“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

 

Richard Deming’s career flourished during the end of the Pulps and the birth of the digests. He published short stories in five different decades. After serving in World War II, he was working for the Red Cross when he sold his first story, “The Juarez Knife,” to Popular Detective. He would write a total of sixteen more stories, as well as four novels, featuring his one-legged war veteran, Manville (‘Manny,’ ‘Mister’) Moon, mostly appearing in Black Mask, and Dime Detective.

He wrote three police procedural novels starring Matt Rudd, a vice cop in Southern California. Deming appeared in the final issue of Dime Detective, but had already transitioned to Manhhunt, the digest magazine that was the successor to the hardboiled Pulps.

Deming also wrote for television – an experience he did not speak of fondly.

It’s an experience I wouldn’t want again…In television they buy a story, hand it to you and tell you to adapt it. Next, they hold a story conference during which they pick the story apart and suggest changes. It’s pretty hard to listen to someone pick your story apart.

He also wrote novelizations for such popular shows as Dragnet, The Mod Squad, Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, and Vegas.

His private eye, Moore, lost his leg in World War I, and he has an artificial strap-on contraption. The forties was not the age of 3D printers. It’s a hassle to put on. However, he has learned to use it as a weapon, and he’s probably more dangerous with an artificial leg, than he was with two real ones. We see it in the first story:

‘Leaning into the support the other two furnished my arms, I planted the inner side of my aluminum foot under Carmand’s chin with enough force to kick a field goal had his head been a football. Without waiting for him to fall, I used the down sweep to smash my heel against the shin of the man holding my right arm. When yowled and let go, I pivoted and slammed a knee into the third’s middle. He let go also.’

Three tough guys were about to threw him out of an office. Two were even holding him by his arms, when Moon unleashed his artificial leg.

Later he gets knocked out and ends up in the same office, hands tied in front of him. And he manages to knock one of the goons unconscious with a kick underneath his chin, once again using the artificial leg.

Moon is tough, but he’s really a likable guy who runs a one-man private eye business. He works out of his apartment, and also a Mexican restaurant: he doesn’t need an office. He’s tough without being too quick with the quips, or being aggressively hard guy. He’s frequently at odds with, and then helping, police inspector Warren Day. They have a very strange relationship – with Day veering back and forth between threatening and cajoling.

There’s a fair dose of humor, without being comedic. In the second story, “The Man Who Chose the Devil,” Moon is working for a man accused of murdering his business partner – though the client was in jail at the time – having pushed Moon into a fight to get arrested: then punching the desk cop. Looking around the office of the dead man, Moon silently comments:

‘I wandered around looking at the floor, the desk top, the window sills and the bookcase without finding any cigarette butts of queer oriental brand, any Egyptian scarabs or an of the other highly informative clues detectives are always running into.’

That’s funny!

In “The Juarez Knife,” he is sitting in the waiting room of an about-to-be well-paying client. Except the prospective client gets himself murdered in his office, unnoticed by anyone. Even without a client, shortly afterwards Moon spirits the beautiful lead suspect away from the waiting police. He definitely isn’t afraid to take any action he deems beneficial to his cause; the Law be damned.

Manville isn’t Race Williams running wild, but he’s also not afraid to kill. Being taken for a ride a little later in the same story, he chops his captor between the eyes with an Army Ranger move he learned. The hired killer dies instantly. Having acquired some now-available guns, he then lets the driver discover what has happened and even raise a gun at him. At which point Moon simply shoots a hole in him. It’s a cold-blooded scene.

Manville likes to have the classic gathering at the end of the case, to reveal the guilty party, and he sometimes has fun with it: ‘I paused to let the tension build up in the room. The only reason I occasionally grandstand is because Day hates me for it. He was glaring at me now.’

Just as Nero Wolfe threatens to turn the as-yet-unrevealed killer to the district attorney when Inspector Cramer is proving stubborn in rounding up people for one of ‘Wolfe’s parties,’ so does Moon tell Inspector Day he’ll give the story to a local paper, if he doesn’t bring the necessary people to the unveiling. Wolfe’s are usually in his office at the famous Brownstone. Since Moon doesn’t have an office, crime scenes and the police station usually do.

Prologue Books has a huge library of Pulp ebooks and short stories available – almost all of them included with Kindle Unlimited. There are several Moon stories, and at least a couple of the novels. You an also check out the aforementioned Matt Rudd there You could do one month of Kindle Unlimited just for the Prologue Books, and you probably couldn’t read even a tenth of what you wanted to. They also have horror and scifi, but for me it’s the huge hardboiled library that does it.

I’m going to read one of the Moon novels and see how he does in the long form. But I find Deming to be a good writer, and I enjoy these.

