Five Bullets

by Lee Thayer

Perhaps it would be mere superstition to consider it an omen, but if the red-headed private investigator had not suddenly appeared in that small college town in Florida when his friend Zingara Hartley, retired newspaper syndicate writer, thought he was at least three hundred miles away, this story of the tragedy that followed hard upon his coming would not have been written.

Instead it would have appeared only in the public press as an ugly, stupid murder, fathered by jealousy, committed under peculiar circumstances that left little sympathy for the youthful murderer's probable passions and complexes and less doubt as to his guilt.

Here is a new Peter Clancy story of the sort that mystery readers look forward to and enjoy, by the author of "A Plain Case of Murder".

Genres: Mystery

548 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Emma Redington Lee Thayer (1874-1973) was an American artist who published sixty mystery novels beginning with "The Mystery of the Thirteenth Floor" (1919) and ending, at the age of ninety-two, with "Dusty Death" (1966). All but one feature the red-headed detective Peter Clancy and his valet Wiggar.

Thayer was born in Pennsylvania and educated at Cooper Union and Pratt Institute, New York City. She married Henry W. Thayer in 1909. As an artist and illustrator, she had paintings displayed at Chicago World's Fair, and produced designs for book jackets.

Reviews

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Five Bullets, a book that I get the feeling no one has ever heard of, is a novel written in 1944 by Lee Thayer, an author that I get the feeling no one has ever heard of. It is one of those books and there are many, that have ended up on a shelf in our house and usually I have no idea how. This one, however, has a name written on the inside cover and it is the name of an older gentleman from our church, so although I don't remember him giving it to me, obviously he did. There were many things I found interesting just on the inside cover, this is what was printed:

Five Bullets
By Lee Thayer

Author of a Plain Case of Murder
Here is a new Peter Clancy story of the sort that mystery readers look forward to and enjoy.
A Wartime Book
Red Badge Detective

I learned from this that Lee Thayer wrote more than one book, wrote more than one mystery, and wrote more books about Peter Clancy than the one I am holding. Not to mention that it is a wartime book (I haven't quite figured that one out yet, unless all books written during wartime had that printed on them), and it is a Red Badge Detective book, whatever that is. See, already I'm interested. But then I went to the last page and read this:

"1944 - 1945"

The Semi-Annual Red Badge

$1,000 Prize
For The Best Mystery-Detective Story

The Red Badge editors annouce that the annual Red Badge contest has been so successful that, commencing immediately, they have decided to offer two prizes each year, the winning book to be published in fall and spring seasons.
For the best mystery-detective novel by an author who has not previously had a book published under the Red Badge imprint, $1000, with additional royalties, will be paid on the declaration of the award by Dodd, Mead & Company.
Manuscripts for the spring contests must be submitted on or before October 1st; for the fall contest, on or before April 1st, in every year."

I am now faced with three things I must decide between; figure out what $1000 in 1944 would be worth today, to find out what ever happened to Red Badge mysteries, or to find out more about the author. I guess I could add a forth - tell what the book is about, but that just isn't in my top three right now. I'm the most curious about the author so I will go with that. And the first thing I find out is something that never even entered my head, Lee Thayer was a woman and she was from Pennsylvania.

"Lee Thayer is the pen name of Emma Redington Lee Thayer, a prolific American writer of detective novels. Emma Redington Lee was born in Troy, Pa. on April 5, 1874, studied at New York City’s Cooper Union and Pratt Institute, and got a job as an interior decorator at New York’s Associated Artists in 1890. With Henry W. Thayer, whom she would eventually marry in 1909, she co-founded Decorative Designers, a firm which (in the days before dust jackets) designed books and produced binding designs, interior illustrations and the like for various book publishers. In 1932, the firm -- and the marriage -- ended, but the author would go by the name of Lee Thayer for the rest of her life. She passed away in 1973, a few months shy of her hundredth birthday.

Thayer wrote sixty mystery novels beginning with "The Mystery of the Thirteenth Floor" published in 1919 when she was 45, and ending, at the age of ninety-two, with "Dusty Death." All but one feature the red-headed detective Peter Clancy who, at some point in the series, is joined by his valet Wiggar. When first introduced, Peter is 15 years old and his role only incidental. He appears at the start and at the end of the story, but he is instrumental in solving the mystery. In "The Mystery of the Thirteenth Floor" Peter is a boy sleuth who, in subsequent stories, grows to become a police officer first and later a private investigator."

I'm not sure which one of the sixty novels didn't have Peter Clancy in it, but it isn't the one I just read. "Five Bullets" comes right about in the middle of the Clancy novels I would think, I haven't looked but I could tell reading it that there were things about Peter and his valet that I was supposed to know from previous books, and I could tell from the ending that there is no reason he won't be back when another crime needs to be solved. I wouldn't mind reading other Peter Clancy novels, I'd like to know more about him, why is he a detective, why isn't he married, why does he need a valet, why does he "dress for dinner" no matter where he is or who is with him, how can he solve crimes from the oddest of clues, things like that. Also, are there other "bullet" books, you know, "One Bullet", "Two Bullets", and such, I guess I could look that one up myself sometime after I'm finished looking up Red Badge Mysteries and a few other things. For now though I'll stick to this book.

