I love a mystery.  I didn’t always.  My Mom was the mystery fan in our house, while I preferred the more visceral thrills of horror and science fiction; at the age of 10 or 11, I couldn’t fathom the point of a story in which people in suits and gowns gave one another the hag eye over a glass of port waiting for the killer to be named when you could watch a monster in pants terrorize a small town or arctic research station.  As I grew older, I appreciated movie whodunits and watched PERRY MASON religiously but I was never a die hard fan.  It wasn’t until I was in my 30s, when my Mom sent me care packages of taped episodes of 80s era British detective series, that I began to develop an interested in mystery novels.  I’ve written previously about my passion for Edgar Wallace but today I want to talk about a mystery writer you’ve likely never heard of, though you may be familiar with his non-genre work.  Born in Baltimore in 1892, Charles Fulton Oursler remains an interesting but forgotten figure in the mystery community.  The son of a transit worker, Oursler grew up poor but devoted to reading and an early passion was the study of magic.  He studied law but his professional life began with a job reporting for the Baltimore American. Oursler rose to the level of art critic but jumped at the opportunity to work as an editor for Barnarr Mcfadden in New York City.  In the 1930s, Oursler was supervising editor of Liberty and in the 1940s moved over to Reader’s Digest, while at the same time sending off his own mystery stories and seeing them printed in such pulp anthologies as Detective Story Magazine, The Black Cat and Mystery Magazine.  (Oursler also had a lucrative sideline as a Broadway playwright, with a number of productions between 1926 and 1942 -among them the magic-tinged mystery The Spider, written with Lowell Brentano.)  A convert to Catholicism, Oursler wrote The Greatest Story Ever Told (published in 1949) and with his son authored the book that inspired the film BOY’S TOWN (1938) with Spencer Tracy and Mickey Rooney.  For the purposes of his mysteries, Oursler chose to identify himself as “Anthony Abbot, ” a pseudonym he attached to a string of detective novels featuring the maverick New York Police Commissioner and sleuth nonpareil Thatcher Colt.

Thatcher Colt cracked his first case in 1930, in About the Murder of Geraldine Foster, published by Covici-Friede for a princely $2.  Time magazine gave the fledgling series a push in its December 1st edition, writing:

A new detective makes his appearance with this mystery-murder; his author promises more later. Thatcher Colt, a combination of Grover Whalen and Philo Vance, was one of New York City’s Police Commissioners you may never have heard about. “What [he] really wanted was to be a musician and poet (in deadly privacy he applied himself to the forms of the sonnet and the villanelle and practiced cadenzas on a flute) but unfortunately nature had made him a detective and, as he once told me, with that quirkish smile of his, ‘Not even my duties as Police Commissioner shall keep me from the business of solving crimes.’ “

As the writer for Time suggests, Thatcher Colt was intended to be yet another gentleman crime solver, a less problematic, drug-free Sherlock Holmes who could navigate society as adeptly as Philo Vance or Nick and Nora Charles and yet truly understand the criminal mind.  In his physical and mental perfection, Colt was a typical ubermensch of an era that gave the world both Superman and Adolf Hitler.  What distinguishes the mystery novels of Oursler/Abbot, however, is the fair shake he gives the working class and minorities – clearly, Oursler never forgot his impoverished beginnings or the disadvantaged people he met as a reporter for the Baltimore American.

In adopting the nom-de-plume of Anthony Abbot, Oursler was playing the alphabetical percentages, choosing a moniker that would rise to the top of book lists.  For this reason, he started all of his whodunit titles with About the… and his success suggests that this gambit payed off.  In 1931, Columbia Pictures optioned several of the Thatcher Colt novels with an aim to producing a trilogy.  For THE NIGHT CLUB LADY (1932), Columbia selected the natty character actor Adolphe Menjou to fill the wingtips of Thatcher Colt.  Menjou’s career had begun in New York prior to World War I, but after the armistice he followed the film industry west.  The Pittsburgh native had made an impression appearing opposite Rudolph Valentino in THE SHIEK (1921) and enjoyed good roles through the decade but his personal fortunes crashed with the stock market in 1929.  When Paramount opted not to renew Menjou’s contract, the actor was forced to sign with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at half his old salary.  He had just received an Academy Award nomination for his rare star turn in the newspaper comedy THE FRONT PAGE (1930) when he signed on as Thatcher Colt for the Columbia series of low budget whodunits.  In both THE NIGHT CLUB LADY and its follow-up, THE CIRCUS QUEEN MURDER (1932), Menjou’s Colt is a chain-smoking, lip-reading aesthete whose fine tailoring goes hand in hand with his brilliant powers of deduction and an often child-like distractability.

Kept in line and on time by his personal secretary, Miss Kelly (Ruthelma Stevens, later in Josef von Sternberg’s THE SCARLET EMPRESS and seen in smaller, uncredited roles in THE FOUNTAINHEAD and HARVEY) – whose lingering looks at her boss betray a shift from professional devotion to unrequited romantic attachment – Colt is a maverick problem-solver who plows through the sundry plot complications even as the bodies pile up at his feet.  In both Columbia films, Colt is already on the scene when the first murder is committed.  Both films lay their action within the milieu of entertainment venues, both kick the action into gear via the use of threatening notes and both feature a female victim who is warned of her impending demise but cannot, for all her resilience and courage or the cooperation of New York Police Commissioner Thatcher Colt, stay the hand of fate.  Directed by actor-turned-director Irving Cummings from an adaptation of Oursler/Abbot’s About the Night Club Lady by Robert Riskin (who later wrote a number of films for Frank Capra), THE NIGHT CLUB LADY was a reasonable success and even found favor with the critics.  For The New York Times, Mordaunt Hall praised both the film, which he declared “a better mystery tale than most” and the star performance of Menjou,who “turns his attention to solving the mystery of three murders, and he acts the role of a police commissioner of an American metropolis with the same facility he did his old parts of philandering Frenchmen.”  Encouraged by the return on their investment and the positive word of mouth, Columbia green lighted an immediate sequel.

