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MacHarg, William

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 1 month ago

William MacHarg (1872-1951) was an American journalist. Born in New York, he attended the University of Michigan and became a journalist with the Chicago Tribune. He wrote many magazine stories as well as several books, both in collaboration with his brother-in-law Edwin Balmer and on his own.

 

MacHarg and Balmer are best known now for The Achievements of Luther Trant (short stories - 1909), which features the first use of psychology in detective fiction.

 


 

Mike Grost on MacHarg and Balmer

 

MacHarg and Balmer: Into the Mind

 

MacHarg and Balmer's Luther Trant tales (1909) are some of the pioneering American scientific detective stories. My favorite is "The Man Higher Up". This tale has brilliant mise-en-scène, where it generates higher and higher excitement as the detectives get closer and closer to nailing the title villain. The story also shows a great deal of realism, taking the reader back stage at the docks, a place and time now preserved forever in their fiction. One wonders if the "background" in this story influenced the Freeman-Crofts school's interests in backgrounds. This story, along with Moffett's Through the Wall of the same year, marks the first use of the lie detector in fiction. Trant is a psychologist, Chicago based, who works as a criminological consultant on mysteries. He is a young, clean cut and dynamic scientist, a characterization that probably influenced Arthur B. Reeve's Craig Kennedy.

 

"The Axton Letters" is apparently the first of all mystery tales wherein the detective deduces psychological or sociological facts about a bad guy, based on clues he inadvertently included in a letter he wrote. MacHarg and Balmer here deserve credit here as pioneers, but I confess that I have always had considerable skepticism about both this story, and the genre as a whole. Detectives in stories are always noticing that a letter writer spelled a date English style, and rushing out to arrest the Duke of York, the only Englishman among the suspects. But couldn't such a thing be a personal affectation of an American crook? Couldn't the writer have just received a note from a British cousin, and subconsciously imitated his dating style? Suppose it were just a typo? Or what if it were done on purpose, to mislead? Or suppose that the writer's first grade teacher was from England, and taught our crook the English way of doing things. Detectives in stories never seem to encounter any of this glitches. In any case, the storytelling here is nowhere as good as "The Man Higher Up". The other Trant story in anthologies, "The Private Bank Puzzle", just seems mediocre.

 

MacHarg's solo collection The Affairs of O'Malley (collected 1940) is written in a different style, one that only rarely invokes anything scientific. This is a large group (33 stories) of police procedural tales, each around four to eight pages long. O'Malley is a New York cop; in each tale he solves a mystery, usually a murder. Each story opens with O'Malley explaining why he probably won't be able to solve the case; then he solves it; each story similarly closes humorously with O'Malley's explanation about why he won't get any credit for solving the case. Most of the cases have realistic New York City backgrounds, ranging from the poor in tenement halls to rich people hanging out in night clubs. They probably served as a model for Ellery Queen's later series of short mysteries with realistic New York settings, Q.B.I. (1949-1954). Very few of the cases have mob or underworld settings. The stories are full of a tough, low key realism, but are not especially hard-boiled or in any Hammett derived pulp tradition. Whether rich, poor, working or middle class, the characters in the story are depicted as "typical New Yorkers".

The brief tales are heavily plot oriented. Some of them have mystery puzzle plots, in others the killer's identity is simply found through police work. O'Malley puts great emphasis on coming up with ingenious ideas to make the killer confess, or make a damaging admission of guilt; the stories contain numerous gimmicks of this type.

 

These stories form a subcategory of the inverted stories of Freeman; here it is not so much how the police are going to discover the killer's identity that is important, as how they are going to trick him into confessing. One sees a similar emphasis on tricking the killer into confession in some of the inverted stories Cornell Woolrich wrote in the early 1940's, and one wonders if Woolrich used the O'Malley tales as a model. The O'Malley stories appeared in slick magazines, such as Colliers, in the 1930's, and some of the police schemes in stories like "No Evidence" remind one of Frederick Irving Anderson's 1920's Book of Murder, which also appeared in the slick Saturday Evening Post. Erle Stanley Gardner's [The D.A. Draws a Circle] (1939) also contains a look at psychological pressure on a criminal to get him to confess. Clearly this idea was "in the air" around 1940. (Gardner's novel also resembles the O'Malley tale "Too Many Miles" in that both deal with mileage on automobiles.)

