D.B. Borton

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women detectives

Female Self-Reliance

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The Female Barber Detective

Cover Illustration: The Female Barber Detective

The cover illustration shows an attractive young woman with lace at her collar and cuffs watching two men face off with pistols. She appears to be playing the stereotypical female role of passive observer. But she’s holding an open razor in one hand, and wait — is that a dark stain on the blade? Could it be — no, surely not — blood? This is just the kind of sensational, even titillating, image the dime novels were so fond of. In fact, the female barber detective in question never bloodies her razor in the story, but she threatens to do so and the cover illustration appears to back up that threat. The subtitle of the story, published in Beadle’s New York Dime Library in 1895, is “Joe Phenix in Silver City,” promoting it as a spinoff of Albert Aiken’s popular Joe Phenix detective series, even though Phenix himself never shows up in the narrative, which is not set in Silver City.

Before the titular detective, Mignon Lawrence, even arrives at her destination, a mining town called Bearopolis (I couldn’t make this stuff up), she undermines in spectacular fashion her cover story as an “unprotected female” (2) on her way to meet her uncle after the death of her father. A “road-agent” (a common term for a highway robber) attempts to rob the stage, and she coolly relieves him of his pistol, knocks him over the head, and announces her intention to take him with her and hand him over to the proper authorities. Since the authorities are bribable, they allow the robber to escape, giving Lawrence one of several enemies to contend with throughout the story. SPOILER ALERT: she always comes out on top.

Shortly afterward, we are privy to a conversation between two miscreants who are apparently expecting a detective to be following the trail of one of them from New York, but the other, who has attempted to ingratiate himself with Lawrence, observes: “It does not seem to be at all likely that the New York sharps would select a woman to do such a job as this” (2). He’s wrong, of course.

With no male relative in sight to protect and support her, Lawrence sets herself up as a barber and in no time is doing a land-office business. To explain her fortuitous possession of a collection of razors and shaving accessories, she tells the woman hotel-keeper that she possesses a “horrid mustache” (5) she must shave regularly. This is only the first overt reference to gender-bending, but there are more to come. In explaining her success as a barber, the narrator tells us that “she possessed the light touch and dexterity common to womankind, coupled with the strength of a man” (6) — a seemingly gratuitous observation since shaving and cutting hair are not usually thought to require strength. Later, when a customer gets fresh with her and tries to steal a kiss, she delivers two hard slaps to his face and throws him out: “He was as powerless in the grasp of the muscular and agile young woman as though he had been a half-grown boy” and an onlooker comments, “A professional pugilist . . . could not have delivered two better slaps” (17). Earlier, she has executed a “right-hand swing” (15) that enables her to escape from a female captor. All things considered, it might seem contradictory that she insults this same female captor by calling her “more a man than a woman” (15), but this story is filled with contradictions.

Eventually, the female barber disappears, supposedly on a mission to restock her supplies, and a young Mexican cowboy appears on the scene, “a well-built stripling of twenty or thereabouts, wearing the gaudy costume usually favored by ‘cow punchers’ of Old Mexico” (20). This is Lawrence in disguise. While she is awaiting an arrest warrant for her quarry, she has taken an interest in the affairs of Margaret Vanderbilt, “a real lady” (11) who is the target of a plot by the two miscreants mentioned earlier. They are corrupting her father with drink and gambling, drawing him further and further into dissipation and debt, so as to force a marriage with his daughter and get their hands on the mine he owns. The owner of the local gambling establishment is in love with Vanderbilt and, suspecting the plot against her, asks Lawrence for her help. When Vanderbilt’s father dies suddenly, Lawrence’s Mexican disguise is intended to entrap these two, insure that the mine ownership remains in Vanderbilt’s hands, and leave the two plotters with nothing for their efforts. This ploy succeeds.

Lawrence often lays claim to that most Emersonian of virtues, self-reliance. When the road-agent holds her at gunpoint, she tells him, “Though I am a woman, I am not one of the fainting kind, and am, as a rule, usually able to take care of myself” (14), and the narrator tells us that “she felt a strong inclination to give the rascal a right-hander which would knock him heels over head” (14). To her gambler ally, she confesses that she’s tired of the sneak attacks she’s been subjected to and plans “to put a stop to it”: “I have always been able to paddle my own canoe pretty well” (17). Every time she’s attacked, she attests to her fearlessness, as when she protests to the road-agent: “Oh, I am not at all frightened” (3). We later discover one reason for her sangfroid when she draws “the revolvers which she always carried in her breast” (15). (No, gentle reader, I cannot explain the physics of this feat, not even if the revolvers were derringers.)

We know little about Lawrence’s background, except that she is fatherless (13); we might suspect that she is motherless as well, given the high mortality rate of women in the 19th century. What we do know is that she is a professional — so skilled at her job that her male boss would send her alone to a Western mining town. In order to be good at her job, she must be an accomplished liar and as adept at disguise as she is at gunplay and fisticuffs. Since Albert Aiken himself was a popular actor as well as an author, he was presumably well acquainted with women skilled at masquerade. According to the Albert Aiken entry in the Edward T. LeBlanc Dime Novel Bibliography,  he wrote under several female pen names, including A Celebrated Actress, Adelaide Davenport, and Sara Delle.

You can read The Female Barber Detective here.

If You Want Something Done Right . . .

