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Paul Kilgerrin

kevinburtonsmith

Created by Charles B. Leonard
Pseudonym of Mary Violet Heberden
(1906-65)

Is he a spy, or is he an eye?

A swarthy, gaunt-faced man with hawk-like features, raven-black hair, hooded eyes and precious little sense of humour, PAUL KILGERRIN worked in Military Intelligence in the First World War, but was seriously wounded. Almost fully recovered by the time the Second World War rolled around, he sought to have his commission renewed, but was rejected.

And so he went private.

Sure, he does a little insurance work, but his main client seems to be the U.S. government, whom he works for under the table.

The only problem? Kilgerrin isn’t that good at following orders, much to the dismay of his handler, a certain Colonel Mathewson who’s not all that keen on private investigators to begin with. Kilgerrin insists on handling his cases his way, demanding a completely free hand without any interference — no matter who he’s working for.

And he does get results. Well into his forties, he’s in superb physical shape; a cynical, cold-blooded, Commie-hating eye with a sometimes sliding scale of ethics — his personal motto seems to be along the lines of “shoot first and ask questions afterward.”

Which he does. Frequently. Maybe he knew James Bond, with his license to kill, was just around the corner.

Based somewhere on the West Coast (probably California), Kilgerrin’s cases take him all over the place, from Washington, DC and North Africa to Yugoslavia and the jungles of Peru, and blend your typical hard-boiled detective fiction with plenty of World War II and Cold War-era espionage, pitting Kilgerrin (usually working undercover) against assorted saboteurs, black marketeers and Nazis, and after the war the ever-popular “Red Menace.”

In Kilgerrin’s first recorded case, The Stolen Squadron (1942), female test pilot and war widow Gerry Cordent (a relative by marriage of Mathewson) is introduced. She pops up in several of the other books, often acting as Paul’s assistant, and Detecting Women mentions her as one of the early “liberated” women of modern crime fiction.

The author appeared to have been a favourite of mystery critic Anthony Boucher, who seemed  particularly fond of Kilgerrin, whom he tagged as one of “the most complex characters among private eyes” and praised for the “bitter realism of (his) outlook.”

Which means, I guess, that while the always cynical Kilgerrin gets shot and knifed and kicked and generally has the crap beaten out of him with alarming regularity, he doesn’t just snap out of it like most tough guy dicks of his era— he actually hurts, and sometimes it takes more than one book to heal.

Good stuff.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charles L. Leonard (actually Mary Violet Heberden, although she mostly hid behind her initials) was also one of the few women mentioned in mystery critic James Sandoe‘s oft-reprinted and anthologized The Hard-Boiled Dick, a personal checklist of his favorite hard-boiled authors. She was also responsible for a couple of other private eyes, ex-Naval Commander Rick Vanner and Desmond Shannon, supposedly “highest paid private eye in New York City.”

Heberden began her life as an actress in England, before emigrating to the US where she landed a variety of supporting parts in Broadway productions. It was during this period that she began writing detective novels. Her first novel, a theatrical mystery featuring Desmond Shannon, was Death on the Door Mat,published in 1939. A successful businesswoman, she had a fondness for travel and lived and worked in South America, running a timber company in Brazil, and settled in Rome for a while in the 1950s. Her 20-year writing career may have never been her primary source of income, but she certainly churned them out, sometimes as many as four books a year. Her final novel was published in 1953. She died in 1965.

Unfortunately, despite the critical and popular success received in their time (Anthony Boucher, for example, was a big fan, routinely praising Heberden’s work), very few of her books have ever been reissued, and paperback editions published during her lifetime are few and far between, which may explain Heberden’s relative obscurity. Still, the used book market is flooded with a variety of her titles,  in both US and UK editions.

UNDER OATH

NOVELS

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Big Al Hubin for his help with this one.

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