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Masur, Harold Q

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 11 months ago

Harold Q Masur (1912-2005) was an American lawyer who created Scott Jordan, a crime-solving attorney. He was educated at Bordentown Military institute, New York University and New York School of Law. Masur has served as President of the Mystery Writers of America (1973-4) and as counsel to the organisation. Masur graduated from the New York University School of Law in 1934. He practiced law from 1935-1942 when he then served in the U.S. Air Force. Starting from the late 1930s, he honed his writing craft by publishing short stories in various pulp magazines like Argosy (1939), Popular Detective, (1941), and Detective Story Magazine (1949). His first novel Bury Me Deep (1947) introduced Jordan as hero and narrator, and went through at least five printings. It was reprinted in 1984 and was made into a movie and an episode of TV's Ellery Queen. Masur was General Counsel for the Mystery Writers of America for many years. Masur died on September 16, 2005, in Boca Raton, Florida.

Bury Me Deep opens with Scott Jordan finding a blond in his apartment. Naturally she ends up dead. Johnson forms an alliance with Lieutenant John Nola of NYC’s Homicide Bureau to pursue the case. Scott Jordan narrates this novel’s episodic structure in first person point of view. Throughout the book Jordan never sees the inside of a courtroom and very little of his law office, preferring to do his own legwork:

“Broadway had pulsed into neon-glaring night life. Swollen throngs milled restlessly with a rapacious appetite for pleasure. Box-office windows spawned long queues, and the traffic din was a steady roar in your ears.”

Mike Grost on Harold Q Masur

Harold Q Masur's short fiction shows some basic virtues. A story typically revolves around some situation "which is not what it seems". Here Masur is showing some ingenuity, and displaying his continuity with the puzzle plot tradition. Built on top of this ingenious situation is a murder plot. His lawyer detective Scott Jordan is hired by a client to investigate the situation or perform some lawyery business, and he stumbles into the midst of the murder. Jordan investigates the crime, figures out the central twist, and nails the killer. Masur sometimes uses the Chandler formula of interviewing each character in the tale, one at a time. The stories are also written to fall, to a degree, within the parameters of the Chandler-based, post WW II private eye paradigm, thus ensuring their commercial acceptance with the readers of the era. There are some differences, however. Masur is still faithful to many of the older traditions of the 1930's pulp magazine - in fact, some of his early tales appeared in my favorite of all the pulp magazines, Dime Detective. Reportedly, he wrote a large number of early pulp tales under pseudonyms; these are largely uncollected in books. (Later he would be associated with such non-hard-boiled magazines as EQMM and AHMM, editing anthologies for the latter.) Masur is not an absurdist, unlike Chandler. His plots make sense, and often center around some puzzle plot situation, just as in the Dime Detective tradition. There is a cheery atmosphere of escapism to the tales, also pulp like, and distinct from the weary weltschmerz of Chandler and Ross MacDonald. He also has some of the older pulp tradition's forward narrative drive. Masur is unfortunately more subdued than some of the wildly surreal pulp stories of a previous era, however: Chandleresque traditions of a realistic depiction of "mean streets" have unfortunately descended over the post war mystery story like a shroud.

Masur also has a certain middle class orientation which is antithetical to the social alienation of the Chandler school of p.i.'s. He is obviously proud of his lawyer hero's education and professional status - Masur was a lawyer himself. Masur's attitude is in fact very close to the 1950's American pride in the nation's growing prosperity and increasingly middle class status. Masur also flaunts his education in the many cultural references which dot his tales. There are surprising references to tropical biology and customs in the stories, and a knowledgability about literature. Many of his descriptions show both a wry humor and a startling metaphor. Masur here is part of a 1950's tradition that equated education with social progress. Many people of the time thought that mass college education, available for the first time after WW II, would bring about a social paradise in future America. Intellectuality was cherished and admired by many people of the era, as a harbinger of a better world.

Masur focuses on rich, corrupt people. He dislikes people who are getting easy money: bankers, union bosses, corrupt politicians, and people living on inherited wealth. His stories are full of gold diggers, both male and female, who marry rich people for their money, and greedy heirs. Extramarital affairs are also common, often motivated by money. A common type in his stories is the arrogant rich man, haughty and condescending, snide to his inferiors, and sure to get involved with a fist fight with the hero. Another standard group of Masur characters are the underworld types. These are often obvious crooks. Their criminal schemes often play are role in the plot, but they are rarely the mystery suspects or the actual killers themselves. Their role is simply to add corruption to the plot, and motives to the central characters in the tale. They stand off to one side of the story. Their function is close to what Alfred Hitchcock called the MacGuffin, a motivating force in a story whose actual content is not that important.

