GREAT DETECTIVES & PEOPLE OF MYSTERY#2

NICK CARTER

Street & Smith were latecomers to the dime novel trade.  They were a family firm founded by Francis Scott Street and Francis S. Smith when the two men took over a weekly New York paper where they had been employed.  By the late 1880s they were publishing weekly and monthly story papers as well as a host of dime novels.  Story weeklies were 32-page newspapers printed on cheap paper and an entire issue would contain a single story devoted to the exploits of, back then, cowboys and outlaws.  These papers sold for a nickel.  Ormond G. Smith, son of founder Francis, came up with the idea of Nick Carter, a detective.  He provided the outline of the first story to writer John Russell Coryell who actually wrote the first Nick Carter story and subsequent sequels.  Nick made his debut in the September 18, 1886 issue of the New York Weekly in the story "The Old Detective's Pupil; or, The Mysterious Crime of Madison Square".  Nick was the 'pupil' to the old detective and the story was part-one of a 13-week serial.  

Nick Carter would become the most enduring of the old dime-novel heroes and would appear in more detective stories than any other character in American literature (only England's Sexton Blake would solve more cases).  It's uncertain how many of the Carter stories Coryell wrote - some sources say that he wrote the first three serialized tales while others have him writing all of them from 1886-1889.  Either way Street & Smith had a successful run of Nick Carter in their weekly papers and wanted to produce a full-length Nick Carter dime novel in 1889.  The problem was that Coryell also wrote popular and highly profitable romance novels as one Bertha Clay and was unable to commit to this new dime novel.

Frederick Marmaduke Van Rensselaer Dey was hired to continue the series in the new dime novel Nick Carter, Detective and was said to produce one 25,000 word novel a week for the next 17 years, a staggering feat if it were true, but it wasn't.  1076 novels were produced and Dey is credited with writing them, a misconception created from a 1920 American Magazine article in which Dey claimed to have written 1000 Nick Carter stories.  The magazine never checked his claim and the exaggeration became gospel and oft repeated.  In fact he wrote 437 of the novels, which is still quite a lot.  Other writers contributed to the franchise, including Johnston McCulley who created Zorro, and they all wrote under the same pseudonym so that it appeared that one individual wrote all of the stories.  Dey was the most prolific of the bunch.  He died on April 25, 1922 when he shot himself in his room at the Hotel Broztell in New York City.  His body was found by the managing editor of Street & Smith, Charles E. MacLaren.

Nick Carter, the all-American detective, was described as being a giant of a man with grey eyes trained to take in the minutest of details; with a rich, full voice that could imitate sounds and noises; and a handsome face that could be distorted in an instant to unrecognizable ugliness.  He was a master of disguise and possessed an intellect that was "keen as a razor blade".  With his faithful assistants Chick and Patsy, Nick Carter solved mysteries in dime novels and, later, pulp magazines for half a century.  Nick was virtuous to a saccharine degree.  He didn't smoke, curse, drink, or chase after women, and was scrupulously honest, not to mention well-groomed.  He carried around with him on his person, several disguises, guns, handcuffs, rope, and assorted useful tools.  Yet the formula worked: a virtuous hero, the likes of which any parson could approve, fighting crime in tales crammed with enough action to satisfy the average unsophisticated reader.

Carter was one of the first dime novel heroes to leave the frontier for the big city and did so at a time when the nation was transforming itself from a rural agrarian society to an urban industrialized one.  In this Carter is a necessary steppingstone between Poe's Dupin and Hammett's Continental Op.  The exploits of Nick Carter took the character of the frontier cowboy to the city where detectives roamed, not buffalos.  He wasn't presented with traditional English-style mysteries to be solved with traditional English-style logic.  Nick acts like a transplanted Wyatt Earp who finds himself in NYC instead of Tombstone - he bluffs, blusters, and shoots his way to a solution.  Nick Carter, in many ways, represented the future of the fictional detective to come.  J. Randolph Cox wrote of Carter, "he is a mythical figure representing the flawless mastery of good triumphing over evil", while others would refer to Carter as the 'blandest' hero in detective fiction.  He was clean cut and impressively strong, and while he did hid fair share of gathering clues and following trails, his appeal to boy readers was his derring-do.  He could box, fence, swim, and operate whatever new mechanism came along - automobiles, airplanes, etc.  Nick Carter's adventures had an air of unreality to them, a lot of melodramatic hokum.  

