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Blochman, Lawrence G

Page history last edited by Jon 14 years ago

Lawrence BlochmanLawrence Goldtree Blochman (1900-1975) was born and educated in California and took a certificate in Forensic Pathology. He married Marguerite Mailliard in 1926 and became a journalist in Asia and the Far East. During World War II he served in the US Office of War Information. He was President of the Mystery Writers of America in 1948-9. His series character for three early books was Inspector Leonidas Prike. A later novella and a collection of short stories featured Dr. Daniel Webster Coffee.

 

Mike Grost on Lawrence G Blochman

 

Where does Lawrence G. Blochman fit into mystery tradition? I would argue that he is an American representative of the "Realist" school founded by Freeman and Crofts. He shows a number of important similarities. His scientific detective, Dr. Coffee, seems in the tradition of that other medical detective, Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke. Also, Blochman's books seem constructed as "backgrounders" in the Crofts tradition, intended to provide a detailed, inside look at some country, industry or institution. Many of his early novels are set in India, where Blochman worked as a journalist, and are full of information about that country. The novella "Murder Walks in Marble Halls", takes us backstage at the New York City Public Library.

 

Blochman also shows signs of continuity with Arthur B. Reeve and the American Scientific School. Reeve's detective Craig Kennedy liked to travel in foreign countries, as in The Panama Plot (collected 1918). Blochman's detective Prike gathers the suspects together at the end of the tale for the revelation of the killer, just as in Reeve. Reeve typically wrote about the sort of industrial background later favored by Blochman. Both writers were fascinated by gems. The characters in both authors are often caught up in romantic tangles.

 

Blochman's fiction falls into two periods. From 1927 to 1940, Blochman mainly wrote tales of exotic adventure. These were often set in India, but he also wrote about Japan, Indonesia, Central America, and other places. These stories tend to mix mystery elements with spy, adventure and travel writing. From 1941 through the 1970's, Blochman's stories were largely mysteries set in the USA. They tend to be much closer to the paradigms of detective fiction, concentrating on a mystery solved by a detective. However, spy elements are still frequently present in this period. Blochman's two periods are the exact opposite of mystery trends of his era. During the 1920's and 1930's, many mystery writers stuck close to strict Golden Age traditions of mystery writing. After the 1940's, however, many mystery authors tried to bring other elements into mystery fiction, moving away from the pure detective story. This is completely different from Blochman's approach. High points of Blochman's first period include the Indian set novel Bengal Fire (1937); high points of his second, three books about pathologist detective Dr. Coffee.

 

Early Short Fiction

 

Blochman was born in 1900. Blochman's first story, "Cholera at Bukit Batu" appeared in 1927, followed by his first mystery, "The Fifty-Carat Jinx" (1930). Already by this time he had been stationed in Calcutta as a foreign correspondent, and he is clearly most interested in the Indian background of several of his characters in this story. Unfortunately, he does not altogether avoid clichés in this early tale. His "Red Wine" (1930), set in Indonesia, is also a well known work. Both of these early mystery stories are pretty weak, but they show mild signs of the much better plotting skills and the much greater realism to come in Blochman's work. He was a friend at this early date of Charles G. Booth, who also combined mystery fiction with exotic foreign backgrounds. "Fifty" also shows signs of Blochman's later plotting technique. There is an elaborate story set in the past, which gives rise to the crime in the present. There are intricate financial deals. The modern day crime involves the interaction of a large group of characters, and is intricately plotted. These characters are very diverse, and include people of all races and financial echelons. The characters tend to be a bit raffish, and involved in deal making on the fringes of society - in this case, the lower levels of the jewelry business. There is an air of wholesomeness about the characters, despite their marginal position in society, and they clearly have their author's sympathy. The plot's intricacies are interesting to watch in their unfolding; yet they do not really form a puzzle plot in the Agatha Christie sense of the term.

 

Blochman's "A Perfect Target" (1932) is a little suspense thriller set in Japan. While it is not a mystery story, and is routine as a suspense plot, it shows that Blochman at this early stage has already developed his skills with backgrounds: the Japanese setting is richly described. Blochman is good at details of daily life. He especially takes us into his hero's home, and shows how he lives and eats. These same approaches will show up later in Bengal Fire. This story deals in stolen netsuke; Blochman also liked tales about rare books, jewelry, and other valuable objects.

 

Blochman would write a short story series about O'Reilly, a typical New York Cop who travels to India as the bodyguard of a Maharajah. These stories are comic adventure, full of mystery elements, with plenty of fish out of water humor about the tough but good natured flat foot experiencing exotic adventure. The portrait of India is less realistic and less serious than in Blochman's novels, emphasizing instead good natured fun and the glamour of India's traditional courts. The first story in the series is "The Zarapore Beat" (1936).