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Nita, the Female Ferret

Cover Image: NITA, THE FEMALE FERRET

What do you do if you report a robbery to the police and they don’t believe you? You resign yourself to becoming a detective and solving the crime yourself. That’s how 18-year-old Juanita Henriques becomes the “female ferret” in Police Captain Howard’s 1885 dime novel, Nita, the Female Ferret.

When a plainly dressed young woman presents herself at the police station to report that she has been robbed of several pieces of diamond-studded jewelry, the superintendent and one of his detectives don’t believe her, even though she makes a strong impression on them. She tells the superintendent that if she knew who the thief was, she would not have come to him; instead, she says simply, “I would have received back my property, or else killed the robber” (2). The superintendent concludes that “she is a singular young woman . . . and has the sharpest eye I ever saw in a woman’s head” (3), and sends a Detective Mason to investigate. At the house where Miss Henriques boards, the landlady tells Mason, “She impressed me as a young lady of extraordinary strength of mind and will power. She is well educated, and as deep as the ocean” (3). In fact, Nita’s past is shrouded in mystery; the residents of the house find her quiet, well bred, and rather withdrawn. Mason is the first to admit to her, “Miss, had you been born one of my sex you would have made a first-class detective” (4). The landlady chides Miss H for not confiding her suspicions to him, but she says, “It’s a detective’s business to find a clew [sic]. If I had a clew I could follow it up myself, and would do so to save the expense of employing a detective” (4); after he’s left, she declares, “My suspicions are not a clew” (4). The next day she returns to the superintendent with a set of diamond earrings and brooch that were not taken in the robbery, and when she is told that the police detective “could see nothing to show that any robbery was committed there,” she responds, “Which shows that he was not much of a detective” (5). Enter Nita, the female ferret (“ferret” was one of many slang terms for a detective).

Her first act is to don a disguise: she tells the landlady that she will be away for a while and will send a friend, Nita Endicott, to occupy her room in her absence. Nita is very like Juanita in stature, but blond rather than dark-haired, and most importantly, lively and outgoing. In no time, Nita is captivating the household with her piano playing, singing, beautiful new dresses, dazzling diamonds, and especial kindness to the maid, Margaret. This is the first of two disguises Nita uses to gather evidence. Quite early, her suspicions fall on Margaret’s lover, Tom Nelson, and she adds a second disguise as a boy so that she can tail Nelson unrecognized and follow him into saloons. As the lovely and enchanting Nita, she dazzles Nelson, goes on carriage rides with him, and permits him to make love to her. As Randy Holland, she follows Nelson and even gets the better of him in a bar confrontation.

Mastery of disguise and role-playing was an essential trait to a dime-novel detective at a time when deceit was regarded as a serious moral failing in a well-bred young lady. Yet unlike some other female detectives who regret the necessity for masquerade, Nita quite enjoys her new persona. She tells herself, “This is the best thing I ever did” (10) and even muses,

“Oh, I wish I was not afraid of betraying my sex in a fine suit of clothes. I’d go to the theaters and operas and mash the girls just for the fun. But this detective business is fun enough just now, and it grows more interesting every hour, and I like it more and more every day.” (17)

But as if concerned that this kind of declaration might risk the reader’s disapproval of Nita, Howard follows immediately with an encounter that underscores Nita’s true sex: she comes to the aid of a weeping young woman because, we’re told, “Nita had a true woman’s heart, and this unmistakable sign of distress touched her deeply” (17). The young woman, Sadie, turns out to be one of many that Tom Nelson has “married” and abandoned; “Randy” reveals her true sex to Sadie and rents some rooms for her in his new role as Sadie’s husband. In fact, however, she plays Tom Nelson’s role of “masher” the next day when a young woman flirts with him, playfully doubting his strength, and he tells her, “I can take a much heavier girl than you are and hold her on my knee, and talk to her all the evening” (20). After a night (alone) in a hotel room, she reminds herself, “Oh, I came near forgetting that I have a wife down in Twenty-second street” (20). She wasn’t the first girl detective to discover the liberating power of cross-dressing. It permits her entry into some spaces that are generally off-limits to respectable middle-class women.

Once Nita has caught the culprit and explained all to her landlady and landlord, the landlord tells her of two “mistakes”: “First, that you were not born a man, that you might have been the greatest detective in the world” and “Second, that being born a woman, you did not go on the stage and become known as the greatest actress that ever lived” (27). The second compliment is sincere, but perhaps unintentionally backhanded, since actresses were considered of dubious moral standing at the time. Indeed, the liberties she permits Tom Nelson — embraces, kisses — are justified, but perhaps not justifiable, by the role she’s playing, and after reminding readers what’s at stake, the narrator observes: “The reader can readily understand then, the extraordinary will-power of our heroine, which enabled her to smile when Nelson kissed her in the carriage” (10). Indeed, Nita’s “will power,” mentioned here and in the previous quotation, set her apart from the feminine ideal, as does her willingness to spend time in cheap dives among disreputable company, where:

   The men and women talked with a freedom of expression that made our heroine wish herself a   thousand miles away.

