Taylor, Matt -- The Famous McGarry Stories (1958)

The Famous McGarry Stories (collected 1958) is the only known book of detective fiction by Matt Taylor.`

Among Matt Taylor's detectives, Dan McGarry is a policeman and Kitty Archer is his love. The idea of a series in which detection is done jointly by a policeman and his girlfriend is appealing. The treatment of the couple is refreshingly egalitarian, with Kitty rescuing Dan, and not the other way around. Apparently a large number of Dan McGarry and Kitty stories appeared in This Week magazine during the 1940's and 1950's, enough to make a book. This Week was not a pulp; it was a Sunday newspaper magazine that paid big bucks for very short detective tales. Most of the McGarry tales are comic, light hearted and brief. They are designed as light sketches, that will bring a smile to the reader.

There are moments when the over-formal phraseology and comic looks at crime recall the comedy short stories of Damon Runyon. The resemblance is quite visible in "McGarry and the Dancing Hoodlum". However, Taylor's tales are far from imitations. They differ from Runyon's in their strong focus on the police and allied good guys.

There was a radio adaptation McGarry and His Mouse (1946-1947) (Kitty is nicknamed his "mouse" in the short stories). Wendell Corey, Roger Pryor and Ted de Corsia variously played comic policeman McGarry. The show's opening: "And now here he is, Dan McGarry himself. Handsome as ever, brave as ever and confused as ever." There was also a television pilot McGarry and Me (1960).

Al Hubin's bibliography Crime Fiction gives birth and death dates for Taylor. These suggest that this is the same Matt Taylor who was briefly a Hollywood scenarist (1926-1931), and whose brother was Sam Taylor, director of many of Harold Lloyd's film comedy classics.

Plot

Taylor's stories follow several different patterns. Some have mystery plots, some do not. Two of the best tales are comic adventure stories without mystery, in which his hero battles crooks. "Where's the Fire, McGarry?" and "Last-Minute McGarry" each have a comic-but-sinister crook who is hiding out from the law. In each, McGarry encounters him by accident, and a thrilling physical adventure ensues. Both have Dan on high-powered vehicles of transportation; in both the villains have similar nicknames. Both tales also get McGarry involved with the police's closest ally, the Fire Department.

"Raucous comic plots involving adventure with vehicles" is a description recalling the Tish stories of Mary Roberts Rinehart, although the Tish tales are typically not mystery or crime related. Both Rinehart and Taylor published in big circulation American magazines, and perhaps reflect common comic traditions of storytelling.` The McGarry tales with the best mystery plots are "McGarry and the Holdup Mystery", "McGarry Becomes a Trigger-Man" and "McGarry and the Mugger". These are tales with logical-but-surprising solutions. These mystery puzzles are solved through pure thinking, in the intuitionist tradition. While Dan McGarry is a cop, there is little use of police procedure, and no scientific detection, employed in solving these mysteries. The fact that some of the mysteries are solved by Kitty, an amateur detective, is consistent with this intuitionist approach: amateur sleuths and mysteries solved by pure thinking are core elements of the intuitionist tradition.

"Dan McGarry - Cop of the Year" has his hero trying to piece together some seemingly unrelated crimes. The solution does succeed in weaving them into a unified pattern. This is a less pure kind of mystery plot than the above stories, but its still shows a certain degree of ingenuity. McGarry becomes mildly famous for his crime solving ability in this tale, attracting some national attention by the end. This is the only explanation anywhere in the volume for the title, the "Famous McGarry". Otherwise, the title seems quite puzzling. In most of the stories, Dan McGarry is simply an ordinary plain clothes detective. He is well-liked and respected, but hardly well-known or famous.

Some stories have McGarry given police assignments that place him in a comically fish-out-of-water situation. These include "McGarry and the Vegetarian Bandits" and "McGarry and the Dancing Hoodlum". "McGarry and the Vegetarian Bandits" includes a simple mystery-and-solution puzzle. "McGarry and the Dancing Hoodlum" is a pure thriller, one with a bit of an ingenious ending. McGarry also gets strange assignments in "McGarry Goes Underground" and "McGarry and the Murderous Clown". These assignments are comic, but they are less purely fish-out-of-water than the previous tales. The stories' mystery puzzle solutions are also less clever and less logically motivated.

The solution of "McGarry and the Vegetarian Thieves" involves "thinking outside of received categories", or as a popular slang phrase has it, "thinking outside the box". To a degree, the solution of "McGarry Becomes a Trigger-Man" has an element of this as well, with McGarry finally getting the solution, when he looks outside his police life.

The solutions of "McGarry and the Holdup Mystery" and "McGarry and the Dancing Hoodlum" involve concealed stories hidden in the actions of the characters. There is perhaps an aspect of this in the solution of "McGarry and the Mugger" as well.

Setting

The jacket of the Detective Book Club edition says that the stories take place in Manhattan. And reference books state that the radio show version is set in New York City. However, the tales themselves seem to be set in a fictitious, unnamed city. The city has a different geography than Manhattan, and it also seems to lack pro or college football teams. However, the life of the city is deeply traditional, strongly recalling American life in 1940 Manhattan or Boston. In 1941, when the first tale is copyrighted, the stories probably reflected the lives of most people in big Northeastern US cities. But when they last appeared in 1956, they were already becoming dated, with many people moving to the suburbs.

While violence and threatened murders by hit men appear in the tales, few of the stories involve an actual killing. This is in accord with their comic nature.

Dan and and Kitty both seem to be Irish, like many cops in New York or Boston. Somewhat surprisingly, Kitty often is the one who solves the mystery. She is frequently described as Dan's "brains". The stories are definitely non-sexist, maybe even feminist. In 1950, it was probably an agreeable fantasy for American women, to imagine themselves as a cop's steady girlfriend, solving his police crime assignments during their evening conversations. Fifty years later, most modern women probably prefer to read about women who are police officers themselves.

Uncollected McGarry stories

"McGarry and the Box-Office Bandits" (1960) is a humorous gem, dealing with robbery and police undercover work. This little story has the same subject as Freeman Wills Crofts' The Box Office Murders (1929), but a very different development. Mainly, it is notable for its sparkling humor. There is also some satire of the horror movies of the era, and the gimmicks used to promote them in theaters; such gimmicks were associated in real life with the film director and flamboyant showman, William Castle. There is no puzzle plot. Stories elements recall "McGarry and the Murderous Clown".

"McGarry and the Box-Office Bandits" was reprinted in Bret Halliday's anthology Best Detective Stories Of The Year 16th Annual Collection (1961). The editor's introduction to the story says that two or three McGarry tales had been published in This Week magazine every year for twenty years. That makes roughly 50 stories. Since there are only a dozen in The Famous McGarry Stories, this implies that there are lots of uncollected tales.

Mike Grost