West of Guam Read online

  The American checked himself; his eyes held a confused expression. Jo Gar said quietly, smiling a little:

  “Not brown like myself, Mr. Price. White—like yourself.”

  Price reached for a cigar …

  “I meant no offense Señor Gar.”

  Jo nodded, “it is all very well,” he replied tonelessly. “I imagine the man is dead, just as both of us will be someday” (“Enough Rope,” p. 26)

  In “The Javanese Mask,” Lemere mutters angrily about “ ‘damned Chinks and Filipinos,’ ” then checks himself, “realizing that Jo Gar was a half-breed, and that there was Filipino blood in his veins. The Island detective said nothing.” (p. 50)

  Paradoxically, Jo is accused of being Pro-American—too much so, for Lieutenant Ratan’s liking. “ ‘You are protecting an American [Markden, his client]. You have always protected them. You like them.’ ” (“The Magician Murder,” p. 92) Jo merely shrugs his narrow shoulders and says that he has not been paid that well, doubts he ever will be paid that well. But he does like Americans and he will distinguish, astringently, the Asians from them. Markden is a gambler; the Chinese do not trust him “and the Chinese were known as the wisest of the gamblers” (“The Magician Murder,” p. 89) who cover bets on cockfights. He is accused of murdering with a knife a magician, Cardoro the Great, because he did not pay his debts. Observes Gar: “Markden is an American, and he would not kill and then boast about it as a Filipino or a Spaniard might do. He would not hate that much’” (“The Magician Murder,” p. 96). To Jo’s way of thinking, Americans would never strangle a victim with a rope—“ ‘that is not the way of an American in killing,’ ” referring to young Carmen Carejo’s demise (“Red Hemp,” p. 37). Nor would an American use a knife, while “ ‘here in the Islands,’” he explains, “ ‘it is most often the knife” (“The Amber Fan,” p. 101).

  His attitude toward the Overseas Chinese in Manila is ambiguous. He is friendly with some shopkeepers, yet can cruelly claim that all fat Chinese look alike and that there are many fat Chinese in Manila. After a knife has been thrown at him outside his office, he ruminates:

  Two thoughts were strong—the knife thrower had been a Chinese, and he had thrown very poorly. He had thrown like a Filipino would shoot, missing at even a short distance (“China Man,” p. 94).

  On more than one occasion, Chinese are murdered in Jo’s cases, and they can be untrustworthy, wily, and dangerous. This does not prevent his defending them against Ratan’s open scorn and contempt.

  Jo Gar said: “Lieutenant—you have learned a motive for the murder? His servant had reason to kill him [Delancey, a curio dealer]?”

  Lieutenant Ratan said sneeringly: “Chinese servants do not always need motives for murder. A sudden rage—”

  The Island Detective smiled. “You are correct, of course,” he said (“The Javanese Mask,” p. 54).

  Lemere, companion and friend of the dead man, tells of the time that Gao, the Chinese house-boy, stole a carved Igorot spoon of little value.

  Jo said slowly: “The Chinese are usually quite honest. … They give the least trouble—”

  The police lieutenant said sharply: “There are some forty Chinese serving terms in Bilibid prison, Señor Gar.”

  The Island detective bowed slightly. “You are undoubtedly correct, Lieutenant,” he stated. (“The Javanese Mask,” p. 55).

  Ratan is insatiable in his desire to pin the murder of Delancey on Gao. He implies that he might also have stolen the wooden Javanese dance mask “ ‘to show his contempt—the Chinese are strange people.’” Jo Gar chuckles and says, “ ‘And the Manila police are strange people, also. Very strange’ ” (“The Javanese Mask,” p. 55).

  Then there are the women of the islands as Jo sees them. He has as little interest in them as he does in his Western women clients, for he leads an utterly sexless existence. The native women are susceptible, deceptive, sometimes murderous; and Gar is less than complimentary about their physical attractiveness. He just doesn’t care for them. In “Red Hemp” he asks Carejo for a picture of his missing daughter, Carmen.

  It was a clear snapshot; it showed a dark-haired, slender girl of about eighteen. She was rather pretty, in a way of the islands, which was not a lasting way. She had large eyes and a rather thin face (p. 34).

  In “Signals of Storm,” the Island Detective interviews Rosa Castrone, who, it later turns out, is an accomplice in the kidnapping of Sam Ying, a wealthy, corrupt Chinese.

  [She] was a plump girl of perhaps twenty. She had blue eyes and blonde hair, but she was not the true Spanish type. She was half Filipino; her lips were too thick and her features too big (p. 45).

