Created by Paul Ernst
Pseudonyms included Frederick Carr, Ernest Jason Fredericks, Kenneth Robeson, Robert Wallace, Chris Brand, George Alden Edson, George Edson, Emerson Graves, Paul Frederick Stern
(1899-1985)
“I am going to turn on the light now. Do not be alarmed at my face.”
Arguably the first of the “defective detectives,” Paul Ernst’s SEEKAY was a tall, muscular and rather peculiar Chicago private eye who appeared in just five short stories in the pulps of the thirties, and whose main claim to fame was that he had no face.
Well, not precisely.
He did have a face, but it was hideously (of course) disfigured, and he hid it behind a pinkish celluloid mask, featureless save for holes through which one can spot his “burning black eyes.”
But his ugly puss isn’t all he keeps hidden.
Seekay is a true man of mystery. He prefers to dwell in the shadows, and keeps his office and home poorly lit. He must have been well off, because he seems to only take cases that pique his interest, and he works out of a book-lined study in a large, “bizarre house” on the near North Side, but other than that, who knows?
We never find out how he received his injuries (the war?) or where exactly he got those Sherlock Holmes-like powers of deduction. His past is as blank as his mask.
Still, he has a good rep, even with the local cops. “Seekay is kind of crazy… But he’s a good private dick,” admits one police detective.
Seekay made his debut in the very first issue of Strange Detective Mysteries, and was featured on the cover of the second (and last) issue. Three further adventures showed up in Detective Tales.
Sure, there were other disabled detectives before Seekay, but the first two Deejay stories were, according to pulp historian Jess Nevins, “striking enough to inspire a number of other authors to imitate the approach Ernst had taken, if not Seekay himself,” resulting in the short-lived defective detectives craze in the pulps in the late 1930s.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Ernst was born in West Peoria, Illinois, and wrote hundreds of short stories and novels between 1926 and 1966. He’s probably best remembered for penning twenty-four novels featuring The Avenger, a quasi-private eye/adventurer who also had facial problems. He wrote them under the house name of Kenneth Robeson for Street & Smith. He also was the author of the Dr. Satan series that ran in Weird Tales starting in 1935 and featured the evil Doc Satan, usually pitted against a wealthy occult detective named August Keane and his secretary Betty Dale. After the pulps died out Ernst transitioned to the slicks writing for Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping. He was still writing at the time of his death in Zepher, Florida in 1985.
SHORT STORIES
- “Madam Murder — and the Corpse Brigade” (October 1937, Strange Detective Mysteries)
- “The Corpse with the Third Eye” (November 1937, Strange Detective Mysteries)
- “Case of the Smoking Skulls” (March 1938, Detective Tales)
- “Two Tickets to Hell” (July 1938, Detective Tales)
- “Widow of the Talking Head” (November 1938, Detective Tales)
COLLECTIONS
- The Casebook of Seekay and Other Prototypes of The Avenger (2010) | Buy this book
- | Buy this book
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- The Defective Detectives
Handicapped Heroes
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