Thatcher Colt is on vacation in THE CIRCUS QUEEN MURDER (1933) but puts his plans for rest and relaxation on hold when an old friend importunes him to look into nasty business behind the scenes of John T. Rainey’s traveling sideshow.  To save money on this follow-up, Columbia borrowed footage from Frank Capra’s earlier circus drama RAIN OR SHINE (1930) and grafted the name John T. Rainey (seen on the canvas covers of the circus wagons) onto the character played by George Rosener.  (In the source novel, the circus raises its big top in Madison Square Garden; in the film, the action takes place almost entirely in the sleepy upstate New York hamlet of Gilead, where Thatcher Colt finds no balm… none at all.)  Although Adolphe Menjou and Ruthelma Stevens reprise their roles, Columbia switched out the team behind the cameras  Future helmer of Universal’s “Sherlock Holmes” series, Roy William Neill handles the direction this time out, working with an adaptation by Jo Swerling (who, coincidentally, wrote RAIN OR SHINE and who would go on to script Alfred Hitchcock’s LIFEBOAT and share an Academy Award for PRIDE OF THE YANKEES).  Both THE NIGHT CLUB LADY and THE CIRCUS QUEEN MURDER were made after the formation of the Hollywood Production Code but before the studios really instituted any self-censorship; as a result, the films are racy, provocative, and more than a little perverse, as studio films of the early 1930s so often are.  THE CIRCUS QUEEN MURDER has the advantage here, with its sideshow setting recalling Tod Browning’s deeply weird FREAKS (1932) from the year before and getting the jump on Melville Shyer’s MURDER IN THE MUSEUM (aka THE FIVE DEADLY VICES, 1934) and the Herman Cohen-produced (and written) BERSERK (1967).  Gretta Nissen (whose Norwegian accent lost her the lead role in Howard Hughes’ HELL’S ANGELS three years earlier) is a tough, intelligent and seductive victim but it’s Dwight Frye who steals the show as Nissen’s onscreen/unhinged husband.  Frye is famous, of course, for playing both the mad estate agent  Renfield in Tod Browning’s DRACULA (1931) and the hunchbacked Fritz in James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (also 1931), as well as assorted halfwits and nitwits elsewhere; the Salina, Kansas-born actor is characteristically over-the-bigtop in THE CIRCUS QUEEN MURDER and gets to do more and shine brighter than he would be allowed to in most of the movies for which he is actually more famous.

Columbia elected not to continue the Thatcher Colt series beyond THE CIRCUS QUEEN MURDER.  Adolphe Menjou went on to greater acclaim in character roles over the next thirty years, from A STAR IS BORN (1937) to PATHS OF GLORY (1957).  He played another dogged detective, Inspector Frank Kafka, in Edward Dmytryk’s THE SNIPER (1952), running shooter Arthur Franz to ground in San Francisco in a hardboiled psycho-sexual thriller that prefigures Don Siegel’s DIRTY HARRY (1971) in some interesting ways.  As for Thatcher Colt, he lived on in print through his last adventure, The Creeps (1939), but was out of the movie business until 1942.  (A final Colt book, The Shudders, predates The Creeps in the series’ chronology.)  That year, the Poverty Row studio Republic Pictures revived Colt in the person of Sidney Blackmer for THE PANTHER’S CLAW.

While Adolphe Menjou’s sartorial signature seemed bespoke for the clothes horse that was Thatcher Colt, many mystery fans loyal to the source novels felt Menjou was too small and fine-boned for the role.  As etched by Fulton Oursler, Colt was the very picture of American frontier individualism, “a striking figure, with his huge and powerful frame and soldier’s face” whom Oursler/Abbot compareed favorably to Theodore Roosevelt (New York City’s Police Commissioner prior to his tenure with “the Rough Riders” in Cuba).  While Sidney Blackmer (most famous to contemporary audiences for playing Satanist Roman Castavet in ROSEMARY’S BABY) is a better physical match for Thatch (and did in fact play Theodore Roosevelt in a number of short subjects and features through the 30s and 40s), THE PANTHER’S CLAW is pretty stolid stuff and Colt spends too much of its 72 minute running time out of the frame.  There is some compensation in a scene-stealing supporting performance by the ever wormy Byron Foulger as the Prime Suspect (first seen scaling the wall of a cemetery at 1:00 in the morning), Ed Wood trouper Herbert Rawlinson is amusingly clueless as an election-minded District Attorney, and jazz saxophonist Billy Mitchell turns up as a comic Negro (if you like that kind of thing – and I usually do).  Flatly directed by William “One Shot” Beaudine  on a couple of drab standing sets, this mystery (laid within the demimonde of the Gotham opera scene but never venturing inside an opera house) is strictly double feature filler and it’s no surprise that Thatcher Colt slipped quietly back into private life after THE PANTHER’S CLAW came and went in the spring of 1942.

Read my partner in crime Moira Finnie’s thoughts on THE CIRCUS QUEEN MURDER and Dwight Frye.

Catch THE CIRCUS QUEEN MURDER on TCM on July 16th (check your local listings for the broadcast time in your area).  THE PANTHER’S CLAW is available as a poor quality DVD from Alpha Video.  Check the bargain bins of your local department store and the rent-by-mail outfit Netlix, who keep it in stock.