Murder On the Way! Read online

  Murder On the Way!

  An old colonial château in Morne Noir, Massif du Nord, Haiti, is the scene of the most blood-curdling murders in the history of the islands. Who was the murderer—man, beast or some supernatural being? Can you select them from this strange company?

  The Characters

  Edwin Edward Cartershall, who puts aside his paint brushes to tell of these things.

  Patricia (Pete) Dale, distantly related to Eli Proudfoot.

  Uncle Eli, owner and proprietor of estate at Morne Noir.

  Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines, LL.B., Comte de Limonade, Uncle Eli’s lawyer.

  Cornelius, Uncle Eli’s house boy.

  Dr. Cherubin Sevestre, Uncle Eli’s personal physician.

  Sir Duffin Wilburforce, K.C.S.I., Uncle Eli’s overseer.

  The Ensign, a deserter from the United States Navy.

  Ti Pedro, a Dominican.

  Ambrose, a punk.

  The Toadstool, bird, beast or fish?

  The Widow Gladys, Jamaican mammy, mother of the Toadstool.

  Manfred von Murda, late of the Potsdam Guards.

  Lieutenant Nemo Nacisse, of the Garde d’Haiti.

  Corporal Louis, of the Haitian gendarmerie

  Murder On the Way!

  by Theodore Roscoe

  Published by Bold Venture Press

  boldventurepress.com

  Cover design: Rich Harvey

  “Murder On the Way!” Copyright 1938 by Thedore Roscoe.

  This book is available in print at most online retailers.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express permission of the publisher and copyright holder. All persons, places and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to any actual persons, places or events is purely coincidental.

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please purchase your own copy.

  Table of Contents

  Introductions

  “Voodoo Child: Theodore Roscoe and the Zombies” by Jm Noy

  “Whose Words Were They?” by Audrey Parente

  “Loup Garou” by Audrey Parente

  “Murder On the Way!”

  About the Author, Theodore Roscoe

  About the Editor, Jim Noy

  Connect with Bold Venture Press

  Introduction

  Voodoo Child:

  Theodore Roscoe and the Zombies

  By Jim Noy

  It is difficult to imagine a culture more conducive to the honing of a writer’s art than that of the so-called short story ‘pulp’ magazines of the first third of the twentieth century. While the recent, stratospheric rise of self-publishing increased the opportunities for people to see themselves in print, the pulps — with several hundred different titles hitting the newsstands every month — crucially generated an urgency fuelled by competition and ever-approaching deadlines, overseen by editorial control that had the freedom to reject anything not deemed up to standard, secure in the knowledge that better could be easily be found elsewhere.

  A great many pulps had deeply-evocative names speaking of a brusque purpose that still echoes down the decades: Adventure, Air Stories, Astounding Stories, Danger Stories, Weird Tales, Western Story Magazine, Wonder Stories...every whim and curiosity seemingly catered for, be it air, sea, or land, past or future, war, western, or something somewhere between or outside of them all. And naturally we must not neglect the crime and detective pulps, whose intent echoes no less sonorously through such titles as Black Mask, Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective...even the intriguingly-titled Spicy Detective Stories must be admired for its frankness.

  This second crop of titles are where many of the later titans of the crime and detective genre in the United States earned their stripes and practised their arts — writers such as James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich went on to become synonymous with their chosen genre, and are still held in the highest regard today having started in these ten-cent magazines. And yet they were but a drop in the seemingly endless ocean of writers who thrilled readers time and again through their pulp stories – but, inevitably, history is densely packed with incident enough to be able to retain memory to recall the lesser contributions of Whitman Chambers, Frederick C. Davis, Eugene Thomas, and hordes of others besides.

  ***

  And so to Theodore Roscoe (1906 – 1992), who contributed scores of stories to a great many pulp magazines, but has equally faded from memory as time as passed on his works.

