(1909-1979)
Babcock was one of the stars of the “second generation” of Joseph Shaw’s Black Mask boys, nurtured by the famous editor after Black Mask—the most esteemed of all pulp magazines—had already established its particular literary school in the writings of Dashiell hammett, Horace mccoy, Raoul whitfield, Paul cain, and the others. Babcock wrote well, and no matter how quickly he completed it, his material was solidly crafted, full of swift word pictures and tough dialogue. Spreading his wings in the 1940s, after the years in the pulps, Babcock wrote a series of detective novels. In these, his best work, Babcock’s sense of humor came to the fore; the topics were breezy fun while still tough and realistic.
“Like all true Californians,” as he once wrote, Babcock was born in Iowa. He went to college, but took his studies lightly. Music was his main interest, and he played banjo and sang with local dance bands by night. He married, quit school, got work, and lost it with the arrival of the Great Depression. He put his savings in a gas station and the station went bust. He tuned pianos, played music at weddings and speakeasies, and ended up picking peaches on his father-in-law’s ranch. “Then for some unaccountable reason was hit by the writing bug,” he recalled, “and baptized my typewriter with a detective yarn. . . . So now it’s write or starve— and maybe a little of both.” He wrote a story about a tough detective named Maguire, who happens to be standing at a drugstore lunch counter when some gangsters kill two people, including an innocent female cashier. Babcock called it “At the Bottom of Every Mess,” and sent it to a bottom-rung pulp, Underworld Magazine, thinking that would be the easiest to crack. The magazine lost the manuscript. Revising his strategy, Babcock sent off another copy to what was commonly known as one of the hardest pulps to crack: Black Mask. Editor Joe Shaw bought it, paying Babcock $100. Shaw’s only complaint was that Babcock didn’t know what he was talking about when he had a character blasting repeatedly with an automatic after a single squeeze of the trigger. The story appeared in the first issue of 1934.
Babcock continued writing for Black Mask, while selling rejects and lesser efforts to other detective pulps. In 1935, Babcock began his best-known series in the pulps, the adventures of “Chuck Thompson, G-Man,” as agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Shaw thought it would be a salable idea to piggyback on a big Warner Bros. Jimmy Cagney movie in release called G Men (with the new and censorious production code in place, Warners was forced to retool the Cagney image from lowlife criminal to two-fisted good guy). Babcock obliged, giving Black Mask a more socially acceptable sort of hero than its usual array of cynical, ambivalently honest private dicks, and assorted denizens of the underworld. Thompson tried to make the stories seem fresh and authentic, basing several of them on actual cases he had read about. Seven “Chuck
Thompson, G-Man” stories were published between 1935 and 1937, by which time Joe Shaw’s replacement at Black Mask, Fanny Ellsworth, decided that FBI agents were passe.
Babcock had never been one of the big producers in the pulps. Like Raymond chandler, he preferred to work on longer stories and to craft each one until it was as good as he could make it. As the ’30s closed out he was averaging less than one sale per month. Soon he was following Chandler’s footsteps into hardcovers and a distinguished New York publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf. Bab-cock’s first topic, A Homicide for Hannah, was a wonderful combination of humor and the hard-boiled, a bit reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man and of novels by Jonathan Latimer, but with its own original approach as well. Bab-cock’s heroine, Hannah Van Doren, is known as “Hannah the Horrible” and “Homicide Hannah the Gorgeous Ghoul” because she specializes in writing about and photographing the violently deceased for a lurid publication called True Crime Cases (“She’s bloodthirsty,” someone explains. “She just goes around hoping for a homicide to happen to someone. . . . The gorier the better, and with a sex angle if possible.”) Tough and gorgeous, Hannah is introduced on a barstool, cocktail in hand, wearing a black skunk-fur coat, looking “angelic,” hair “like misty sunshine” sparkling all over “like a fragile, beautiful jewel.” The man who becomes her sidekick and quasi-boyfriend in a three-topic series is a custom car salesman named Joe Kirby, and surrounding the pair is an equally colorful collection of characters from every stratum of society and both sides of the law. A Homicide, set in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve, opens with Kirby discovering a beautiful, nude, brutally beaten young woman crawling along an alleyway, then meanders along an entertaining course studded with murders, wisecracks, brawls, drinking, and sexy banter:
[Hannah] looked directly at Kirby. “Where’ve you been all this time, my fine-feathered friend? Trying to desert me, too? I guess I’ve lost my charm, or maybe my un-derthings have that certain odor the ads warn us about.”
“I didn’t know you wore any,” Kirby said, grinning down at her.
