Diamonds of Death

Read/Watch 'em In Order #68

"Diamonds of Death" (Black Mask, August 1931) finds private eye Jo Gar in San Francisco. He's found six of the ten stolen diamonds, but his one remaining suspect managed to slip through customs without the remaining four being discovered.

Fortunately, a customs agent visits Jo Gar with new of where the suspect has holed up. Unfortunately, the customs agent isn't really a customs agent. Jo is being lured into a trap.

Jo Gar knows the agent was a fake and the supposed hide-out is a trap. But this is a chance to find the rest of the diamonds, catch the man responsible for so many murders and finally just get to go home. So he walks into the trap. (Though not without making some preparations first.)

This final story in the "Rainbow Diamonds" series is wonderful. Jo Gar's final confrontation with the chief bad guy is very, very tense and keeps the reader riveted to the story from start to finish. The serial has a whole is the high point in the career of an already great hard-boiled character, with this final chapter arguably the best of the lot.

It's interesting to compare this story with "Red Dawn"--the fourth story in the serial. I was a little critical of that one, because several elements of the story (the bad guy spouting off information for no good reason) seemed a little contrived. "Diamonds of Death" ends with a similar situation and once again has the villain conveniently explaining his actions, but somehow comes across as much more natural. I'm not even sure why--Raoul Whitfeld simply makes it work here.

There's another aspect of the story I love. Jo Gar arrives at the house he's been lured to by cab. Part of his preparations for foiling what he knows is a trap is to tell the cab driver to honk his horn at set intervals, then go for the police. The cab driver ups the ante by saying he packs a gun and is willing to come into the house after Jo Gar if necessary.

Gee whiz, all this for a fare he literally just met. You just don't get that kind of service nowadays. I blame Uber.

The next Read 'em in Order will be a look at the first of two Doc Savage novels in which the Man of Bronze battles a villain who may actually be as smart as he is.

Blue Glass

Read/Watch 'em in Order #67

With this entry, we get to the next-to-last story in the Rainbow Diamonds serial (published in the July 1931 issue of Black Mask).

I whined about the previous story being a little contrived, but by golly this time Jo Gar is in the center of a very tense and well-told hard-boiled yarn.

"Blue Glass" has Jo Gar back aboard ship, this time leaving Honolulu enroute to San Francisco. With all the corpses left in his wake, he's now at a disadvantage--pretty much everyone knows who he is and that he's in search of the remaining nine Von Loffler diamonds.

Soon, he's getting anonymous phone calls--someone is using phones in unoccupied cabins to prevent tracing the calls. The tipster reveals that a particular woman has the diamonds and will be using the child that accompanies her to sneak the diamonds past Customs.

But what's in it for the tipster? He claims he wants a cut of the reward, but Jo immediately realizes the guy could collect the entire reward by simply reporting the problem himself.

Jo Gar tentatively identifies the man phoning in the tips. But when the island detective makes his next move, he soon finds a pair of hands around his throat, choking the life out of him.

It's no spoiler to tell you Jo Gar survives---the serial isn't over yet. But how he survives makes for a great plot twist. When the dust settles, Jo has five more of the diamonds and a pretty good idea of who has the remaining four, but there's still someone around willing to put bullets into convenient backs.

What happens next? We'll find that out when we look at the final chapter in the serial. We'll do that sometime soon.

Red Dawn

Read/Watch 'em In Order #66

I think Raoul Whitfield's Jo Gar stories rank among the best stories in the hard-boiled genre. I think the 6-part "Rainbow Diamonds" story arc is the best of the Jo Gar series. That being said, "Red Dawn" (published in the May 1931 issue of Black Mask) is arguably one of the weakest in the overall series.

Perhaps it's because its in the middle of the "Rainbow Diamonds" arc, when many serials hit a bit of a lag. But whatever the reason, it is flawed in that it depends on several over-used cliches to move the story along.

I'm not against cliches. When used cleverly and sparingly, they are an effective shorthand to provide both exposition and movement in the plot. But in "Red Dawn," I'm afraid they seem a little too obviously a contrivance.

