Created by Leslie Allen
Pseudonyms of Horace Brown
(1908-96)
In the digest-sized 1946 paperback Murder in the Rough, private eye NAPOLEON B. SMITH is out on the links, ending a round when a particularly bad hook (or slice or whatever you call it) lands his ball in the roughs that the local players have tagged “Hell’s Half Acre.”
Alas, the ball beans an old lady and kills her.
Ooops!
Turns out the woman was a little on the odd side, but rich as hell, and Smith, guilt-ridden and all shook up, eventually realizes that he may not have been responsible for the women’s death after all. And so he begins to poke around…
The over-sized Smith, a sort of wannabe Nero Wolfe, is a former cop (the original blurb calls him a “mastodon of a man”), isn’t shy about tossing his considerable bulk (and unpleasant manners) around while on the case. He even has an Archie Goodwin-like partner, Leslie Allen, to narrate his story, which involves an estate scam and a crooked lawyer.
The blurb also promised that “you’ll chuckle over the wisecracks and love affairs of his writing side-kick,” but William F. Deeck in his review in the Summer 1990 issue of The Mystery FANcier wrote “It is to be hoped that Leslie Allen the character and alleged writer is a better stylist than Leslie Allen the author.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Horace Brown, it turns out, was a Canadian newspaper reporter and editor. In the thirties and forties he wrote radio scripts for the CBC, and began selling short stories to general interest magazines such as Saturday Night and Star Weekly, before starting his own pulp magazine publishing company. Global Publishing Company, located in Pickering, Ontario, put out pulp titles like All-New Western Stories and the short-lived and apparently self-published Original Detective Stories, which Brown both “edited” and contributed all the stories. In fact, the latter published a story, “Murder à la Carte,” which marked the debut of private eye Squire Adams. The story would be revised and published as the standalone novel The Penthouse Killings a couple of years later. Meanwhile, under the pen name of “Leslie Allen,” Brown wrote Murder in the Rough and Death of a Prime Minister (1948). Under his own name, he wrote The Corpse Was a Blonde (1950), and the novelization of the 1947 film noir Whispering City. He later served as a city alderman in Toronto, where he gained some notoriety in the early seventies for slapping a fellow alderman in the face.
NOVELS
- Murder in the Rough (1946) | Buy this book
TRIVIA
- There are about a million golf-themed mysteries bearing the title Murder in the Rough, up to any including the Otto Penzler collection of golf-themed mystery short stories, but I believe Allen’s was the first.
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- In the Shadow of the Wolfe
Variations on a Theme, Originally Composed by Rex Stout
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