 

Prior Posts in A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2024 Series (9)

Will Murray on Dashiell Hammett’s Elusive Glass Key
Ya Gotta Ask – Reprise
Rex Stout’s “The Mother of Invention”
Dime Detective, August, 1941
John D. MacDonald’s “Ring Around the Readhead”
Harboiled Manila – Raoul Whitfield’s Jo Gar
7 Upcoming A (Black) Gat in the Hand Attractions
Paul Cain’s Fast One
Dashiell Hammett – The Girl with the Silver Eyes (my intro)

Prior Posts in A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2023 Series (15)

Back Down those Mean Streets in 2023
Will Murray on Hammett Didn’t Write “The Diamond Wager”
Dashiell Hammett – ZigZags of Treachery (my intro)
Ten Pulp Things I Think I Think
Evan Lewis on Cleve Adams
T,T, Flynn’s Mike & Trixie (The ‘Lost Intro’)
John Bullard on REH’s Rough and Ready Clowns of the West – Part I (Breckenridge Elkins)
John Bullard on REH’s Rough and Ready Clowns of the West – Part II
William Patrick Murray on Supernatural Westerns, and Crossing Genres
Erle Stanley Gardner’s ‘Getting Away With Murder (And ‘A Black (Gat)’ turns 100!)
James Reasoner on Robert E. Howard’s Trail Towns of the old West
Frank Schildiner on Solomon Kane
Paul Bishop on The Fists of Robert E. Howard
John Lawrence’s Cass Blue
Dave Hardy on REH’s El Borak

Prior posts in A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2022 Series (16)
Asimov – Sci Fi Meets the Police Procedural
The Adventures of Christopher London
Weird Menace from Robert E. Howard
Spicy Adventures from Robert E. Howard
Thrilling Adventures from Robert E. Howard
Norbert Davis’ “The Gin Monkey”
Tracer Bullet
Shovel’s Painful Predicament
Back Porch Pulp #1
Wally Conger on ‘The Hollywood Troubleshooter Saga’
Arsenic and Old Lace
David Dodge
Glen Cook’s Garrett, PI
John Leslie’s Key West Private Eye
Back Porch Pulp #2
Norbert Davis’ Max Latin

Prior posts in A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2021 Series (7 )

The Forgotten Black Masker – Norbert Davis
Appaloosa
A (Black) Gat in the Hand is Back!
Black Mask – March, 1932
Three Gun Terry Mack & Carroll John Daly
Bounty Hunters & Bail Bondsmen
Norbert Davis in Black Mask – Volume 1

Prior posts in A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2020 Series (21)
Hardboiled May on TCM
Some Hardboiled streaming options
Johnny O’Clock (Dick Powell)
Hardboiled June on TCM
Bullets or Ballots (Humphrey Bogart)
Phililp Marlowe – Private Eye (Powers Boothe)
Cool and Lam
All Through the Night (Bogart)
Dick Powell as Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar
Hardboiled July on TCM
YTJD – The Emily Braddock Matter (John Lund)
Richard Diamond – The Betty Moran Case (Dick Powell)
Bold Venture (Bogart & Bacall)
Hardboiled August on TCM
Norbert Davis – ‘Have one on the House’
with Steven H Silver: C.M. Kornbluth’s Pulp
Norbert Davis – ‘Don’t You Cry for Me’
Talking About Philip Marlowe
Steven H Silver Asks you to Name This Movie
Cajun Hardboiled – Dave Robicheaux
More Cool & Lam from Hard Case Crime

A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2019 Series (15)
Back Deck Pulp Returns
A (Black) Gat in the Hand Returns
Will Murray on Doc Savage
Hugh B. Cave’s Peter Kane
Paul Bishop on Lance Spearman
A Man Called Spade
Hard Boiled Holmes
Duane Spurlock on T.T. Flynn
Andrew Salmon on Montreal Noir
Frank Schildiner on The Bad Guys of Pulp
Steve Scott on John D. MacDonald’s ‘Park Falkner’
William Patrick Murray on The Spider
John D. MacDonald & Mickey Spillane
Norbert Davis goes West(ern)
Bill Crider on The Brass Cupcake

A (Black) Gat in the Hand – 2018 Series (32)
George Harmon Coxe
Raoul Whitfield
Some Hard Boiled Anthologies
Frederick Nebel’s Donahue
Thomas Walsh
Black Mask – January, 1935
Norbert Davis’ Ben Shaley
D.L. Champion’s Rex Sackler
Dime Detective – August, 1939
Back Deck Pulp #1
W.T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox
Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Phantom Crook (Ed Jenkins)
Day Keene
Black Mask – October, 1933
Back Deck Pulp #2
Black Mask – Spring, 2017
Erle Stanley Gardner’s ‘The Shrieking Skeleton’
Frank Schildiner’s ‘Max Allen Collins & The Hard Boiled Hero’
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: William Campbell Gault
A (Black) Gat in the Hand: More Cool & Lam From Hard Case Crime
MORE Cool & Lam!!!!
Thomas Parker’s ‘They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?’
Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Hardboiled Film Noir’ (Part One)
Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Hardboiled Film Noir’ (Part Two)
William Patrick Maynard’s ‘The Yellow Peril’
Andrew P Salmon’s ‘Frederick C. Davis’
Rory Gallagher’s ‘Continental Op’
Back Deck Pulp #3
Back Deck Pulp #4
Back Deck Pulp #5
Joe ‘Cap’ Shaw on Writing
Back Deck Pulp #6
The Black Mask Dinner

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Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ made its Black Gate debut in 2018 and has returned every summer since.

His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate from March, 2014 through March, 2017. And he irregularly posts on Rex Stout’s gargantuan detective in ‘Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone.’ He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’).

He organized Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series, as well as the award-winning ‘Hither Came Conan’ series. Which is now part of THE Definitive guide to Conan. He also organized 2023’s ‘Talking Tolkien.’

He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories – Parts III, IV, V, VI, XXI, and XXXIII.

He has written introductions for Steeger Books, and appeared in several magazines, including Black Mask, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and Sherlock Magazine.