting his first client. What this particular dick thought was a smart move — “there’s (sic) only three other detective agencies here” — has brought only bitterness: “There’s not enough crime in this burg.” This goes some way in explaining why it is that Steve allows himself to be hired by a broken-hearted Webster Reynolds.
Reynolds is a successful artist — he smokes gold monogrammed cigarettes —and his story is fascinating. For nearly four years he’s been involved with model Marcia Hunter. They became engaged around the end of year three, but decided to put off marriage until they’d saved up a nice nest egg. All went according to plan until Marcia suddenly, inexplicably spent three thousand dollars on an oil painting. “I called the thing a bloody daub,” says Reynolds, “and told her she has [sic] been taken in for spending so much money.”
The purchase was uncharacteristic of a woman who’d never paid more than two hundred dollars for a painting. More mysterious still is the unexpected appearance of the artist himself, Pierre Robinette. Newly arrived from Paris, he offers ten thousand dollars to buy back his own work. After Marcia refuses, Robinette starts in on winning her heart and Reynolds pops the Parisian paramour in the snout.
An artist himself, Steele’s intriguing premise is made fun through his wishful alternate reality. Artists are invariably handsome, sophisticated, and well-paid, attributes they share with the writers in fellow Torontonian pulpist Keith Edgar’s I Hate You to Death (1944). I was reminded also of The Penthouse Killings by fellow Canadian scribe Horace Brown (1950) in that both its private detective, Squire Adams, and Steve Black are dimwits.
If the case covered in Artists, Models and Murder is typical, Steve’s lack of thought and his inability to put two and two together would be understandable. He suffers numerous beatings in his first twelve hours on the case, losing consciousness no less than seven times. I counted (Steve, poor Steve, thinks it was only five times.)
The cover copy errs in mentioning a Manhattan murder before going on to claim: ”Artists, models and gunfire are bound up in a swift-moving train of events that thrust Steve into a multitude of situations both hair raising [sic] and hilarious.”
Hilarious? No, but that train of events moves so rapidly that one wonders whether Artists, Models and Murder is a parody. In one scene, Steve comes upon a murdered model, is knocked out, revived, surrounded by policemen, encounters an old acquaintance, is cleared of the crime, and, at the end of it all, told by the coroner that the murder occurred within the last thirty minutes. In another, newspapers report a thorough investigation involving forensics has proven that Steve is responsible for a murder that took place less than two hours earlier.
So… not a parody, just sloppy writing. Hilarity is intended in the private dick’s quick quips and head-scratching descriptions. “I felt as giddy as th:e Empire State Building’s spire,” a drunken Steve tells us. “My stomach kept leaping over the middle rail of an escalator and my one good eye was showing me the damnedest display of pyro-technics I had ever witnessed.”
Artistic licence, I suppose.
Eerything is explained at the end by the villain. He’s going to kill Steve, so what the hell. “Take a seat there on the chair and I11 outline the beginning of the whole affair,” he tells the haplessdetective. Seven pages later… I found it was all beginning to make sense, more or less, though by that point I’d become obsessed with two unrelated questions:
Did Tedd Steele do the cover illustration himself?
And why does that cover not feature his name?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Writer and artist Tedd Steele was born on April Fool’s day in 1922, and by the ripe old age of 19, had made his professional debut as an artist with the cover of the Canadian pulp, Uncanny Tales No. 5. Then it was off to the comics, riding the wave of the so-called “Canadian White” comic books that appeared in the early forties, when the Canadian government deemed American comics “non-essential” imports under war-time restrictions. Steele’s earliest job for Toronto comics publisher Bell Features was taking over the popular Dixon of the Mounted feature, before moving on to his first original creation, Pvt. Stuff in Joke Comics # 1. His most significant creation, however, was superhero/private eye Speed Savage, who first showed up in Triumph Comics #7. About the same time, Steele began writing short fillers and working as an editor for some of the detective and western pulps by Export Publishing, and when they began publishing paperbacks, Steele became an author. Among his books were Artists, Models and Murder, Trail of Vengeance, Pagans and Torch of Violence, all published and re-published under assorted pseudonyms over the years, such as David Benedict, Jack Benedict, David Forrest, or Jack Romaine. Sadly, he apparently never did any art for these books, although he did return to art in the fifties, working in advertising and as a freelance artist and writer in Toronto until the eighties.
Torch of Violence (1949), by the way, holds a secure place in Canadian literature as the first novel to feature the word “shit”.
NOVELS
- Artist Models and Murder (1948; aka “Death Wields a Bloody Knife”)
Respectfully submitted by Brian Busby, taken from his book (and blog), The Dusty Bookcase. Additional snark provided by Kevin Burton Smith.
