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Knight, Clifford

Page history last edited by Bill Kelly 14 years, 10 months ago

Clifford Knight (1886-1963) was an American pulp writer who invented the series character Professor Huntoon Rogers. 

 

Mike Grost on Clifford Knight

 

Knight's The Affair at the Circle T (1946) has the sort of detailed Background common in his fiction, in this case, of a Nevada dude ranch. Most of his books' backgrounds are locations out West, or in the Pacific. The solution to the mystery, discovered by his series detective Professor Huntoon Rogers, turns on science. There is also a routine investigation of alibis in the tale. All in all, it shows signs of the Realist tradition.

 

Huntoon Rogers first appeared in The Affair of the Scarlet Crab (1937), a book set against a Background of a scientific expedition to the Galapagos Islands. Many of the characters in the book are University professors; University settings are frequent among Realist school writers. So are boats and shipping. Puzzle plot elements are skimpy in this not very inspired mystery; the best ideas involve the second murder, and follow Realist school traditions of alibis and the "breakdown of identity". The storytelling is also grim and depressing, and the book is not recommended. This book does not seem like a pure example of the Realist school. It also shows signs of the Van Dine tradition. Rogers is a genius amateur detective; he is an English professor, not a scientist. And the characters seem like the sort of intelligentsia that often show up in Van Dine school books, although they are scientists, not the arts oriented scholars of Van Dine novels.

 

The Affair of the Scarlet Crab seems oddly anticipatory of Michelangelo Antonioni's film L'Avventura (1959 - 1960).

 

After World War II, Knight abandoned Rogers to write about non-series detectives.

 

Bibliography

 

The affair of the Scarlet Crab (1937)

The Affair of the Heavenly Voice (1937)

The Affair at Palm Springs (1938)

The Affair of the Ginger Lei (1938)

The Affair of the Black Sombrero (1939)

The Affair on the Painted Desert (1939)

The Affair in Death Valley (1940)

The Affair of the Circus Queen (1940)

The Affair of the Skiing Clown (1941)

The Affair of the Crimson Gull (1941)

The Affair of the Limping Sailor (1942)

The Affair of the Splintered Heart (1942)

The Affair of the Fainting Butler (1943)

The Affair of the Jade Monkey (1943)

The Affair of the Dead Stranger (1944)

The Affair of the Corpse Escort (1946)

The Affair of the Golden Buzzard (1946)

The Affair of the Sixth Button (1947)

Dark Abyss (1949)

Hangman's Choice (1949)

The Yellow Cat (1950)

The Dark Road (1951)

Death of a Big Shot (1951)

Death and the Little Brother (1952)

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