   But she stood it for the sake of her mission. (15)

As you might guess by now if you have been following this blog, Nita doesn’t rely solely on her acting skills and men’s clothing to keep her safe in dangerous places and situations. Her small pearl-handled revolver makes its first appearance in a wonderfully comic scene in a restaurant, where Tom Nelson picks a fight with Randy Holland for — wait for it — wearing his hat at the table. Insisting on his status as a gentleman, Tom menaces the offending Holland until s/he calmly draws “a tiny revolver” and aims it at him. Confident of his own shrewdness, Tom offers her ten dollars to relinquish the gun to a waiter, and when she takes him up on it and collects her cash, he springs at her again, only to be repulsed this time by “a long bright bladed dagger” (11). Slow on the uptake, Tom offers another ten dollars if she’ll relinquish the dagger, and when she does, the inevitable ensues: Tom lunges for her, only to be brought up short by “a tiny pearl-handled revolver” (12). Clearly, Nita is armed to the teeth. Later, Randy tells a gang of would-be assailants, “The man who comes up to pick a fight with me will get both steel and lead” (16), and she proves it by shooting their leader. Like other girl detectives, however, Nita also demonstrates that she has the physical prowess for the job when she pursues the escaping Tom across roof-tops, at one point leaping ten feet down from one rooftop to the next.

Nita’s “masculine” traits and abilities contrast sharply with the those of the other women characters in the story. Tom’s two female victims, Margaret and Sadie, are characterized by their tears, whereas we never see Nita cry. Both women are blinded by their love for Tom. Margaret refuses to heed Nita’s warnings about him up to the point when Nita reveals the other wife she has met. Then Margaret becomes a picture of female vengeance: “True, she thought of Tom, but only how she might avenge herself” (21). In the cheap dive mentioned above, two gin-soaked women engage in a catfight motivated by jealousy over Randy Holland. When Nita pursues Tom across rooftops later, he enters a house through a window and terrifies the women inside, who, after “raising a terrible racket,” demonstrate their panicked incompetence by running “screaming from room to room in the house, locking the doors to protect themselves, but in reality preventing him from getting out” (25). It’s difficult to see how Nita developed her strong will, her sangfroid, her intelligence, and her adventurous spirit if these were the kinds of female role models available to her. We know little about her background, except that she, like so many other girl detectives, is an orphan.

The ending of the novel is something of a disappointment, if perhaps an inevitability. Nita’s celebrity in the press makes her the talk of the town, especially after she testifies in court to the incompetence of the police, and she’s confronted by an importunate millionaire banker who wants her to investigate bank thefts and won’t take no for an answer. She cracks the case in very short order because she visualizes the theft in a dream! Delighted, the banker gives her a blank check in payment for her services, and when she threatens to take the whole bank, he insists that the banker himself would have to be included. Later, when she next shows him the check, she has filled in the amount to read “the banker himself” (29), thus strengthening our impression of Nita as a young woman who knows what she wants and goes after it. They are married immediately and live happily ever after, especially when the papers she has recovered along with her stolen jewels prove her claim to an English fortune that doubles her husband’s. So her unconventional story ends in a conventional way, and we are left to consider that it is, perhaps, just as well, since a professional detective could hardly rely on visionary dreams to solve the average case.

 

I’ve been unable to locate an online version of this text. According to The Dime Novel Bibliography published by the Edward T. LeBlanc Memorial Library, “Police Captain Howard” was a “pseudonym used by multiple people.”

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Cat and the Lost Kitten

from Two-Shot Foul

 

Detectives-in-training can’t afford to turn down a case, no matter how small.

 

“AJ cat gone.”

I wasn’t a mother for nothing. Mothers know more than the goddamn Shadow knows, seeing as how they’ve got eyes in the backs of their heads and built-in code descramblers more sophisticated than a Dick Tracy secret decoder ring. That was why I had turned to detective work to begin with. Who was better qualified?

               So when Leon stood at my door holding a grubby, tear-smeared little white kid by the hand and stated his business, I knew what I was dealing with. Leon wanted to be my first customer.

“That AJ?” I said, nodding at the half-pint.

“Uh-huh,” Leon said. AJ stuck a fluorescent thumb in his mouth and snuffled. I refrained from taking it out and inspecting the stain for toxic chemicals. That much of a mother I ain’t.

“Come in.”

Leon was a tall, rangy black kid whose fame in my Northside neighborhood was exceeded only by that of Bill, the hardware store owner. Leon was supposed to be mentally handicapped. Aren’t we all?

I met him while I was working on my first case, which resulted in a commendation for Leon for assisting in the capture of an armed criminal. He got his picture in the paper shaking hands with the mayor of Cincinnati, who is a total loser if you ask me, but that’s beside the point. I’m Leon’s hero. I’m also the only detective he knows. He’s the only kid I know, my own included, who accepts me as a detective, even though I don’t look like anybody on TV. Well,
maybe Columbo. Anyway, if a B-movie actor could reinvent himself as a U.S. president — another loser, in my estimation — no reason I couldn’t be a detective.

“Why don’t you introduce us?” I prompted Leon. He’s not all that mentally deficient, like I said, and generally outdistanced his peers in etiquette.

“This Alfonse Dwayne McManniss, J-Junior,” he said, gesturing in the direction of the little person sitting perched on my sofa. “AJ, this M-Miz Cat.”

I’m Cat to my friends, and Ms. Caliban to my enemies, but Leon, as usual, demonstrated his originality. Besides, I suspected some of his habits were rooted in old Southern traditions. And who am I to quibble with tradition as long as I don’t have to follow it? Sadie had strolled out to see who was there and stopped dead in the middle of the room, her nose in the air and that expression on her face cats get when they smell something bad. My kitties liked Leon but baby humans ranked right up there with flea baths on their list of things to avoid. I edged a box of tissues closer to AJ. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and pulled his head into his ski jacket like a reluctant turtle.