An effort was made to involve Nick with real locales and even some real criminals of the day.  He went out West to chase the Daltons, to Chinatown to root out opium dens, to London and Paris to track international crooks.  Nick had a wife, Ethel, in the original stories by Coryell.  Dey wrote her out of the stories by having her murdered by gangsters in 1904.  Dey added assistants Chick and Patsy and as I write this in 2022 there is some confusion concerning these two characters.  In later stories Nick would have an adopted son named Chick who became a boy detective.  Is this the same Chick who started as an assistant?  And I'm uncertain as to Patsy's gender, as one source referred to Patsy as a male, yet in silent films and radio Patsy was a girl.  My research hasn't yielded the answers to these questions and I have no desire to read hundreds of stories in an attempt to clear up the mystery.

Nick Carter Stories, the third periodical devoted to the formidable investigator, first appeared in 1912.  By the time the nickel weekly was nearing its' 160th issue in 1915 the feeling around the Street & Smith offices was less than enthusiastic.  "Youngsters are getting tired of reading about the same characters week after week," Ormond Smith is alleged to have told his brother William.  "They're getting fed up with Nick Carter."  These feelings had been inspired by Street & Smith Vice-President Henry W. Ralston who was anxious to launch a detective pulp and had been pitching his idea to his bosses.  Ormond liked the idea of a magazine that would feature dozens of different detectives each month.  Dime novels couldn't compete with the dawning competition of the thicker pulp magazines with their colorful covers that cost the same price or just a nickel more.  While other publishers closed up shop Street & Smith began converting their dime novels into pulp magazines.

Nick Carter was one of the last traditional dime novels to be published.  The final issue of Nick Carter Stories dated October 2, 1915 featured an announcement: "Nick Carter Stories has outgrown it's present form and we are going to publish it in magazine style...and will be called Detective Story.  It will be published on the 5th and 20th of each month, and will contain, besides a rattling good serial, telling of the exploits of Nick Carter, serials and short stories dealing with the detective art in all its forms."  The first issue of Detective Story carried the date of October 5, 1915 on it's bright red cover and sold for ten cents.  This landmark pulp carried the second installment of the Nick Carter serial "The Yellow Label; or, The Drive Against Crime" that had begun in the final issue of Nick Carter Stories, and thus Carter entered the pulp era.  Editor Frank E. Blackwell was a young reporter from the New York Sun who offered readers of the first issue five short stories, a novelette, an episode of another serial, in addition to the Carter story.  Tales of murder and larceny caught on with the public and beginning with the September 4, 1917 issue it became a weekly publication until the early 1930s when it reverted back to a twice-a-month schedule.  But the success of the pulp was without Nick Carter who was soon dropped from its' pages.  Carter was revived from 1924-1927 in Detective Story and dropped again.

But Nick came back in the 1930s as a hardboiled private eye.  The first issue of Street & Smith's Nick Carter Magazine was dated March 1933.  The monthly pulp sold for a dime and Nick, while still a super-sleuth, was much tougher and less gentlemanly than his previous incarnations.  Carter owed his rebirth to the increasingly impressive sales of Street & Smith's The Shadow pulp that started in 1931.  By 1933 they were also publishing Doc Savage and decided to bring back their old friend Nick Carter.  Mystery writer Richard Wormser was asked to write the stories.  "Being young, ignorant, and hungry I said sure," said Wormser.  He wrote 17 novels in 10 months and received a little less than $5000 for a little more than a million words.  That was good money for the worst year of the Great Depression.  The pulp expired with it's 40th issue in June 1936.  Nick didn't make it as a pulp hero in that hardboiled decade.

Vital Publications released four digest-sized Nick Carter paperbacks in the 1940s, all written by Wormser.  In 1948 Atlas Mystery also published digest-sized paperbacks of Nick Carter.  Street & Smith, in an attempt to expand their readership, began a line of comic books and Nick Carter was featured in "Shadow Comics" 1940-1949, as were the adventures of his adopted son "Chick Carter, Boy Detective".  In 1972 Nick Carter was made into an Italian comic strip.  His biggest success in the post-pulp era came in 1964 when Nick Carter returned to paperbacks as a secret agent called Killmaster.  Inspired by the success of James Bond, Nick Carter's first book was titled "Run Spy Run" and would produce more than 260 books in the series before ending in 1990.  Authors Michael Avallone and Martin Cruz Smith contributed to the series.