 

Blochman's poorest novels are three non-series books that combine spy-fiction, murder mystery plots, Third World settings and anti-Axis propaganda: Midnight Sailing (1938), Blow Down (1939) and Wives To Burn (1940). The mystery story sub-plots in these books are not unpleasant reading, especially during their initial murder investigations, but their solutions are poorly crafted. Blochman's anti-Axis beliefs do him credit. Unfortunately, all three of the books express stereotypes about inhabitants of Third World countries. This forms a blot on Blochman's otherwise commendably anti-racist record.

 

During the early 1940's, the Good Neighbor policy encouraged Americans to look to Latin America for close ties. There was a huge outpouring of Hollywood films with Latin American settings, especially Argentina and Brazil. Mystery writers seemed to favor the Caribbean, instead. It was a place easily traveled to by ordinary Americans, and it was a place close to United States borders, making it a good setting for spy fiction. In addition to Blochman's Blow Down, we get Richard Sale's "Cape Spectre" (1941), Helen McCloy's The Goblin Market (1943) and Charles G. Booth's [Mr. Angel Comes Aboard] (1944). Blochman and Booth were friends. There were also such mystery films as the Panama-set Phantom Raiders (1940), directed by Jacques Tourneur, and based on a story by mystery writer Jonathan Latimer.

 

The Blochman books marking his transition from exotic adventure to American pure detection are among his least interesting works. In later books such as Recipe for Homicide (1952), Blochman will write with brilliance and sympathy about business women, portraying them with a complete lack of sexism. Here the ideas about women in business are conventional.

 

Much of Blochman's short fiction is unavailable today. He appeared in both the slicks and the pulps, and in magazines that fell in between, like Adventure. His pulp story, "Reprieve" (1943), while brief, startles with the immense freight of well done detective story machinery Blochman has managed to cram into it. There is a detailed financial background, quite realistic and complex, reminding one that Blochman is the author of that in-depth look at American business, Recipe For Homicide, and a member of the realist or Croftsian school of fiction, and believes in backgrounds. There is a private eye, and one whose intellectual attainments are emphasized, beyond the normal rule in pulps. There is a whole locked room mystery story, and a pulp adventure and intrigue tale. All of this is done with considerable grace and charm.

 

In addition to the novel Recipe For Homicide, Dr. Coffee appears in two short story collections, Diagnosis Homicide and Clues For Dr Coffee. Blochman's Dr. Coffee tale, "But the Patient Died" (1947), is a straightforward Dr. Thorndyke imitation. The first tale in the Dr. Coffee series, it furnishes a good summary of both the daily hospital work and routine of Dr. Coffee, and of his and his police friend Max Ritter's personalities. It makes for pleasant reading, although quite mechanical in its approach to mystery. The best touches in the story deal with politics in Coffee's hometown of Northbank. More creative, and with a better puzzle plot, is "Catfish Story". "The Phantom Cry-Baby" concerns the heiress to the Barzac Cannery, later used as the setting of Recipe for Homicide. Its plot is alluded to in Chapter 6 of Recipe, and in some ways forms a prequel to that novel. The Cannery itself is hardly discussed in "Cry-Baby", however. It is one of the few Dr. Coffee stories to use mechanical, non-medical technology as part of the plot.

 

Another locked room story is "Murder Behind Schedule". This is a very well done tale, brief but with a well constructed plot. It contains a gracious homage to John Dickson Carr. Carr in turn was a fan of Blochman's, and praised his stories in print. This is much shorter than Blochman's other Dr. Coffee tales, presumably because it appeared in This Week, a magazine that offered high prices for very short mystery stories - Ellery Queen's Q.B.I. also appeared there in the early 1950's. The characterization of Paul Monson in the story is interesting. It emphasizes his interior world, his attitudes and thoughts, as well as his talents. It also stresses the relationship between the character, and society, especially the sociology of modern life. Many of Blochman's characters seem to exist on such an interface. The plot of the tale, like many of Blochman's, interweaves a cat's cradle of relationships among the characters. The solution is also typical of Blochman, in that it involves the detective discovering new previously hidden relationships among the characters.

 

"Kiss of Kandahar" (1951) is set in the same world as Recipe For Homicide (1952), with its factories, its food processing, and its poisons. This tale, like its predecessor "The Swami of Northbank" (1950), is in the pure Freeman tradition of scientific detection. Both stories involve some interesting science. The later "A Taste For Tea" (aka "The Man Who Lost His Taste") (1958) also recalls Recipe for Homicide, as such Blochman interests as botany, medical detection, and the world of industrial food preparation all intermix. Blochman's interest in industrial food preparation exposes a whole hidden side of modern American life. Despite the ubiquity of grocery stores and prepared food, most people have little consciousness of this. It underpins all of modern life on a daily basis. Blochman also enjoys the technology of gourmet cooking, and exotic foods. The Caribbean meal in "Rum For Dinner" is an example. I've seen the akee trees discussed in that story at Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami.

 

"Death by Drowning?" (1965) is also set in the world of industrial food preparation. Despite its brevity, Blochman has crowded many of his other themes into the tale, too: scientific detection, characters representing corruption in the business world and a cross section of business practices, irregular romantic liaisons, timetables, unexpected perspectives in the solution that transform earlier events in the tale. The story is an example of Blochman's ability to construct complex plots.