“So AJ’s lost his cat.” See what I mean? Doesn’t take a goddamn Philip Marlowe to figure it out, just a mother.

Two heads nodded.

I avoided the dead-end question mothers usually ask: Where did you lose it? I asked the next best thing.

“Where was the cat last time you saw it?”

“At AJ house,” said his spokesperson patiently. Where did I think? Riverfront Coliseum?

When did it disappear?”

“Tuesday.”

This was Monday. That meant they could file a missing persons report, but somehow I didn’t think it would be welcomed at District 5.

“Did you put up signs in the neighborhood?”

“A J too little. He can’t write. But I wrote some for him, and we p-put ‘em down on Hamilton Avenue, and on AJ s-street, Apple, and on Cherry, and C-Colerain, and Chase, and K-Kirby, and —.”

“Okay, I get the picture. Did you call the SPCA?”

“We rode over there on my b-bike. It w-wasn’t no cats like AJ cat.”

“What’s AJ’s cat look like?”

“He black, got some w-white on his chest.”

They must be kidding. Half the cats in Northside looked like that and they bred enough to keep the SPCA well stocked.

“He little.”

I began to wonder if I couldn’t talk AJ into the idea that one of the cats at the shelter was his cat, only it had grown since Tuesday.

“How little?”

Leon raised his hands and held them about six inches apart. If you’re having trouble visualizing this part, let me say that my gray tiger Sophie couldn’t squeeze her belly into this space.

“A kitten?”

They nodded.

“Male or female?”

“A b-boy.”

Now we were getting somewhere.

“How old?”

Leon looked at AJ. AJ shrugged. Leon turned to me and shrugged.

“Four months? Six months? Eight months?”

Shrug, shrug.

“What’s his name?”

“Blackie.” AJ spoke through his thumb.

Why is it that when I’m with Leon I always feel that I’m playing the straight man?

“Okay,” I said, standing up.

“You gonna f-find Blackie?”

“I’ll try.”

Suddenly Leon was all business. “Show her you m-money, AJ.”

Shorty stuck his paw in his pocket, rooted around, and brought up a fistful of change in which pennies predominated.

“Keep it,” I said. “When I start incurring expenses, I’ll let you know.”

“W-Where you goin’ to?”

“We’re going to AJ’s house so I can check out the scene of the, uh, disappearance.”

Now, you might think it would be beneath my dignity to take on a missing cat case. To tell you the truth, I never had much dignity to begin with and raising three kids put a big dent in it. My two oldest were attempting to continue the process. They seemed to think that since their father, Fred the Frugal, had moved on to that suburbia in the sky, I’d need more of what they considered advice and I considered interference. They had been a real pain in the ass since I moved to Northside and announced my intention of training to be a private investigator. They would have me committed except that they’d lose what little free babysitting they managed to squeeze out of me, which, I might add, is more than you’d think if you heard them carry on about what an unsafe neighborhood I live in.

Lucky for me I didn’t discuss my cases with them.

My tenant and sometime sidekick Kevin O’Neill was coming in as we were going out.

“On a case, Mrs. C?”

He always says that when I wear my mirror sunglasses.

Hell, I was interested in this case, and sympathetic to boot. It was February, and even though we were having a mild spell, Canada could send us the big chill any old day. The last snow had almost melted, but if I had lost a kitty, I’d have been worried. And kitties, as everybody knows who’s lived with one, can be anywhere. They have that ability to slip into a fifth dimension whenever you need to give them medicine or take them to the vet. When mine disappeared, they were usually at Kevin’s, scarfing down gourmet cat yummies or snoozing on his Barcalounger. But they’d taken their share of unannounced vacations.

If this kitty was a tom, he might be taking a sex tour of Northside, playing his part in the population explosion. I didn’t want to have to explain that to AJ, who was wiping suspiciously wet hands all over my beige cloth upholstery.

AJ lived on Apple, a block down from the IGA, which opened up all kinds of possibilities I didn’t want to think about. It was a three-story two-family house, one of those blocky brick Northside types which make up in basement and attic what they lack in closets, from a feline perspective, that is. The front yard looked pretty neat, but my heart sank when I saw the back: someone appeared to be in the middle of a major home improvement project and there was all kinds of crap piled up back there. A kitty kiddieland. We went in the side door and up the stairs.

“AJ? That you?” a female voice called.

“It’s us, M-Miz Hedges.”

“Us who?”

“That my granny.” On his own turf, AJ was becoming downright expansive.

“Oh, hi, Leon. Who’d you bring to visit?”

Mrs. Hedges was a mature woman in her prime, about my age. She was on the thin and weathered side, with graying brown hair pulled back in a stubby ponytail. She wore turquoise polyester slacks, a print blouse, and trotters.

“This M-Miz Cat. She a detective. She going to find AJ cat.”

“Catherine Caliban, Mrs. Hedges. The kids asked me to help them, and I agreed.”

“Lord have mercy, AJ and his cat’s fixing to drive me round the bend. I ain’t never seen nobody so attached to an animal. ‘Course, we had cats on the farm growing up, mousers mostly, and they came and went and didn’t nobody ever pay them no never mind. If they was there they was there and if they wasn’t they wasn’t. Want a Coke?”