FILMS, RADIO & TV

The French were the first to bring Nick Carter's exploits to film in several fast-paced serials (1909-1912) directed by Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset and starring Pierre Bressol and Andre Liabel.  Four German silent movies were made (1920-1922) by director Rudolf Walther-Fein  and starring Bruno Eichgrun in films titled "The Hotel in Chicago", "The Passenger in the Straitjacket", "Women Who Commit Adultery", and "Only One Night".  In 1921 American director Alexander Hall made "Nick Carter Down East" with Thomas Carrigan as the detective, Colin Chase as Chick, and Mae Gaston as Patsy.  Director Hall then made four short films in 1922 - "Unseen Foes", "The Spirit of Evil", "The Last Call", and "A Game of Graft" - all with Edmund Lowe as Nick and Diane Allen as Patsy.  After an absence of nearly two decades Nick Carter was revived in the sound era by MGM with Walter Pidgeon in a series of full-length films.

"Nick Carter, Master Detective" MGM, 1939.  Starring Walter Pidgeon, Rita Johnson, Donald Meek, Henry Hull, Milburn Stone, Sterling Holloway.  Directed by Jacques Tourneur.  Carter (Pidgeon) operates undercover at an aircraft factory trying to expose a gang of spies who are stealing plans and committing sabotage and murder.  Carter is plagued by an elderly eccentric (Meek) who, imagining himself to be a great amateur detective, becomes Carter's self-appointed assistant.

"Phantom Raiders" MGM, 1940.  Starring Walter Pidgeon, Donald Meek, Joseph Schildkraut, Florence Rice, Nat Pendleton, John Carroll, Steffi Duna.  Directed by Jacques Tourneur.  On vacation in Panama, Carter (Pidgeon) suspects a cafe owner of loading ships with straw, insuring the vehicles as carrying valuable cargo, and then destroying them by remote control.

"Sky Murder" MGM, 1940.  Starring Walter Pidgeon, Donald Meek, Joyce Compton, Kaaren Verne, Tom Conway, Edward Ashley.  Directed by George Seitz.  In Washington, Carter (Pidgeon) is asked by a Senator to uncover a fifth-column group; later a man is killed in a plane bound for NYC with Carter aboard.

Nick Carter next came to radio on the Mutual Broadcasting System commencing April 11, 1943 as "Nick Carter, Master Detective".  The half-hour show that aired on Sundays began with a loud pounding on a door followed by a woman shrieking "Who is it?" and an officious male response, "Another case for Nick Carter!"  Lon Clark played the detective  and his assistant Patsy was played by Helen Choate until mid-1946 when Charlotte Manson stepped into the role.  Other characters were Scubby Wilson, a newspaper reporter, and Nick's contact at the police department, Sgt. Mathison.  The radio drama was sponsored by Old Dutch Cleanser.  Walter Gibson, creator and writer of "The Shadow" pulp character, was fired from the magazine when he asked for a raise in 1946 and then became the head writer of the Nick Carter radio series.  "Nick Carter, Master Detective" remained on the air until September 25, 1955.

A juvenile spin-off radio series "Chick Carter, Boy Detective" featured the adventures of Nick's adopted son, his friend Sue, and a grizzled cowboy guardian named Tex.  The 15-minute show aired on Mutual Monday-thru-Friday from July 5, 1943 to July 6, 1945 resulting in 525 episodes.  The episodes typically ended with a cliffhanger to entice young listeners to tune in the next day.  Followers of the show could join the Inner Circle Club which provided them a membership card.  Initially, membership was only available to listeners of WOR, the flagship station of Mutual in New York City, but was eventually opened up to the rest of the country.

In 1946 Columbia Studios produced a 15-chapter serial of "Chick Carter, Detective".  Columbia couldn't afford the rights to produce a Nick Carter serial so they bought the rights to Chick Carter, his son.  Then they dropped "boy" from the title and hired 44-year old Lyle Talbot to play Chick (Walter Brennan wasn't available?).  Portly, middle-aged Talbot spent the serial trying to recover a stolen diamond.  It was directed by Derwin Abrahams.

American actor Eddie Constatine, best known for a series of French films in which he played Lemmy Caution, portrayed a tough, trenchcoated Nick Carter in two French films.  "License to Kill" (1964) directed by Henri Decoin, and "Nick Carter and the Red Club" (1965) directed by Jean-Paul Savignac.

Lastly, "The Adventures of Nick Carter" aired in 1972 on ABC's Sunday Night Movie with Robert Conrad ("Wild, Wild West") portraying Nick Carter.  The TV-movie was set at the turn of the century with most of the story taking place in a nightclub situated  in New York's Tenderloin.  Nick is hired to investigate the disappearance of the wife of a wealthy playboy and the movie also starred Broderick Crawford, Shelley Winters, and Neville Brand.  The film was a pilot for a proposed series that never materialized.