A Homicide for Hannah got a very good reaction from critics and the buying readers, and Babcock followed up later that same year, 1941, with a sequel, The Gorgeous Ghoul. It was another highly entertaining case, with the same breezily caustic tone and attractive crime-solving duo. A third and final Homicide Hannah/Joe Kirby novel, Hannah Says Foul Play, did not make it to hardcover publication but appeared as a paperback digest in 1946. Like the other two it was well-plotted, entertainingly digressive, sharp, and sexy.
The move from the literary developer Knopf to Avon Murder Mystery Monthly was a steep drop, but Babcock had stopped worrying about his fiction writing income or direction by this time. Beginning in 1943 with a berth at Universal Pictures, he had begun a new career as screenwriter. At Universal he worked on horror scripts (including The Jungle Captive and The Mummy’s Curse, the last of the original Mummy series) and “weird suspense” like Dead Man’s Eyes and Pillow of Death, two from the studio’s Inner Sanctum series, which starred Lon Chaney Jr. For the same studio he penned the scripts for the two “Creeper” movies, House of Horrors and The Brute Man, starring the tragic real-life “monster” Rondo Hatton. Badcock moved over to Columbia, where he worked on their Crime Doctor and Whistler series and also scripted the cult classic, So Dark the Night, a film noir set in a French village, brilliantly directed by Joseph H. Lewis. Bab-cock continued to be steadily employed by Hollywood production companies throughout the ’50s and into the ’60s as well, writing for small studios and independents and working on numerous television series (including Superman, Sky King, and Hawaiian Eye). He is known to have published only one additional novel, a sexy melodrama called Chautauqua, published under the name Dwight Vincent, in actuality a collaboration between Babcock and an old pulp writer friend, Day Keene; the topic sold to the movies and became the basis for an execrable Elvis Presley feature released in 1969 and called The Trouble with Girls.
Babcock’s comic hard-boiled novels never came back to print, other than in the early (abridged) paperback reprints of the first two. In more recent years they may have appeared too dated or frivolous to have found a place among the roster of revived hard-boiled classics, the works of Babcock’s better known, one-time peers. But to the small but devoted fans of the Hannah novels, they are dated in much the same way as Hollywood screwball comedies of the ’30s or ’40s film noir, that is to say timeless—richly detailed, wonderfully entertaining artifacts of a lost style that cannot be recreated.
Works
STORIES
- “At the Bottom of Every Mess” (1934);
- “Black Rose, The” (1944);
- “Blonde Alibi” (1935);
- “Blood in the Snow” (1939);
- “Bloodless Murder” (1934);
- “Bonus Blond Baby” (1937);
- “Careless Killer” (1938);
- “Case of the Gold Monkey, The” (1934);
- “Corpse at the Carnival, The” (1939);
- “Death Goes Free” (1935);
- “Death’s Ransom” (1935);
- “Dumb Cluck” (1934);
- “Flight at Sunrise” (1937);
- “Free Ride to Rio” (1936);
- “G-Man Chuck Thompson” (1936);
- “Hide Out” (1935);
- “Hit and Run” (1939);
- “It’s Murder Now” (1934);
- “Jitterbug Murder, The” (1939);
- “Jumbled Justice” (1934);
- “Killer’s Souvenir” (1940);
- “Lady in Black” (1944);
- “Lady Killer” (1940);
- “Live Bait” (1935);
- “Men of the FBI” (1936);
- “Milk and Blood” (1937);
- “Murder After Midnight” (1935);
- “Murder for Hire”
- (1937); “Murder in Hell” (1934);
- “Murder in the Family”
- (1938); “Murder on the Gay Way” (1939);
- “Murder on the Side” (1936);
- “Murder Preview” (1939);
- “Murder Snare” (1935);
- “Pay Off” (1934);
- “Pearls Without Publicity” (1934);
- “Private Murder Party” (1935);
- “Prodigal Pearls” (1938);
- “Rat Bait” (1936);
- “Raw Deal, The” (1935);
- “Renegade in Reno” (1939);
- “Reward Chaser” (1939);
- “Scandal Racket” (1934);
- “State Narcotic Dick” (1937);
- “Storm Victim” (1939);
- “Too Many Slips” (1934);
- “Vengeance Is Mine” (1934);
- “Welshers Pay Off” (1936);
- “Widow Regrets, The” (1938);
- “You Listen!” (1938)
BOOKS
- Gorgeous Ghoul, The (1941);
- Hannah Says Foul Play (1946);
- Homicide for Hannah, A (1941)