She had a cigarette going in the kitchen, so we sat down at the kitchen table to talk.

“So you’re a detective? Do you specialize in lost cats or what?”

“I’m not licensed yet, so I specialize in anything that comes around. I didn’t like to disappoint the kids, and I’ve found a few lost cats in my day, but you know as well as I do what the chances are.”

We both glanced at the kids, who were waiting for me to pull off a miracle. She gave me an exaggerated wink.

“Okay, shoot. You going to interrogate me?”

“How old was Blackie? AJ didn’t seem to know.”

“Lord, honey, I don’t know. He’s just a little scrap of a thing. AJ found him out back maybe a month ago during that real cold spell, so we took him in. He was a mess. Full of worms and mites and I don’t know what-all.”

“But he was eating solid food okay?”

She blew out a puff of smoke. “He ate anything he could get his paws on. And Loreen, that’s my daughter, AJ’s mama, she fixed him one of those fancy little boxes of sand and he jumped right in it and did his business. So we told AJ he could keep him.”

“Has he ever disappeared before?”

“No, he follows AJ around just like a little puppy. Cute little rascal, come to that.”

“Friendly? Outgoing? Likes people?”

“Loves everybody, far as I can see. Not a bit afraid, like some cats. Sometimes when AJ was gone he’d go downstairs to visit poor Marion, Mrs. Kay. Now that’s a woman’s had more than her share of troubles. ‘Course, that apartment’s empty now. But lots of times she would leave the door open into the hall, and he’d just walk right in like King Solomon, calm as you please. Fact, it must’ve been Marion was the last one to see him, near as anybody can recollect.”

“She saw him on Tuesday?”

“That’s right. Says she was kind of distracted on account of packing and waiting for the Goodwill and all, but she remembers seeing him. Gave him some tuna fish in the kitchen to keep him out from under foot.”

I shook my head. It couldn’t be that easy.

“So Marion was packing the day Blackie disappeared? Where did she go?”

“She moved in with her sister in College Hill. Said the apartment felt too empty to her, bless her heart.”

“Do you have her new address and phone number?”

“Well, yes, I do. What you want it for?”

“Well, cats are naturally curious little beasts, Mrs. Hedges. They love to explore open boxes and suitcases and bags. Sometimes they climb into something and go to sleep, wake up in a different place.”

“You mean that little rascal might’ve got hisself packed? But Marion would’ve called me right away if she found Blackie.”

“Maybe she hasn’t found him yet. It hasn’t been a week. Maybe there are boxes she hasn’t unpacked.”

“But he’d make noise, wouldn’t he? I never knew such a little thing make so much noise when suppertime rolled around.”

“Well, maybe he’s in a basement or an attic where there’s nobody around to hear him.”

I heard a snuffle from across the table and realized I was waxing a mite graphic for little ears.

“I hate to have you bother poor Marion about a lost cat after what she’s been through.”

“M-maybe the Goodwill took B-Blackie.”

Maybe I should offer Leon a goddamn partnership.

“What did the Goodwill truck take?”

“Why, I don’t know what-all they took. Her sofa and living room chairs, I guess. Juky’s bedroom furniture. Maybe some of hers, I don’t know.”

“Tell you what. I’ll start with Goodwill. If that doesn’t pan out, I’ll let you know, and we’ll have to give Marion a call. Now what’s her full name again?”

“Marion Kay. Mrs. Bashford Kay. You know.”

“Remember what her living room furniture looked like?”

“Seems like it was kind of a brown plaid Colonial. Chairs was the same as the sofa.”

“All right, I’ll start there.” I looked at the name I’d written down. “Am I supposed to recognize this name?”

“Oh, honey, her boy Julius was that basketball player they found. You know — down by the Mill Creek where they’re doing all that digging.” Her voice dropped as she ground out her cigarette. “He was murdered and they still don’t know who done it!”

 

I figured this was one case I could solve on my own — well, not counting Leon’s advice and counsel. The last time around I ended up recruiting every one of my tenants in the old Catatonia Arms. And lucky for me, nobody had yet proposed a rent reduction in exchange for services rendered. But I didn’t anticipate any legal complexities requiring consultation with my resident attorney, Alice Rosenberg, unless Goodwill wouldn’t release Blackie into AJ’s custody. Her roomie, Melanie Carter, might come in handy if I had to move heavy furniture around, but I didn’t expect to need Mel’s expertise in the martial arts for the missing kitten caper. Ditto for Kevin’s astonishing knack for producing unregistered firearms. If I succeeded in my mission, Kevin could cook the celebration dinner — one of his best skills. Moses Fogg, an ex-cop and our newest resident, I would hold in reserve in case I was dealing with a kidnapping. Of course, if Blackie had been transported across state lines, I’d need to involve the feds. In fact, the animal residents of the Catatonia Arms had more to offer than their human counterparts, and I could envision sending them in as a team to flush out a kitty in hiding. When I left, however, the cats were all sacked out on various heat registers like little warm piles of dust rags and there was nary a beagle in sight.

The Northside Goodwill store is where I do most of my shopping for birthday presents. You’d be amazed what you can find there. Old rock-and-roll records. Ceramic condiment pots that look like beehives. Old chemistry sets with only a few of the chemicals missing. Mirro cookie presses — the kind everybody used to have and nobody has anymore. On a lucky day, a poodle skirt. I don’t hang out in the furniture section, but that’s where I was that day.