We begin at a small college town in Florida, Peter Clancy, and Wiggar, (what an odd name), have arrived in town much to the surprise of his friend Zingara Hartley (another odd name). Zingara is our narrator, she calls herself an "old newspaper woman" and now she has written her first book, a book about one of Peter Clancy's exploits. She is surprised to see him and he is just as surprised to see her. Peter is described as a tall athletic figure with unmistakable red hair. He is on town for some "mysterious" reason, what other reason could it be?, and had no idea that she was also there. She is visiting her friend Rowena Gaspard and her son Douglas. He asks her not to tell her friends why he is there, although he doesn't bother to tell her why he is there either. Rowena's husband has died - I can't remember how - and since the "lean times" have come she has turned her house into a type of bed-and-breakfast - well, one with all the meals served. College students also seem to find their way to Rowena's house, all friends of her son's. It sounds awful to have your home filled with college students, but she doesn't seem to mind. It probably bothers her more when one of those students is shot and killed and Douglas is arrested for the murder. It's kind of hard not to believe he isn't the one who commited the murder, after all, Ted (the dead guy) was shot during a class at the college and everyone in the room saw Douglas shoot him and then throw the gun out the window.

Now we have to figure out why he shot Ted. The general feeling among the students is that Douglas was jealous of the time Ted spent with one of the girls. Most of the people in the book seem to go with that, but it seems that the shooting was part of some odd experiment being performed that day in which after the gun was shot everyone was expected to report on what they saw - they didn't know about the gun until they saw or heard it. The professor came up with the plan, the professor was there when Douglas got the gun, the professor took out the bullets (five of them) and put a blank cartridge in it, a supposed blank cartridge that is, and Douglas shooting the gun and dropping it out the window was all known by the professor. All worked wonderfully except for the dead guy. Oh, a little more about our professor, he is Doctor Jean Liebling, an interesting little man, with a great dome of a head very sparsely settled on top. He had large, soft, rather dreamy brown eyes, capable of a great variety of expression. He had escaped from a German prison camp in 1940 making him an object of interest to a small college town where the echoes of the second World War hardly penetrate.

So, Douglas is arrested and sent to jail until his mother bails him out, and he is out of jail until the professor also gets shot a few hours later. Then he finds himself once again back in jail. And of course it is Douglas who shot the professor, after all, who else could it have been? I can't remember what reason they came up for him to have wanted to kill the professor, but I suppose if he killed one person that day he would kill another, get it all over with in one day. There are a few people who don't believe Douglas shot anyone, no matter how many people saw him do it, Zingara, Rowena, Wiggar, Peter, and me. None of us think Douglas is guilty, but there is something about him that bothers me, he can't walk without crutches, he was injured in an accident two years ago and the injury to his legs had not cleared up. So every where he goes he uses his crutches, until it is late at night and all are in bed, then he goes down to the beach, swims in the ocean, runs along the shore, and doesn't need his crutches again until he leaves the beach. I thought that with a war going on he was trying to avoid getting into the middle of any battle by pretending to still be hurt, but then I guess killing two people and getting thrown in jail for the rest of your life would keep you out of the fighting.

I still refuse to believe Douglas is our murderer, it would be too simple. Besides, I knew who the real bad guy was early in the book, well, I had it narrowed down to four people, and by the time I reached the middle, I had it narrowed down to five. I should have been a detective. So we have two people shot, another hit on the head by a hard object - I can't remember what - he's in the hospital, a German professor, a secret marriage, a never finished hotel which, even though it was never finished a light is still sometimes seen in one of the windows, and Peter Clancy. I gave the book three stars at first, but I'm thinking of changing it to four just because this woman wrote sixty books, the last one when she was in her 90s, and I never heard of her before, it makes me want to give a forgotten author another star. It also makes me want to go off in search of more information about Peter Clancy, and also what Red Badge Mysteries was.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid mystery, but modern readers should be aware that despite it's sympathy for Jewish characters, POC characters are written abominably.

[Bev · Rating 3 out of 5]

5 Bullets by Lee Thayer (1944) was a nice little treat. I discovered Lee Thayer many years ago through the local library. They had only two books by this author--whose name grabbed me, I must admit, because of its similarity to Sayers. I read one (Dusty Death) and was in the midst of the second (title escapes me) when a very Twilight Zone-y thing happened. The hubby, small son (at the time) and I were getting ready to take a trip. Small person decided to be difficult about getting into the car and Mama put her books (yes, two, whatever we were doing I knew that there wasn't enough book left in the one to provide me with enough reading material) on the top of the car, got the boy settled, and got in the car herself (forgetting all about the books on top of the car). We backed out of the drive-way and went exactly one house-length down the road, when Mama realizes that the books are not in the car. Hubby & I looked all over the yard, in the bushes, along the street, under the cars parked along the street, and even in the wheel-wells of the cars. No books. Gone. Disappeared into the fourth dimension.

But, back to the reveiw....I didn't realize or had forgotten that this particular Thayer book took place at a college. It was a pleasant surprise to find that I was not only reading a vintage mystery, but a vintage academic mystery. Set at a small college in Florida, we have Peter Clancy, Thayer's primary detective, arriving on a top-secret mission just in time to help his friend Zingara Hartley get to the bottom of a local murder. The son of Zingara's friend has been accused of murder with malice aforethought. It appears that he has shot a rival during a psychological experiment gone wrong. Did he replace the blank cartridge with a live bullet and shoot his rival in cold blood? Is it some kind of horrible mistake? Was there actually a second shot timed for the experimental shot? And was the slain man really the target? There seems to be evidence that the real target may have been the German professor who designed the experiment. Perhaps a "real" American has decided to eliminate the "alien" during this time of war.

This was, as I mentioned, a pleasant little read. A decent mystery and fairly well-written. Not the absolute best example of its kind and the language (particularly references to African Americans) is very dated and jarring. But only to be expected from a book from the time period. It's good to know how far we've come...even though we all know we still have a good ways to go. I do like the character of Peter Clancy as well as his right-hand man, Wiggar. And I remember liking Dusty Death a lot. I wish the library still had that one...I'd go back and re-read it just to refresh my memory