Reeves, Robert -- Cellini Smith: Detective (1943)

Robert Reeves was a Black Mask writer of the late 1930's and early 1940's era. He seems to have been a member of the Frank Gruber -- Norbert Davis school of humorous private eye writers.

Reeves' third and last novel Cellini Smith: Detective (1943) takes place in a humorous world of eccentric low lifes. Many of the male characters are hoboes, and the females burlesque dancers, so the book takes place in a lower social stratum than even most hard-boiled fiction. In fact, Cellini Smith: Detective is one of the few formal detective novels to transpire among the world of the very poor. Frank Gruber's Depression era detectives also exist in a world of hand to mouth poverty, and Norbert Davis' sleuths frequently encountered people living in cheap shacks among dire financial woe. So Reeves' book is in their same tradition, although pushed to a systematic extreme. 

Cellini Smith: Detective has a full Background, or rather two Backgrounds, showing the lives of both the hoboes and cheap burlesque. Reeves is surprisingly inventive, at coming up with different kinds of characters who relate to these activities. 

The book also echoes Reeves' interest in anthropology. In his debut Dead and Done For, we learn that Cellini Smith studied anthropology in college, and that he is still interested in it as a field of study. In Cellini Smith: Detective, there is an anthropologist character. Oddly, Smith himself in Cellini Smith: Detective does not talk much about anthropology any more. Other pulp writers of the era also referred to the subject: the heroine of Norbert Davis' Oh, Murderer Mine (1946) teaches it in college. 

Like the non-series short story "Dance Macabre", Cellini Smith: Detective shows Reeves' interest in jewelry. Both works include star sapphires.

Reeves' prose comes alive in action sequences: for example, the scene where his hero is hunted down within the burlesque theater (Chapter 6), or the episode where his hero heads on back to his apartment (the end of Chapter 8).

Another virtue is the humorous dialogue that parodies mystery conventions. When the hero is caught snooping around one of the dancer's dressing rooms, he tells her he is just looking for evidence to prove she is a murderess. This sort of bright comic dialogue appears throughout the book. Norbert Davis' heroes also often spoofed mystery convention, especially ideal behavior for an honest detective. Unlike Davis' Max Latin, Cellini Smith does not pretend to be a crook, however. He is merely a two bit operator at the end of his financial rope. In any case, Smith's dialogue recalls not just Davis and other pulp writers of his school, but also Georgette Heyer's burlesque of detective fiction in Death in the Stocks (1935). 

Cellini Smith: Detective is a formal, puzzle plot detective novel, as the term would be understood by Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr. Like many Golden Age detective writers, Reeve builds up his story out of a number of different mystery subplots. MILD SPOILERS AHEAD. 

The novel's best mystery idea involves the disappearance of the corpse. Corpses were always being kidnapped in Norbert Davis, Craig Rice, Richard Sale and other humorous writers of the 1940's, so this is not a new idea. In fact, one might say that any self respecting corpse in a 1940's detective story had to get kidnapped at least once. However, Smith has come up with a new motive for such a peregrination. He also does a good job with the story treatment here, making it relatively fresh in its trappings.

Like several other subplots in Cellini Smith: Detective, the disappearance is unraveled gradually, step by step, through the course of the book, rather than simply being solved in the last chapter. Each step involves a little mini-mystery being solved, with the subplot as a whole being made up of a series of such mini-mysteries. 

Somewhat surprisingly, many of the mystery plot approaches Reeves uses for his subplots, echo those used by Baynard Kendrick. Kendrick, like Reeves, was a mystery writer who combined hard-boiled settings with formal mystery puzzles. The correspondence between Reeves and Kendrick's plotting technique is not 100% perfect, but it is still worth pointing out.

The motive for the stealing of the corpse involves messages or information, a Kendrick subject. Unlike some Kendrick works, this information in Cellini Smith: Detective is not any sort of dying message.

The killer is identified at the end, through the killer's access to certain physical areas or objects, and through knowledge that the killer alone possessed. Both kinds of clues to a villain's identity are a principal feature in Kendrick. They are also found in other writers, such as Ellery Queen. Reeves is especially complex in his construction of the access clue. It actually involves a lack of access.

In Kendrick, there are often surprising revelations about the background of a suspect or victim's past life or identity. The victim in Cellini Smith: Detective has a mysterious identity, and the book shows the hero using solid detective work to track it down. This mystery arrives at a solution, but not one that could be logically predicted by the reader through clues: it is not "fair play", in other words. But it does use sound detection. A second puzzle involves the background of a suspect. This puzzle turns out to have nothing to do with the main murder.

The killing starts out with some mild "howdunit" aspects: detective Smith has to figure out the unusual murder weapon. There are howdunit aspects in several Kendrick novels, but they are usually linked to impossible crime-like killings at a distance. But there are no such impossible crime aspects to Cellini Smith: Detective.

Howdunits are also a favorite of the Van Dine school. The burlesque theater also reflects the Van Dine School's interest in show biz, although it is much tackier than the more elevated show biz backgrounds in most Van Dine School writers.

Mike Grost