Not a brown plaid sofa in sight, either, and that’s more astonishing than you might think. The only thing Northside has more of is black cats with white on their chests.

“Whatcha looking for, hon?”

“A brown plaid sofa and chairs. A Mrs. Kay donated them. Marion Kay. They would have arrived on Tuesday.”

“Had your eye on ‘em, had you?”

“Well, no. It’s just that we’ve lost something and we think there’s a chance it could be in the furniture somewhere.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I tell you, if they was just picked up on Tuesday, they might not have left the warehouse yet. They take everything over there, check it out, repair it, and clean it up. You might not think they do, but that’s what they say. You go over there and look.”

She told me how to get to the warehouse and I thanked her.

Something about the way I said it tipped her off that I was laboring under a delusion.

“Oh, I don’t work here. I just shop here. They should pay me a commission for all the stuff I sell, just walking around the store. But I wouldn’t take it, anyway. I like to speak my mind. When I see junk, I call it junk.”

The warehouse was only a few blocks away and I was turned over to a morose individual who was probably not playing with a full deck.

“You want a brown plaid sofa? Now, we ain’t allowed to sell anything right out of the warehouse. You can’t even reserve anything. You have to go to the store and buy it.”

“I don’t want to buy it. I just want to look at it. Some people in the house it came from have lost something and they think it might be in the furniture.”

“Oh. What’d they lose?”

I knew he wasn’t going to budge until I told him. “A kitten.”

“Oh, well, we haven’t found any kittens here.”

“Could I just take a peek at the furniture?”

“Well, I guess so. But like I say, we haven’t found no kittens. We would’ve found something like that. I thought you was meaning a watch or something. Why, you’d never get a kitten into a divan like that. I mean, not so’s nobody wouldn’t know it was there.”

This guy had obviously never lived with cats. “Let’s see. Callahan, you said the name was?”

“No, Caliban is my name. The lady who donated the furniture was named Kay. Mrs. Marion Kay or Mrs. Bashford Kay.”

“How you spell that?”

I told him. He shuffled through a clipboard of papers, then decided it was the wrong clipboard. He then set about commencing to find the right clipboard, then asked me how to spell Callahan, then asked somebody in coveralls who had just walked in. And Coveralls, without a glance at any clipboards, offered to take me back to look at the furniture.

It didn’t look promising, I admit. A desk and dresser flanked a sofa with two overstuffed chairs piled on top, and two lamps on top of that. A linoleum kitchen table lay on its side, with a disassembled bed frame propped up against it. I sighed.

I got out the can of tuna I’d bought at the IGA, popped the top, and went to work.

Coveralls removed the chairs, eyeing the tuna dubiously.

“Blackie,” I called softly. “Kitty, kitty.”

From the depths of the sofa, there issued a faint, pitiful squeak.

“He’s in there, and he’s alive!” I said, almost hugging Coveralls in my excitement. Like I said, dignity was not one of my more prominent qualities.

“Well, I’ll be darned. Now, how we going to get the little fella out?”

I yanked off the cushions, and was rewarded by a faint but plaintive wail. I shoved my hand down between the back and the seat and felt something. But it wasn’t furry. I considered leaving it there, but I couldn’t. As a mother retired from active duty, I still felt the pull of the old mystery: what long-lamented family heirlooms lurked in the depths of the family sofa? I extricated a small brown notebook and tossed it aside.

“Help me turn this sucker over,” I said to Coveralls. “Just lay it on its back.”

Up in one corner there was a sizeable hole in the black gauzy fabric that had been used to line the bottom. I applied tuna and a black head emerged. I slid a hand in and extricated one Blackie the cat, looking considerably the worse for wear but alert enough to bury his head in the tuna can. Goddamn, I love happy endings.

“Well, I’ll be darned. Would you look at that?” Coveralls was grinning as if he’d just assisted at a birth. I hated to tell him that the kitten already had a name.

I was almost to the car when he came running after me. “Hey, lady, you forgot your notebook.”

I’ll skip the tearful reunion between boy and cat and let you imagine it for yourself. I had to warn Mrs. Hedges about the dangers of overfeeding a cat who’d been fasting a few days; your first instinct is to empty out the refrigerator into the cat dish. I also had to explain a few basic principles of feline behavior. I left out the part about Blackie eating bugs in the warehouse at night.

Leon beamed at everybody like a godfather at a wedding. Then he took me aside and assured me he’d make up whatever costs AJ’s piggy bank wouldn’t cover.

“That’s real generous of you, Leon, but my only expense was a 99-cent can of tuna.”

Look, I know I should’ve billed them for my time, but I’m a soft touch. I’m also unlicensed, so it would be illegal for me to accept any money at this point. Plus, to tell you the truth, I was a little abashed when I realized that it was Leon who’d come up with the Goodwill angle.

But Kevin was impressed. “High five, Mrs. C! Any detective can find something as big as a missing person, but it takes special skills to find something as small as a kitten. He didn’t even leave a credit card trail for you to follow. And you didn’t have to pay informants to rat him out or anything.”

“Yeah,” I said, “and all it cost me was a 99-cent can of tuna.”

 

Look for D. B. Borton’s Two-Shot Foul, coming soon to your online book dealer or local bookstore.

https://dbborton.com/2050-2/

Santa Fe Sal, the Slasher; or, A Son’s Vengeance

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Cover illustration for SANTA FE SAL
Sal confronts a roomful of barroom rowdies.