 

In addition to his industry set stories, Blochman also wrote tales set among the criminal element. "Stacked Deck" (1959) is especially Freeman like. Its dubious death is a major Freeman theme, and the blood analysis recalls such Freeman tales as "The Old Lag" (1909) and "The Pathologist to the Rescue". Blochman includes complete life histories for his characters. Blochman is an especially people oriented writer. He notices his characters, their beliefs, their relationships, their histories, their physical appearance, and their medical conditions: much of the science in Blochman's tales revolves around this latter.

 

Of the two last stories in Clues For Dr Coffee, "The Wolf and The Wayward Wac" (1963) is not bad, with some interesting business detail about the Army, while "Wrong-Way Tosca" (1964) is unpleasant. "Old Flame" (1959) is also a minor work. "Wrong-Way Tosca" suffers from a stereotyped, negatively depicted gay character, one of the few examples of prejudice anywhere in Blochman's work.

 

Dr. Coffee also appeared in several later 1960's and 1970's stories published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, that have not yet been collected in book form. Most of the Dr. Coffee stories I've read from this period are fairly weak, however. Blochman will develop a much more objective look at gay people in "Missing: One Stage Struck Hippie" (1970). The medical model of homosexuality here is typical of Blochman's medical orientation, but it seems oddly old fashioned, and recalls the 19th Century, when writing about gay people was often done by medical experts. Neither tale shows any consciousness of gay people as an often discriminated against minority. But "Missing" does depict gay people as deeply integrated into the fabric of American society, and making a positive contribution to public life.

 

Blochman is on surer ground with his dark portrait of heterosexuals in "Dr. Coffee and the Pardell Case" (1972). The sinister central character gets a full life history at the start of the tale, emphasizing his sexual and professional misconduct. This is extended at the end of the tale, deepening the life history. The other characters in the tale are also involved with Pardell's life history, getting their own life stories. While some Blochman tales take characters "through a war", this one takes them through the life of class conflict experienced by Pardell, and his rise from poor kid to millionaire. This central transition from wealth and poverty has a before, during and after, just like a war, and we see how the characters' life situations change during these stages. Life histories are a technique used by Hugh Pentecost in his stories, although Pentecost does not usually center them around some transitional event such as a war or change in class status, the way Blochman does.

 

One of the best is "Dr. Coffee and the Whiz Kid" (1972). Blochman kept up with the times in his later work. This story has a "through the Vietnam War" perspective similar to the "through World War II" approach of Rather Cool For Mayhem. Blochman is interested in depicting not just a current event, but how the aftermath of the event will impinge on people's lives. It is a whole historical process that Blochman writes about. This tale also has the richest look at Max Ritter's family background in the Dr. Coffee saga. The tale also has a semi-satiric look at Ritter's relatives in academia. Blochman has captured the feel of 1970's American academia well, half pretentiousness, half genuine scholarship and learning. These are among the few academic people in all of Blochman; it is a side of modern life in which he had previously displayed little interest. The cab-driving academic in "Dr. Coffee and the Pardell Case" is also a vivid character, another attempt by Blochman to make a portrait of the hippie era.

 

Blochman's untitled novella appeared in EQMM (September 1956); it was the subject of a contest for readers to suggest a title. This story is a complete change of pace for Blochman. It shows him taking on many of the features of the intuitionist school. Its comic but persistent amateur detectives are a married couple, on the fringes of New York City theater, just like the popular amateur sleuth couples in the novels of such intuitionist writers as Craig Rice, Kelley Roos and the Lockridges. As in those writers, the couple has a policemen friend on the city homicide squad, with whom they work. There is even a dying message, that favorite of Ellery Queen. There is no Background, and science plays little role in the mystery, unlike many of Blochman's other works. All in all, it is a pleasant invocation of intuitionist school traditions, traditions Blochman had otherwise ignored throughout his career. The story does show some of Blochman's approaches. Many of the suspects in the story have a background in the armed forces, and the story is in the Blochman tradition of skepticism about the honesty of some members of the service. The careers of people are tracked through more than one stage, as part of the plot. The complex relationships among the characters, and their somewhat surprising interactions, also play a role in the plot. This story makes pleasant reading. It is not quite fair play - it does not seem possible for someone to guess the whole solution based on clues in the story - but there is ingenuity in the tale.

 

Bibliography

 

Bombay Mail (1934)

Bengal Fire (1937)

Red Snow at Darjeeling (1938)

Midnight Sailing (1939)

Blow Down (1940)

Wives To Burn (1940)

See You at the Morgue (1946)

Diagnosis Homicide (1950)

Death Walks in Marble Halls (1951) aka Murder Walks in Marble Halls

Pursuit (1951)

Rather Cool For Mayhem (1952)

Recipe For Homicide (1952)

Clues for Dr Coffee (1964) 

 

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