  His first published story was a western entitled “The Duel” in the September 1926 edition of North West Stories and from a glance at his bibliography it would appear that once published never looked back: up until 1942 he was printed with a frequency becoming of those who took on this craft as their career in titles as diverse as Action Stories, Detective Fiction Weekly, Far East Adventure Stories, Fight Stories, Highspot Magazine, Jungle Stories, Wings, and — under its various incarnations — the Argosy, widely regarded as the first pulp magazine, and certainly established at a time when a less-crowded market demanded a less eye-catching sobriquet.

  It was the Argosy that published – between 1st December 1934 and 5th January 1935 — Roscoe’s six-part serial A Grave Must Be Deep, which was reworked (copyrighted to Theodore Roscoe Library of Congress 35021951, not renewed) to become a book, Murder on the Way! and published as a novel in its own right by the New York Dodge Publishing Company in 1935.

  An inveterate traveller, Roscoe likely got the inspiration and atmosphere for A Grave Must Be Deep from a trip to Haiti in 1934, where he encountered first-hand not just the trappings of the voodoo rituals practised on the island, but also to deep vein of superstition both positive and negative evinced in the use of good-luck charms and — perhaps most tellingly — stories of living souls trapped in dead bodies that could then be put to work as slaves, known in the voodoo religion as zombies.

  Thus, well before the zombie came to represent the flesh-eating cinematic monster of lore — the 1932 film White Zombie predates Roscoe’s serial, but uses the idea of resurrection in the same, original manner — Roscoe got to experience the sense of awe and terror surrounding such a monster in the very place that would have given rise to it, and this first-hand experience of such legends arguably enabled him to take it and use to it to quite excellent ends. Nineteen years before Ian Fleming would institute the voodoo arts in Live and Let Die (1954), there is something of the seven grotesques encountered by Roscoe’s protagonists in Morne Noir — the “seven bloodhounds” in the piece of doggerel from which the book takes its title — not unlike a coterie of Bond villains gathering to see off one of their own, and so luridly versatile a group could only seem acceptable against a background of the dead rising to walk again.

  It helps, too, that Roscoe is a quite wonderful writer, capable of a brutish yet elegiac turn of phrase as much as invoking a startling sense of escalating panic in just a few short lines. As the events depicted herein spiral more and more out of control, you are never in any doubt that Roscoe has a perfectly tight hold on what he is doing: amidst the cavalcade of insanities — the impossible shootings, the inexplicable disappearances, the stirring of rebellion that forms the background of this most unforgettable of weekend house-parties — there is unquestioningly a steady hand on the tiller, steering you unyieldingly into the heart of the madness. I defy anyo
ne to read this and deny that Roscoe earned his craft in those pulps, or that any other culture of creativity would have produced something so individual as this.

  And so I give you Murder on the Way!, a classic country house murder quite unlike anything before or since, a piece of detective fiction with superstition to spare, a series of events that simply cannot be explained ... but are, beautifully, and with panache enough to rock you back on your heels while you emit a graveyard chuckle throughout.

  Buckle up, you’re in for a hell of a ride …

  ***

  Whose Words Were They?

  Theodore Roscoe was born in Rochester, New York. At the age of eight, he was the author of a thrilling mystery, “The Sheriff of Red Roach Ranch,” published in a hand-bound edition limited to one copy.

  Mr. Roscoe was a seasoned wanderer. He said:

  “I have been to Europe, North Africa, Central and South America, most of the islands in the Caribbean. I have traveled on liners First Class and freighters No Class, in naphtha launches, barges, bumboats, sailboats, Wagon-Lits, ships carrying tourists, ships carrying cattle, in the cab of a locomotive named Joseph, on a Haitian pony, in a Ford tri-motor, and once (confirmed on request), New York to Honduras in a porcelain bath tub.