Detective stories and Westerns were two of the most popular genres appearing in 19th-century dime novels and story papers, so it’s not surprising that they were frequently combined to enhance appeal. E.L. or Edward Wheeler was a prolific writer of dime novels who contributed several entries into the history of the girl detective, as you may remember from New York Nell, the first character whose exploits were reported in this blog. But whereas New York Nell is a good example of the urban detective, Santa Fe Sal is a Western figure.

The story is set in the Buckshot mining camp in Arizona. It opens in a barroom where a local tough proposes to bully a blind, elderly organ grinder into rolling dice for his organ, which is his sole means of livelihood. In the fashion of all Western heroes, Santa Fe Sal bursts onto the scene to see justice done:

   “I’ll see that you ain’t cheated, old man!” cried a ringing voice — a voice that was so strange to the crowd that they wheeled about, simultaneously.

   They beheld, standing near at hand, a girl of beauteous face and figure — a girl with midnight eyes and flowing dark-brown hair — a girl attired in [a] stylish, elegant-fitting gray suit of male attire, including patent-leather shoes, and a jaunty white slouch sombrero. She stood there smiling, while she twirled a light cane in her white hand. (2)

The strangeness of this apparition no doubt constituted a large part of its appeal to the reader.

Like New York Nell, Santa Fe Sal appears cross-dressed, the cane a superfluous ornament quickly abandoned by the narrator as an unworthy weapon. Later the villain will try to stir the crowd against her by referencing her male attire:

“She is evidently a desperate character; the very fact that she sports around in men’s clothing is against her, and casts a reproach on the fair reputation of your wives and daughters. I say the woman ought to be strung up without mercy!”

When another woman tries to shame Sal for her clothing, the detective nonchalantly cites economic practicality as her motive: “I’m bobbin’ around all over, and the petticoats I’d have to buy, through gittin’ ‘em tore, would bankrupt me.” Like other girl detectives, and detectives in general, Sal is also a master of disguise and enters one scene as Howlin’ Hank from Hardpan, whose true identity is exposed when an irate gambler makes to cut off Hank’s whiskers, only to have them come off in his hand. Disguise serves deception, another trait that was considered decidedly unladylike.

Like many early girl detectives, Sal invades forbidden space, the all-male space of the saloon; in contrast, the more conventional heroine of the story, the saloonkeeper’s daughter, says that she has tried to talk her father out of “that low business” and declares, “I never enter the saloon” (5). Although we hear of wives and daughters in the camp, its public spaces are dominated by men.

Sal violates feminine norms in other ways, as well. She is a practitioner of that Western art that so captivated Mark Twain: the art of the boast. Here’s her introduction:

“Who am I?” was the pert reply. “Well, if you want to know, I’m an angel without wings — a regular la-lah, you bet! I hail from Texas-way, an’ down there I’m known as Santa Fe Sal, the Slasher. Are you happy to meet me?”

After praising her own marksmanship with a gun, she introduces herself again:

“Down whar I cum from they call me Santa Fe Sal, the Slasher, ‘cause when I git inter a soiree, an’ hev a six-inch bowie, I kin carve the hull crowd, in no time!”

These are remarkable statements for a woman on many counts. They violate feminine ideals of modesty, certainly. They demonstrate an enjoyment of fame and a comfort with publicity that was supposed to be anathema to the Angel in the House, the 19th-century feminine ideal that Sal may be referencing here. And if they paint her as a woman of action, they also evince Sal’s fluency in slang, language that carried a heavy weight of social disapproval when used by men, much less by women. Indeed, she has the nerve to chastise the villain for his own language, which includes the words “thunderation” and “the deuce”: “You’r’ a reg’lar old hoss on expletives, ain’t ye? (5).”

In spite of her sobriquet, Sal’s first weapons are a pair of revolvers, as depicted in the cover illustration. On the second full page of the story, she kills a man, one of a threatening mob, who disregards her warning to stay back. Nor does she show any remorse, saying, “That man earned his fate! . . . And if any of the rest of you want a funeral just notify me” (3). When she is later called a “murderess,” she objects: “I put a pill in that feller’s cabeza, ‘ca’se I’d told him if he come for me he was a dead man. He came, and you bet he went, quicker’n he came” (5). But eventually Sal feels forced to draw her knife and justify her moniker, addressing an angry mob:

“Ef you’re bound to crowd on me, all I ask is that you leave yer shootin’-irons alone, and draw yer carvin’ tools, an’ meet me more on terms of equality. I’d ruther not have any scrimmage with you at all, fer some one’s bound to get dissected, but ef yer bound ter all pit yerselves ag’in’ one lone girl, you’ll be pretty apt to find Santa Fe Sal right to home, and the latch-string out!”

This speech so shames her would-be attackers that they back off and we never get to see a demonstration of Sal’s carving skills.

SPOILER ALERT. It may not surprise you to learn that Wheeler’s imagination only extends so far in the matter of gender-bending. Sal’s male client tells her at one point:

“This is no life for one to lead who is so beautiful and accomplished as yourself. If I live, we will take little Bertie and go to my home in the East, where your sole business will be to act as his governess.”

The modern reader may well wonder if little Bertie is quite prepared to learn shooting and knife fighting at the hands of his new governess, not to mention why the speaker believes that this vision of domestic life would appeal to Sal the Slasher. Our skepticism is further aroused when the narrator observes:

He spoke earnestly and kindly, but not passionately, yearningly, as a lover might have spoken.