 

The science in the early Luther Trant tales tended to be based on psychology, such as the lie detector, or what the killer's words revealed about his mental makeup. The emphasis was on getting the criminal to reveal his mental secrets. This is related to the later approach of the O'Malley tales, with their emphasis on triggering criminal confession. What science there is in the O'Malley stories tends to invoke altered states of consciousness, in which killers might talk, such as "The Sleeptalker", or the anesthetic based dentistry of "The Man on the Truck". The O'Malley stories also include episodes in which the detective gets small children ("The Sleeptalker", "The Key Man"), naive adolescents ("Too Bad") or animals ("The Scotty Dog", "Dumb Witness") to reveal what they know. In each case, O'Malley has to coax the knowledge out of a brain that is different from an adult's, finding ways of interpreting the non standard psychology of the witness.

 

 

Another persistent theme in the tales concerns O'Malley's ingeniously tracking down suspects, by following up often meager clues. One suspect often leads to another suspect, who in turn leads to a third, until ultimately the actual killer is traced. In general, the O'Malley tales emphasize the ideas of the detective, whether they consist of novel ways to get a killer to confess, or finding ways to track down suspects from the slenderest of clues. Almost none of them glamorize the "routine police work" beloved of the Freeman Wills Crofts school of police procedurals. O'Malley does a good deal of routine investigation, and more frequently delegates this to other cops, but the knowledge gained therefrom is more often treated as the raw material for O'Malley's clever ideas, not as an ultimate end in itself. Several of the cases involve a tangle of personal relationships, with jealous love triangles and rival lovers. The pattern of interrelationships can get complex, and forms a major part of the plot.

"Written in Dust" and "The Widow's Share" deal with payroll robberies, a subject that would later be popular in books and films. As in "The Man Higher Up", these stories take one back stage at a business. So, in its own way, does "The Locked Door", a tale that shows some interesting geographical patterns.

 

 

The story "Man Missing" suggests that MacHarg had been reading Freeman Wills Crofts' The Cask (1920). "The Right Gun" recalls Ellery Queen, with its boxing arena setting, and search for a missing gun. Also Queen like is this stories' sympathetic black character.

 

The cover of the 1951 paperback of The Affairs of O'Malley (1940) (retitled Smart Guy) shows a vivid illustration taken from the story "A Little More Evidence". I don't know the name of the artist. The O'Malley tales did not end in 1940 with this collection; for example, "Deceiving Clothes" (1942) came afterwards. One of the best plotted stories in the series is "Hidden Evidence" (1946). In this tale, a chain of events that look one way are eventually given a very different interpretation. It is sort of the plotting equivalent of a pun: something that sounds the same, but that has two meanings. This story also contains MacHarg's patented complex chain of relationships among the characters.

 

Bibliography

 

The Affairs of O'Malley 1940 (aka Smart Guy)

  • Almost Perfect
  • Best Clue Missing
  • Broadway Murder
  • The Cat's Eyes
  • The Checkered Suit (aka East Side Homicide)
  • Dumb Witness
  • The Fourth Girl ( aka Manhattan Murder)
  • Just Too Smart
  • The Key Man
  • Last Look
  • A Little More Evidence
  • The Locked Door
  • Lost Girl
  • Man Missing
  • The Man on the Truck
  • Murder Makes It Worse
  • No Clues
  • No Evidence
  • No Fingerprints
  • The Right Gun
  • The Ring
  • Rosas Ring
  • The Scotty Dog
  • Sinister Gifts
  • The Sleeptalker
  • Smart Guy
  • Soiled Diamonds (aka Tell 'Em at Headquarters)
  • Too Bad
  • Too Many Enemies
  • Too Many Miles
  • The Unconvincing Note
  • The Weak Spot
  • The Widow's Share
  • Written in Dust

 

With Balmer

 

The Achievements of Luther Trant (1910)

  • The Axton Letters
  • The Chalchihuitl Stone
  • The Eleventh Hour
  • The Empty Cartridges
  • The Fast Watch
  • The Man Higher Up
  • The Man in the Room
  • The Private Bank Puzzle
  • The Red Dress

The Surakarta 1913

The Blind Man's Eyes 1916

The Indian Drum 1917

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