  “Murder on the Way! was written partly at home; partly on a steamship carrying bedsprings for Jérémie and aerial bombs for Colombia; partly on the backs of old envelopes in Cape Haiti, Port de Paix, Gonaives, St. Marc, Petit Goave; partly in a candle-lit cemetery near Leogane; partly in the café of J. Marcel Volel, Professeur de Sciences Mathématiques and rum-mixer extraordinary at Jacmel.”

  One can learn more about Theodore Roscoe from Pulpmaster! The Theodore Roscoe Story by Audrey Parente.

  In the authorized biography which Roscoe actively participated, Parente discusses the opening line of the text in Murder on the Way!, which appears to be a cliché.

  Parente explains that, while the serialized Argosy tale opened with an exclamation — “Take away those candles!” — the novel began with a phrase that might have been considered cliché.

  “The thing was funny. Funny queer — not funny ha-ha….”

  But it was no cliché in 1935. The words were Roscoe’s, but credit for the phrase has been misplaced.

  Roscoe claimed the words in Pulpmaster! The Theodore Roscoe Story, by Audrey Parente, published by Starmont House, WA, copyright 1992. From the text:

  Whose words were they?

  “Well, they were mine, and they were copied thereafter by a number of writers,” expresses Roscoe.

  Roscoe says the phrase was picked up by Nicholas Freeling, a mystery writer. But neither Roscoe nor Freeling were given credit for the phrase in Longman’s Quotation Guide. Ian Hay, British, author of Housemaster, is given credit for the phraseology:

  “Users of English have long noted the ambiguity of the word ‘funny,’ but the first character in literature to give clear and net express to the problem was a fourteen-year-old-girl with the unlikely name (or nickname) of Button. Moreover she was to be found in what in 1936 was a very unlikely place indeed — a boy’s public boarding school. Three girls, aged fourteen to twenty, are dumped — for inadequate reasons — on a public school housemaster. They almost wreck his career, in a light-hearted way, but not before their dialogue has introduced a classic and popular phrase to the English language.”

  Problem is, Hay’s Housemaster, according to the Quotation Guide, and a bibliographical sketch in Britannica was written in 1936, a year after Roscoe’s novel.

  Loup Garou

  by Audrey Parente

  “Loup Garou,” The Houngan said,

  “Loup Garou,” the leader cried.

  Mambo and bocor agreed,

  Everyone should run and hide.

  A missionary scolded,

  “The werewolf is only fake;”

  but the village Voodoo priests

  warned all men to stay awake.

  So to their huts they skittered.

  Children huddled close to pray

  that Loup Garou,the werewolf,

  would be spirited away.

  When daybreak lit the village,

  the youths’ prayers had been fulfilled.

  Villagers were spared from death.

  The missionary was killed.

  From On Any Dark and Spooky Night, a poetry chapbook by Audrey Parente, published by The Ormond Beach Observer, 1992

  I Met Murder On The Way

  He Had A Masque Like Castlereigh

  Very Smooth He Looked, Yet Grim

  Seven Bloodhounds Followed Him —

  MASQUE OF ANARCHY

  Murder On the Way!

  I.

  Exit Uncle Eli

  The thing was funny. Funny queer — not funny ha-ha.

  Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines, the card said; but I was in no mood for humor that evening.

  “Who is it?” I said with a glare.

  Mr. Diogenes Skouloudis, janitor, having handed me a greasy, suspicious look with the card, jerked a greasy, suspicious thumb to indicate four flights down. “Man at the door, he’s asking for Miss Dale. Says she’s in your studio. I wouldn’t let him up, so he give me this.”

  Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines, LL.B., Comte de Limonade.

  Pete stopped whistling Sibelius and came over from the gas log to look at the card. No ordinary calling card, either, but more like a belated Easter greeting, embossed with gilt flourishes and curlicues. Pete widened her eyes and made a bewildered shrug at the name.

  “Heavens! I couldn’t possibly know such a man. French, too. I think ‘Maître’ means he’s a lawyer. And Count of Lemonade!” She gave a little chuckle of amusement. “Sounds like someone from the court of Louis Fourteenth or Alice Through the Looking Glass.”