So imagine our surprise when Sal blushes and considers the proposal in language devoid of slang:

“I wonder if I ought to take advantage of it, and give up this wild, roving existence? He is a true gentleman, and offers me a home, and — and maybe —”

    The color came faster into her cheeks, and her eyes glowed bright as the stars that twinkled in the blue dome above. (12)

Yes, reader, she marries him, in a single sentence that strips her of her colorful sobriquet: “And Santa Fe Sal (otherwise Sara Wilmot) came with him, and became his wife” (15). This event marks the end of “the detective firm of Santa Fe Sal & Green” (15). A disappointment, surely, but perhaps we ought to acknowledge that a writer as prolific as Wheeler knew his audience and presumed that they wanted the ending that readers are said to have wanted from many generations of storytellers: a wedding.

Santa Fe Sal is not available in full text online.

 

 

Josie O’Gorman, Secret Agent

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Dorothy of Oz fame wasn’t the only adventurous girl hero created by L. Frank Baum. Often writing under pseudonyms, Baum loved to put girls and young women at the heart of a mystery. Writing as Edith Van Dyne, Baum published four novels in the Mary Louise series beginning in 1916; a fifth book was completed after Baum’s death by Emma Speed Sampson, who continued the series with three additional books. The series was intended to focus on the titular character, Mary Louise, but for many the true center of interest was the detective Josie O’Gorman, which Sampson and the publishers recognized by giving Josie her own book, Josie O’Gorman, in 1919. Josie is one of the candidates for the title of first modern girl detective, in part because her books were written for girls, not adults (though sadly, not illustrated).

In the first book, Mary Louise, 15-year-old Mary Louise Burrows discovers that her mother and her adored Gran’pa Jim, with whom she and her mother live since her father’s death, have disappeared in the middle of the night, and that he is wanted by the government for giving state secrets to the enemy. Before this happens, her grandfather has told her to write to him care of his attorney. After a brief interrogation by a blustering Secret Service agent, she leaves school and travels on her own to see the attorney, an old family friend named Conant, but she is followed. The detective who follows her turns out to be the famed John O’Gorman of the Secret Service, who speaks kindly to her, pays for a hotel room, and treats her to breakfast, telling her that she reminds him of his own daughter.

The Conants invite Mary Louise to spend the summer with them at Hillcrest Lodge, their rented summer place, which they hope will be remote enough to discourage the government’s unwanted attentions. Their new neighbor is a fashionable single woman, accompanied by a secretary, whom Mary Louise and her new friend Irene Conant come to know and like. When a dull-witted Irish girl shows up at the door claiming to have been offered employment by the house’s owners, the Conants hire her for the summer. In fact, the plan to avoid government agents fails because the woman neighbor and her secretary are crack Secret Service agents, and the dull-witted Irish girl is none other than Josie O’Gorman, John O’Gorman’s daughter, who has been trained in detective work from her infancy. It is Josie who brings back Gran’pa Jim and establishes his innocence to the astonishment of the two women agents. They have heard of Josie, but never met her: “Everyone who knew O’Gorman had often heard of his daughter Josie, of whom he was accustomed to speak with infinite pride. He always said he was training her to follow his own profession and that when the education was complete Josie O’Gorman would make a name for herself in the detective service” (1st World Library edition, p. 181).

In subsequent books in the series, Mary Louise continues to encounter various mysteries that need solving, and to engage Josie, now a good friend, to solve them. In fact, after the death of her father, Josie moves to the same town to be close to Mary Louise, even though her increasingly busy detective career often takes her away. We learn more about her training, carefully supervised by her father, and her passion for her work: “Josie O’Gorman loved mysteries for their own sake. She loved them because they required solutions, and to solve a mystery is not only interesting but requires a definite amount of talent” (Mary Louise Solves a Mystery, 1917, Echo Library Edition, p. 74). Published during the war years and soon after, these books are often patriotic, even jingoistic.

Nancy Drew and my own girl detective, Dizzy Lark, are direct descendants of Josie O’Gorman, and students of girl detectives will be interested in both similarities and differences. Most notably, Baum does not make Josie beautiful, like Titian-haired Nancy Drew: “Josie O’Gorman was small and ‘pudgy’—her own expression—red-haired and freckle-faced and snub-nosed. Her eyes redeemed much of this personal handicap, for they were big and blue as turquoises and as merry and innocent in expression as the eyes of a child” (Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls, 1918, Biblio Bazaar edition, p. 52). Like girl detectives who came before her, Josie is a master of disguise, with a talent for deception not generally encouraged in girls and young women. And Mary Louise and her friends are referred to as “chums” (Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls, 1918, Biblio Bazaar edition, p. 40, for example)—a word that I will always associate with Nancy, George, and Bess.

 

Some of the Mary Louise books are available from Project Gutenberg:

Mary Louise, 1916

Mary Louise in the Country, 1916

Mary Louise Solves a Mystery, 1917

Mary Louise Adopts a Soldier, 1919 (with Emma Speed Sampson)

Josie O’Gorman, 1919 (Emma Speed Sampson)

Mary Louise at Dorfield, 1920 (Emma Speed Sampson)

Mary Louise Stands the Test, 1921 (Emma Speed Sampson)