When the last story ended, Jo Gar was in Hawaii, having recovered one of the ten missing diamonds but having run out of living suspects. Good fortune comes in painful packages, though. One of the original crooks kidnaps Gar, convinced that he has all ten diamonds.

That part I'm okay with--the villain is presented with a reasonable motive for thinking Gar has been lying about having the diamonds. He kidnaps Gar to beat the location of the diamonds out of him.

But its here that Whitfield falls into cliche. First, the bad guy spouts off important information to Gar for no good reason at all--primarily that he has a female accomplice. Gar had no idea she existed before this and there was no reason to tell him. Second, the bad guy comes up with a nasty but overly complex method of killing Gar after he's done with the island detective.

Whitfield, though, still saves the story. There is a high level of tension built into the plot and Gar's cleverness in manipulating the villain with lies and then coming up with a brutal but effective way of beating the assassination attempt makes for great reading. Whitfield is just that good--he might stumble a little this time in plot construction, but he makes up for it with honestly-manufactured suspense and hard-core characterizations.

So the story ends with another dead bad guy, but with nine diamonds still missing. He knows a little more than he did before, though. He knows there's a double-crossin' dame out there somewhere. Find her and he finds the diamonds.

Dead End for Jo Gar

Read/Watch 'em In Order #66

"The Blind Chinese" (published in the April 1931 issue of Black Mask) brings us to the halfway point in the Rainbow Diamonds saga.

In the first two stories, the trail after the stolen diamonds has brought Spanish-Filipino detective Jo Gar from Manila to Honolulu--following partial clues taken from the fragmented last words of dying criminals.

As I mentioned last time, Jo Gar heard dying men mumble cryptic last words with surprising frequency. This entry in the series, though, seems to bring him to a dead end. He knows he has to find a blind Chinese in Honolulu, but the city has a large Chinese population, undoubtedly with its percentage of blind people.

The bad guys inadvertently help Jo out by trying to kill him. Jo evades death and captures the chauffeur who had been paid to drive him into a trap. This puts the chauffeur in a very uncomfortable position. If he takes Jo to the blind Chinese, he'll be killed. If he refuses to help Jo--he'll be killed. (Or so Jo allows him to think.)

This leads to a great bit of hard-boiled dialogue. When the driver tries to justify his actions by saying he's a poor man, Jo Gar replies "Then you have less to live for. Let us start."

Anyway, the story ends with several dead crooks--not ONE of which manages to utter any cryptic last words. That may be a first in Jo Gar's eventful career.

I know I sound like I'm making fun of the story, but it's really a superb piece of hard-boiled fiction, building suspense that leads us to a violent but satisfying conclusion. Jo Gar seems to have run out of leads at this point, but he's still got three upcoming stories in the series, so I'm sure he'll be back on the trail of the diamonds before long.

The Man in White

Read/Watch 'em In Order #65

At the end of "Diamonds of Dread," Filipino detective Jo Gar had learned that "the one who walks badly--always in white" was apparently the leader of the gang that had stolen the ten Von Loffler diamonds and murdered a number of people (including Jo's friend Juan Arragon). So when the next story in the serial--"The Man in White"--begins, Jo is on a ship sailing to Honolulu, keeping tabs on a man in a white suit who walks with a slight limp.

But this guy is a former cop himself. And when Jo's cabin is broken into and searched, so is the man in white's cabin. Soon after that, someone tries to put a few bullets into Jo. A steward who could have ID'd the shooter is found with a knife in his back. Is the shooter the man in white, or is there another killer on board?

The situation seems to be getting confusing, but Jo actually has a pretty good idea of what's going on right from the beginning. In fact, so do a lot of the story's readers. Raoul Whitfield was great at plot construction and keeping the level of mystery high. This time, he writes an atmospheric and interesting tale, but the real killer isn't as well-concealed behind the plot twists as Whitfield probably hoped. An attentive reader will have a firm lock on the plot fairly quickly.