  “A thousand pardons, ma’mselle, but I am neither.”

  The Greek janitor jumped in surprise. So did Pete and I. The voice had spoken out of nothingness in the darkness of the hall; then, in the creep of light from our door, we discovered a shadow standing at the head of the stairs. Rain-water glimnered darkly on cloth, and there were round white eyes and a set of shiny white teeth.

  “Come in, we know you, and April fool,” I sighed. The shadow advanced quietly into full light, edged the janitor aside with a dignified nudge; and the April fool was on me. Perched on the doorsill in a rain-soaked and ancient redingote, storm rubbers and stovepipe hat, under his arm an enormous umbrella that looked as if it had just been handed him by Doctor Foster, was a little Negro, a dwarf of a man, black and wizened as a raisin.

  “Good evening.”

  When he smiled the face was all teeth. When he spoke it became an underslung jaw, a huge lower lip and eyes like picnic eggs nesting in smoky caverns. “Ma’mselle? They informed me at your lodgings I might find you at the apartment of m’sieu. My apologies for intruding uninvited, but there is need of haste. I am addressing Miss Patricia Dale?”

  She acknowledged the name, frowning a little. Pete didn’t like her name. She said it sounded like a bathing model. She preferred Pete.

  “I know,” she guessed. “You’re Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines, LL.B., Comte de Limonade.” That, I saw, was a name she did like.

  “Ah,” agreed our visitor, bowing over his umbrella. “And I come from Morne Noir, ma’mselle, as emissary of your Uncle Eli.”

  “Uncle Eli,” Pete gasped; and I knew at once that was a name she didn’t like at all, for there was a color in her eyes I’d never seen there before. “Uncle Eli,” she repeated. “What is he up to now?”

  To my astonishment the little old Negro uncovered a head as blue-black, bald and shiny as a Civil War cannonball; crossed himself twice. “Your Uncle Eli, ma’mselle, is up to nothing. Your Uncle Eli is dead.”

  “Dead!” Pete put a hand to her throat.

  “Yesterday,” said the apparition in the redingote. “The funeral will be day after tomorrow.”

  “Funeral!” Pete whispered;
and under her breath to me: “Cart, don’t go away.”

  I wasn’t going away. I was standing with a bitten liverwurst sandwich in one hand and that glorified calling card in the other, my jaws open. Rain fell with gravity on the skylight, and the room had gone cheerless as wallpaper peeling in a Russian novel. It was that Levantine janitor who was leaving. At the word “funeral” he had loosed a squeak from his throat, and we could hear his distracted carpet slippers on the stairs.

  The little old Negro clapped on his stovepipe hat, and crossed himself again.

  “Mais oui, ma’mselle. I fear your Uncle Eli — was murdered.”

  I stood glaring at this goblinlike visitation, wondering what Aladdin’s lamp he had hopped from, and glaring again at Patricia, startled by the color in her eyes. For the moment the only sound in the room was the drumming of rain on the skylight, the drip of that Mother Goose umbrella making a puddle at the little black man’s feet. Hairs crawled on the back of my neck. The whole thing was going too far, and I was going to have a temper.

  The day had climbed out of the wrong side of its bed to begin with, starting with a hangover and a note from the landlord to ask me why the hell, Mr. Cartershall, did I never pay the rent. I paid the rent and was sore because there wasn’t enough left to buy Pete a gardenia. Then I couldn’t find a tube of sienna. Then Pete came over soaked, in a coat much too thin for the weather, and sat for a while looking paler than was good for her. Most of the afternoon I wasted mixing paints, then didn’t touch a brush to the canvas. At six we were bickering like panthers. By seven I’d told her again I couldn’t finish the portrait in time for the showing; she accused me of sloth, indiligence, procrastination and torpor and said I was lazy; and by then it was eight o’clock by the old grandfather alarm clock and the light too poor for anything.