Masur had high regard for the police: his series officer Lieutenant John Nola is smart and incorruptible. Federal agents often show up as well; they are implacable, efficient, buzz cutted and Brooks Brother suited forces of nature, honest, but not too directly involved in the detection, more characters who keep the pot boiling.

The supporting cast of Masur's tales often includes legal workers, such as legal secretaries or research assistants. Another common type of support characters are low level private eyes and investigators. Both kinds of support characters are often employed by rich people in the tale. Their mortality rate is high: they are always getting bumped off for what they know. They have a real pathos; although sometimes they are crooked, more often they are sincere working people who are just trying to do their job, and getting killed for their pains. Other middle class people who work for a living, and who play a similar role in his tales are the bank guard in "The Double Frame" and the doctor in "The Silent Butler". All of these working characters are a lot more sympathetic than Masur's rich people. They are also a lot more realistic. The crooked rich of Masur seem to be a convention of the Chandler era private eye tale; they also show up in many other p.i. writers of the era. Masur bats them out, but they never really come alive, in my opinion. But the other middle class people seem to be more a personal Masur world. The middle class characters often have ambiguous relationships with the rich people. These relationships are made more mysterious by the fact that the middle class people have often been murdered. The real nature of these relationships is often among the most interesting, ingenious part of Masur's mystery plots.

The bad guys often manipulate a body after death, to make the crime look different than it was. Often times this is done by a different person than the one who did the actual killing. Two other Masur plot devices: frames, and impersonations. All three of these devices are schemes of bad guys to make one person seem very different from what they are. The person can be an innocent suspect who is made to look like a criminal (the frame), the murder victim (the body manipulation) or a character in the tale, usually a bad guy (the impersonation). But all three techniques have a similar "feel", and similar structural role in the mystery.

The only Scott Jordan collection, The Name is Jordan (1962), seems to be in the same series as Craig Rice's collection The Name is Malone (1958). Both were published by Pyramid Books, and both appeared in paperback editions in the late 1960's, with similar photographic covers by Morgan Kane.

Masur frequently recycled the story "Dead Issue" (1954). He reworked the plot for "The Woman Who Knew Too Much" (1957), then incorporated elements into the novel Make a Killing (1964). Unlike some of his earlier writings, Masur has stripped this novel of anything resembling "hard-boiled" elements. These would conflict with the tone of sophisticated, affluent New York that Masur is working so hard to convey. The best part of Make a Killing is its opening section (Chapters 1 - 8), which occurs before any mystery plot gets going. These chapters give a glamorous view of New York City's business world in the 1960's. The mystery that follows is utterly routine; it is also not well integrated with the business events that preceeded it. Also noteworthy: the brief but pointed comparison between mystery and mainstream fiction, in the speech by Beatrice Dennison (middle of Chapter 18). Masur, like John Dickson Carr, implies that mystery fiction is far superior to "serious" literature, a view that was heretical in its day. Arthur Upfield also expressed somewhat similar ideas in An Author Bites the Dust (1948).

"Murder Never Solves Anything" (1976) comes out of the same world as The Big Money (1954). Both deal with stockbrokers and the world of finance - The Big Money is an early look at what today we call venture capitalists, although that term is not used in the novel. Both involve ingenious schemes to defraud people of their money. These show considerable sophistication about the intricate details of finance, both honest and crooked. Both have a sub-theme of impersonation, as part of these schemes. The Big Money is too drawn out, and runs out of inspiration after its first few chapters. "Murder Never Solves Anything" is both concise, and fascinating throughout.

"Trial and Terror" (1979) has some unusual features. First, it is one of the few lawyer stories that shows a hero lawyer defending a client who is obviously in the wrong. The client is not evil, but clearly he has done the wrong things with his finances and his professional conduct. Scott Jordan knows this, and simply tries to get the best deal for him. This is more realistic than many law tales. Secondly, the government lawyer going against Jordan and his client is not vilified. Instead, he is depicted as the sort of buzz-cutted, Brooks Brothers suited government man who often show up in Jordan tales. Masur respects him even as he clobbers his hero. This sort of approach allows Masur an opportunity to explore legal territory not usually seen in fiction.

The other notable thing about "Trial and Terror" is how abstract it is. The most important thing in the characters' lives is not their physical environment, but their behavior, and how it interacts with the law. Masur describes their legal situation in great detail. By contrast, the buildings and rooms around them are barely mentioned. The world in which the characters live is mainly a legal, financial and moral one, in which their behavior is central. It is an abstract world, created out of the law. The mystery plot, too, arises entirely out of this world, and is part of it. The mystery plot depends on ambiguities in and hidden secrets of the legal and financial actions of the characters. It has nothing to do with the timetables, physical clues, locked rooms and other themes of much detective fiction.