Will Cuppy on the Week's Mystery and Crime Titles in the Herald Tribune Book Review
Will Cuppy wrote the weekly roundup of new mystery and detective novels. The genre had its many fans but the titles seldom made the bestseller lists, in part because they were often rented rather than bought.
This week's books were:I Hate Blondes by theatrical press agent Wolfe Kaufman. The story revolved around a series of murders and a set of lewd photographs. Cuppy thought Kaufman was "a decided find in the hardboiled field." However, the book was withdrawn that week by the publisher after it was noticed that a number of sentences in the book bore a striking resemblance to sentences in British writer Eric Ambler's Background to Danger. The plots of the two books, however, were completely different.
In Wings of Death by Marjorie Boniface the mystery involved a trainer of carrier pigeons in New Mexico who was suffering from amnesia. a medical condition more often found in novels and soap operas than real life. Cuppy dismissed it as a "soft-boiled, harmless offering."
Crows Can't Count was by A.A. Faire, one of many pseudonyms used by Erle Stanley Gardner, best known for his Perry Mason novels. It was the latest installment in the sleuthing adventures of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. This time it was a Colombian gold mine and a trick will that was the cause of murder and mayhem. The book presented a "bleak and unattractive world where the candy contains copper sulfate," Cuppy wrote, noting that the duos adventure "should please their many admirers." In print and available as an ebook.
Death Rides a Sorrell Horse by A.B. Cunningham also was one in a popular series. In these books the hero was Jess Roden, a backwoods detective who was "as good as ever at making superhuman deductions." He solves the murder of a college girl who had died in what is widely presumed by others to be a riding accident.
Build My Gallows High was by Geoffrey Home, a pseudonym of screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring. A detective with a shady past flees a murder frame-up while trying to discover who his mortal enemy is. It was filmed as "Out of the Past" in 1947 and "Against All Odds" in 1984. Cuppy called it "a speedy affair with enough whodunit routine to keep most readers happy."
Reportedly during his long career Will Cuppy read and reviewed more than 4,000 genre novels. He was a well-regarded humorist as well and his plot summaries frequently were tongue-in-cheek. A somewhat reclusive bachelor he spent much of his time at his beach shack on what became part of Jones Beach State Park-- he was allowed to stay on after the park was established. He was said to be happiest when deep in research. In 1949, while suffering from depression, in ill-health and about to be evicted from his Greenwich Village apartment, he took a fatal dose of sleeping pills. He was much mourned by his fellow journalists.