The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [77]
They went to the theater after dinner—box seats—and after the theater they had a little cold snack, amounting to about eleven dollars, including wine and cigars. Moreover, Mr. Lamb had gratefully accepted the secretaryship of the Universal Covered Carpet Tack Company.
FREDERICK IRVING ANDERSON
Frederick Irving Anderson was a journalist and a prolific author of clever, discursive short stories. His is not the gum-chewing, wisecracking tone that would soon show up in hard-boiled mysteries. He takes his time and he has fun.
Anderson spent ten years as a reporter with the New York World and eventually became a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post and other major magazines. Besides the Infallible Godahl, whom you will meet in “Blind Man’s Buff,” Anderson created several other recurring characters. He liked to weave his favorite characters in and out of each other’s stories. In fact, one character, mystery writer Oliver Armiston, is occasionally presented as the creator of Godahl. One of Anderson’s best ideas is that Armiston is too clever for his own good. Criminals read and copy his ingenious crime stories, so he has to quit writing and become a special consultant to the New York City police. Perhaps best known among Anderson’s characters was Deputy Parr, who is a successful detective in his own stories but fails against Godahl and Anderson’s other series thief, Sophie Lang. Unfortunately the charming Lang came along late enough to fall, like a couple of other great female rogues, outside our anthology’s purview. Hollywood had a great time with her until censors declared that the wily young woman shouldn’t be profiting from crimes up on a movie screen for all of America’s impressionable youth to learn from.
The Infallible Godahl, who seems to have supplied himself with this grand moniker, is a man of many talents, as he demonstrates in “Blind Man’s Buff.” The story appeared first in the May 24, 1913, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. The next year Anderson included it in a collection of stories about his unpredictable thief, The Infallible Godahl. This was one of only three volumes of fiction that Anderson published. The great majority of his nonseries magazine stories, and even some of those in a series, have never been reprinted.
BLIND MAN’S BUFF
“Godahl, attend!” said that adept in smart crime to himself as he paused at the curb. “You think you are clever; but there goes your better.”
He had to step into the street to make way for the crowd that overflowed the pavement—men and women, newsboys, even unhorsed actors leaving their pillars for the time for the passing sensation, the beginning of the homing matinée crowds—all elbowing for a place about a tall, slender man in black who, as he advanced, gently tapped a cane-point before him. What attracted the vortex, however, was not so much the man himself as the fact that he wore a black mask. The mask was impenetrable. People said he had no eyes. It was Malvino the Magician, born to eternal darkness. From a child, so the story went, his fingers had been schooled with the same cruel science they ply in Russia to educate the toes of their ballet dancers—until his fingers saw for him.
Head erect, shoulders squared, body poised with the precision of a skater—his handsome, clear-cut features, almost ghastly in contrast to the band of silk ribbon that covered the sockets where sight should have been—he advanced with military step in the cleared circle that ever revolved about him, his slender cane shooting out now and again with the flash of a rapier to tap-tap-tap on the flags. Why pay for an orchestra chair to witness his feats of legerdemain? Peopling