Dr. Poggioli: Criminologist

Henry Poggioli

by T.S. Stribling, Arthur Vidro (Editor)

LOST MYSTERIES BY A PULITZER PRIZE WINNER !!! Clues of the Caribbees (1929), a collection of detective stories about Dr. Henry Poggioli by Thomas Sigismund Stribling (1881-1965), was recognized by Ellery Queen as one of the most innovative volumes of sleuthing ever published, and is one of the books in Queen’s Quorum. To the general public, however, T.S. Stribling was known as one of the leaders in the school of Southern Literary Realism, especially in his discussion of the plight of African-Americans in the South. His 1932 novel, The Store, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Between 1929 and 1935, Stribling published a second series of eight Poggioli cases, which are collected in book form for the first time in Dr. Criminologist. Although they sometimes use stereotyped language for the Black characters (indeed for many of the characters), several of the stories, especially the extraordinary "Bullets," present a penetrating view of race relations during the 1930's. Dr. Criminologist is the 14th in the Crippen & Landru "Lost Classics" series. The collection is edited by Arthur Vidro and includes a complete checklist of Poggioli stories. The cover illustration is by Native American artist Barbara Mitchell, and the Lost Classics design is by Deborah Miller.

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Thomas Sigismun Stribling was a staff writer for "Saturday Evening Post" and a lawyer. He published under the name T.S. Stribling. In the 1920's and 1930's, T. S. was America's foremost author. His most notable works were "Birthright," "Teeftfollow," "Backwater," "The Forge" and "The Unfinished Cathedral". He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, "The Store" in 1933.

Reviews

[Kelvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of nine detective short stories from early 1930s featuring Henry Poggioli (a psychologist and a criminologist). There was a useful introduction at the beginning by Arthur Vidro explaining the three periods of Henry Poggioli stories written by T.S. Stribling and how they differ in style. The first period (1925-1926) has five stories, all with a Caribbean setting. The second period (1929-1935) has nine stories, all featured in this book. They take place mainly in New York, Tennessee and Florida. The third period (1945-1957) includes 23 stories Stribling wrote for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

The stories from this collection are all from the second period. The nine stories featured in this book are: (1) A Pearl at Pampatar, (2) Shadowed, (3) The Resurrection of Chin Lee, (4) Bullets, (5) The Cablegram, (6) The Pink Colonnade, (7) Private Jungle, (8) The Shadow and (9) The Newspaper.

I find the Poggioli stories are more like mystery and suspense novels instead of detective novels (at least in the early few stories). A lot of times Poggioli uses intuition and his view of human psychology to solve the case instead of logically work through the clues. The first two stories in the book (A Pearl in Pampatar and Shadowed) are, in my opinion, the weaker ones. They get a lot better after that. Unfortunately Shadowed is also the longest of the collection (more like a novelette) and I find it difficult to get through. However, the solution is quite interesting. If I were to rate only the last seven stories (and exclude the first two) I would probably give the book a 5 Star.

[Patrick10132002yahoo.Com]

Crippen & Landru Publishers have done a real service in putting together this collection of Stribling's "middle period" stories about Prof. Henry Poggioli, if only for making available the long story "Shadowed," which I will deal with further down. There is an interesting introduction by Arthur Vitro covering the three periods of Poggioli stories: the 1920s pulp stories, republished in Clues of the Caribbees, the middle period stories from the 1930s, and the ones most people today are familiar with, the 1940s-50s stories published mostly in EQMM and distinctly influenced by its editor, Frederic Dannay (half of the Ellery Queen writing team).

Of the nine stories collected here, I would opine that two, "The Pink Colonnade" and "Private Jungle" are duds. The rest are all good. Apart from the very unique "Shadowed," I would say the best are "The Cablegram" and "The Newspaper," linked stories where Poggioli deals with the same suave, clever Venezuelan diamond smuggler, Dr. Sanchez. The author's sly mockery of Poggioli (abandoned when he later came to write for EQMM) is evident in "The Newspaper" when he writes: "It struck him as idiotic to expose an exceptional intellect, such as his own, on a chore which any corner policeman could accomplish."

"Shadowed" is a fascinating, somewhat overlong story in which Poggioli takes on the case of a frightened little man, Clayman Mordag, who thinks his former employer, a sinister mentalist and stage hypnotist with seemingly limitless supernatural powers, is trying to drive him mad and/or kill him. In this story Stribling piles on a series of highly improbable, if not literally impossible, events to the point of surreal absurdity (while superficially adhering to the detective story format). Indeed, there are some piquant similarities to the work of the Paris-based American surrealists of the 1920s (Djuna Barnes, Robert M. Coates, Nathaniel West), though Stribling was most likely unaware of them. (I can't imagine what the readers of the pulp magazine Adventure, that published the story in 1930, made of it.) If someone were to bring to bear on "Shadowed" the same kind of critical exegesis that is now common in discussing Ionesco plays and Hitchcock films, he/she could easily write a 20-page essay on this one story. I don't have the temperament or academic background, but suggest it as a project for someone who does.

By fortuitous coincidence I was also reading Joan Dayan's "Fable of Mind," a complex critical study of E.A. Poe and came upon this sentence in the Introduction: "In Poe's stories his deliberate dramatization of contradiction is a ruse that leads to his disclosure of 'convertibility' between things that normally appear antithetical." In "Shadowed" Stribling dramatizes a series of self-contradictory "impossible" occurrences in a not dissimilar way (but without Poe's Gothic trappings and with a more playful attitude). As a cynical Southerner, Stribling has a distinctly skeptical attitude towards Americans' fetish of unquestioning acceptance of ongoing technological "advances" which unduly complicate their lives and are dubiously beneficial.

Again, I commend Crippen & Landru for publishing this collection and recommend it to (1) all Stribling fans and (2) anyone interested in the surrealist writers of the period. Incidentally, Stribling's 1935 novel "The Sound Wagon," about a naive first-term congressman's experiences in Washington and with his local political machine, is as good a satirical take on American politics as Preston Sturges' "The Great McGinty." I recommend it highly, if you can find a copy.