It's a tribute to Whitfield's skill as a storyteller that even when he's not entirely successful in constructing the tale--it's still engrossing and entertaining. Like all great heroes in fiction, Jo Gar is someone we want to hang around with. And despite the climax being telegraphed a little bit too obviously, the tale moves along a logical path to a satisfying conclusion.

And that conclusion involves a dying crook managing to speak a few cryptic last words. It's interesting to note how some of the best mystery writers could reuse a particular devise over and over again but still make it work. In the Ellery Queen stories, for instance, murder victims left dying clues with amazing frequency. With Whitfield's Jo Gar stories, there was a tendency for villains to gasp out an important sentence fragment before expiring.

This time, the dying criminal turns out NOT to be the head of the gang, but just one of their allies. Jo Gar recovers one of the ten diamonds, but that means he still has one gang leader and nine diamonds to go. But, by golly, he has yet another sentence fragment to give him a clue to where to look next: "The blind--Chinese--Honolulu--you can find---."

It's a very small clue, but it's enough to take Jo Gar into the next story of the Rainbow Diamonds serial. We'll take a look at that one soon.

Death of a Friend

Read/Watch 'em in Order #64

Raoul Whitfield was one of the many great writers who contributed strong hard-boiled tales to Black Mask magazine.

Whitfield created a number of hard-boiled detectives, but Jo Gar is the most unusual and arguably the best of his creations. Whitfield had lived for a time in the Philippines while growing up (his dad worked for the Territorial Government), so he drew on this experience to give us Jo, a Spanish-Filipino P.I. who works out of an office in Manila. He used the pen name Ramon Decolta for the Jo Gar tales.

The Jo Gar stories are short, sharp, and often violent tales, with Jo often having to bring his Colt automatic into play before he could wrap things up. As Jo's entry at the Thrilling Detective website phrases it: There was no doubt Gar meant business -- his small, Colt automatic was called into service with alarming frequency, and the dying confessions of men who thought they'd get the drop on "the Island detective" were as much a part of the stories as his seemingly endless supply of brown-paper cigarettes.

But Jo was smart as well, often working directly with the police and helping them stay on the right track by picking up on clues they would miss.

His usual police contact was Juan Arragon--a cop who inevitably ended up suspecting the wrong man and would need Jo to find the real killer. But, despite this, Juan was friendly and appreciative of Jo's help. The two were friends and, except for a few stories that took Jo out of Manila, Juan was a series regular.

So when Juan is abruptly killed in the story "Diamonds of Death," it's a bit of a shock.

This story was published in the February 1931 issue of Black Mask. It was the 10th Jo Gar story published and the first in a series of six dealing with the theft of 200 grand worth of diamonds.

The story starts out with a bang--Jo happens to be nearby when a diamond merchant is robbed and, in fact, one of the getaway cars collides with the horse-drawn taxi in which Jo is riding. The robbers also killed two men during the heist. Juan Arragon responded to the crime, commandeering a car to pursue them. But both Juan and the car he was in vanish.

Not long after, Juan's body is found in Jo's office. It looks as if Juan had made it there on his own and manage to write a note before he died. But Jo notices several clues that show the note is a forgery--an attempt to lure him into a trap. The crooks fear him more than the official police.

The criminals have, in fact, planted several false leads, which results in a police car being ambushed by a pair of thugs with machine guns. The private eye is nearby when this happens. He plugs one of the bad guys. "The one who walks badly--always in white," mutters the wounded man before dying. Dying men in fiction seem to be legally required to talk in cryptic sentence fragments.

Jo decides not to pass this information on to the cops. In fact, he tells the police chief that he's out of it--it is, after all, a police matter.

But Juan had been his friend. Jo will trail the killers on his own.

All the Jo Gar stories are good, but I think this particular story arc is the best of the lot. The plot is well-constructed and moves along at a brisk pace, while Jo Gar is an effective and likable protagonist. Whitfield gives us not just an unusual setting in these stories, but a detective who both fits the profile of the standard hard-boiled detective while simultaneously defying stereotypes. We'll continue to follow the Island Detective through the next five stories as he leaves the islands to track down the stolen diamonds and the killers of his friend.