In January 1936, F. Orlin Tremaine, editor at Street & Smith for Clues Detective, Astounding Stories, Cowboy Stories, and Top-Notch presented Donald Wandrei with that month’s issue of competitor Popular Publications’ Dime Detective. There were two stories that were imitations of Wandrei’s “Ivy Frost” stories from Clues Detective.

One was a non-series story, “Black Widow’s Might” by Leo Stalnaker. A four page story involving death using female black widow spiders. The other story was “The Case of the Crazy Witness” by Frederick C. Davis.

Frederick C. Davis (1902-1977) was a pulp magazine writer producing reams of detective and western stories. He is best remembered today as one of the writers of the “Operator #5″ pulp “novels” and as the writer of the “Moon Man” stories in Ten Detective Aces.

Davis was a steady but not frequent contributor to Dime Detective magazine. Dime Detective might have been the biggest detective pulp magazine in the mid-1930s in terms of sales. It was successful enough to have two issues a month in the first years. It ran a wide range of stories within the crime/detective/mystery field. The magazine had stories by authors from Black Mask such as Frederick Nebel, Carroll John Daly, and Erle Stanley Gardner. Raymond Chandler moved to Dime Detective after Joseph Shaw quit as editor of Black Mask with stories that would be incorporated into his Philip Marlowe novels. At the other end of the spectrum, Dime Detective would have hyper-emotional stories by Cornell Woolrich.

Frederick C. Davis had the “Secrets, Inc” series from 1933-35, “Guy ‘Keyhole” Kerry” 1936-1939, and “Carter Cole” 1935-37. The Carter Cole series does look like an imitation of Wandrei’s “Ivy Frost” series. It ran to nine novelettes in total.

Steeger Books/Popular Publications has recently reprinted the first five stories in the series as The Complete Cases of Carter Cole Volume 1.

Carter Cole is a psychiatrist who runs a sanitarium on Long Island. He is also an amateur detective solving case involving strange deaths.

“The Case of the Crimson Claws” involve using a cat with claws dipped in poison. “The Case of the Skinned Men” was a case of a doctor removing the skin from corpses to pin it on an innocent dermatology fellow. “The Case of the Crazy Witness” involves using cyanide in a perfume bottle. “The Case of the Silent Giantess” uses rat poison. “The Case of the Queen’s Headsman” has beheading by an Elizabethan era axe.

Carter Cole is about as interesting as cold plain oatmeal. He does carry a Luger pistol in a shoulder holster and drives a Duesenberg car. Raymond Chandler had the various proto-Philip Marlowes using a Luger.  Marlowe himself used a Colt .38 Super in the novels. Still waiting to come across a pulp detective who used a .380 Savage automatic.

As a psychiatrist, Cole is two steps ahead of the police and the killers at the end. The murderers are rather mundane as is their motives. There is an unfunny gag of Cole having a pair of identical twin secretaries that he cannot tell apart. Davis has medical explanations for various medical terminology with copious footnotes.

This is low to mid-level 1930s magazine pulp writing. No real spark of ingenuity about this series. It lacks the characterization that Wandrei’s “Frost” series has. It has a mild grisly aspect to some of the stories but lacks the tinge of horror and gothic atmosphere in Wandrei’s stories. The prose struck me as flat. Still, I am glad I read half of the stories in this series. That bit of curiosity has been scratched.

If you are interested, you can get The Complete Case of Carter Cole Volume 1 in trade paperback or hardback from Popular Publications.