"You killed him, girlie. But you didn't kill him dead enough!"

A few weeks ago, I was playing the game Ace Detective, a card game in which the players create a hard-boiled mystery set in the early 1940s. One of the components are cards you can play that include quotes from various hard-boiled stories.

One of those quotes was "You killed him, girlie. But you didn't kill him dead enough!"

Well, obviously I had to look up the story from which that quote is taken and read it.

The story is "Heir in the Air," published in the September 1945 issue of Black Mask. It was written by Dale Clark, one of several pen names used by a writer named Ronal Kayser. Clark wrote something over two hundred stories for the pulps, including twenty-nine stories for Black Mask featuring hotel detective Mike O'Hanna.

Clark is one of those writers that it is a delight to discover as more and more pulp magazines become available digitally. "Heir in the Air" is the first story by Clark I've read, so its my introduction to O'Hanna.

I like him. The hotel for which he works is a swanky Southern California place called San Alpa. He's tough and, if a crime is committed, quite willing to direct that toughness at the wealthy, paying customers.

That's quite necessary in this case. The attractive Eva Taine has come running out of her room, screaming that the ghost of her grandfather had just tried to strangle her.

An investigation leads to another nearby room, where the guy staying there actually took a shot at the supposed ghost. Soon after that, though, a fresh corpse with a bullet in him is found.

O'Hanna soon discovers that several other members of the Taine family are in the hotel, all of whom have issues. This pretty quickly starts to aggravate him: "I'm tired of bumping into a brad-new Taine family skeleton every time I open a door!"

The murder, the supposed ghost and various other shenanigans turn out to revolve around a copy of the first draft of the Gettysburg Address. An old attempt to kill the Taine grandfather with a car bomb several years earlier is also a factor.  (He had since died of natural causes.) The fact that the grandfather had left a chunk of money to his cat is also thrown into the mix.

Despite all this, O'Hanna proves himself to be smart as well as tough. He manages to sort all these facts together and arrive at the truth.

A few years ago, I wrote about an Erle Stanley Gardner character whose adventures have never been collected into a single volume. The same is true of Clark's Mike O'Hanna tales. I love stumbling across pulp characters whose adventures I haven't read before, but once I find them, I want ALL the stories. I want them NOW!!!

Well, at least "Heir in the Air" is there to read. You can find it online HERE.