  The nameless chambermaid in “The Siamese Cat” is involved in two murders. “She was dark haired, medium in size. She was good looking for a Filipino girl, slenderer than most of them. Her English was very good” (p. 37). When she is cornered, she spats obscenities at Jo “in a half Spanish, half Filipino dialect” (p. 38). Another nameless Island woman impersonates behind a veil the supposedly grieving widow, Clara Landon. Jo unceremoniously tears off the veil. “She was a mestiz[a], mostly Filipino. But Spanish or Anglo-Saxon blood had given her skin a white tint. She was small, very thin” (“Enough Rope,” p. 32). Jo threatens her with Bilibid Prison if she doesn’t talk, and points out that many prisoners die there. She confesses.

  But enough of this.

  Lieutenant Ratan gives his solution to John Mallison’s violent end in “China Man.” Naturally, he is dead wrong, by now a familiar bit, but Gar is polite and patient with the man he knows hates him.

  Jo Gar nodded. “It appears to be very simple,” he agreed.

  The police lieutenant smiled broadly. “Very,” he agreed. “You waste your time, Señor Gar.”

  The Island detective shook his head (pp. 98–99).

  To Jo Gar, like any good detective, nothing is ever as it appears. “Things,” are never as they appear. In the teeth of seeming evidence, he will pursue a case with dogged tenacity until he solves it—correctly. Admittedly, too much of his legwork and sleuthing is accomplished outside the boundaries of a story; at the end, therefore, the reader is suddenly “handed” data out of reach to him. This is decidedly a weakness in the series.

  Another failing is what I call the “shoot-out” ending when Jo unlimbers his .45 from his hip-pocket or his side-pocket and goes into action; but even as I say this, I realize that the Code of the Pulps, e.g., Black Mask, dictated such a zip-bang, crash-bam finale. In a word, dear readers, it was de rigueur. Decolta/Whitfield knew The Code; he was not stupid.

  Somehow these weaknesses are not bothersome. Nor is Jo’s bluffing. Nor his unerring hunches. He is too fascinating a man to be the butt of such quibbling.

  After Jo’s wrap-up of Benjamin Rannis’s murder, Juan Aragon has a word or two.

  “Death in the Pasig,” he said slowly, “is always difficult.” He smiled at Jo. “Not being a fool, I congratulate you.”

  Jo Gar fanned himself slowly with his pith helmet. He smiled in return.

  “Perhaps I had the better opportunity,” he said quietly. “But not being too modest—I am pleased” (“Death in the Pasig,” p. 111).

  And so is the honest reader pleased. Pleased by him, pleased by his bearing and his conduct, pleased by his adventures.

  Sixteen of them stand by themselves and range from death on a U.S. Army transport (“West of Guam”) to death in an airplane (“Climbing Death”). More likely than not, murders happen off-stage or before a story commences. Knifings—Decolta/Whitfield has a thing about knives—shootings, and stranglings are favored, not to mention five suicides by the guilty ones, not to mention the five “humans”—one of Decolta/Whitfield’s pet words—Jo either kills or wounds.

  There are two serials made up of eight segments total. The first, and less interesting, is a tandem, “Nagasaki Bound” and “Nagasaki Knives.” Here the diminutive Jo tracks down both the murderers of Randonn, a wealthy Englishman, and his valuable pearls whi
ch Howker and Deming have heisted. Hard-boiled action is handled very well by Decolta/Whitfield.

  Jo’s longest and most violent caper (a sextet) takes him from the blood-spattered streets of Manila to the suburbs of San Francisco as he chases stolen diamonds and the killers of Juan Arragon.7 The story deserves a re-telling, for it is the high point of Decolta/Whitfield’s series in Black Mask. Some of his best tough-guy style flashes time and again, and there are narrative passages and dialogue set pieces which compare with the finest in Hammett, Paul Cain, and Chandler.

  A daring and death-dealing daylight robbery (two killed) of Delgado’s jewelry shop in downtown Manila nets the gunmen the ten fabled Rainbow Diamonds, owned by Von Loffler and worth about $200,000. Arragon is killed by the gang and his body deposited in Jo’s upstairs office. There is a good scene when he finds his dead friend and swears to himself to get “them.” Some $15,000 in reward money is posted. Jo is approached by Delgado (whose son was killed) and Von Loffler. The Dutchman asks if Jo will work for them.

  [He] smiled with his thin, colorless lips pressed together. He parted them and said:

  “Yes—but I feel it will be difficult. This was not an ordinary crime. It may mean that I must leave the Islands.”

  Delgado said firmly: “I want my son’s killers—no matter where you must go … ”

  Von Loffler said:

  “It will be dangerous, Señor. But that is your business.”

  The Island detective looked expressionlessly at the room’s ceiling.

  “It will be so,” he agreed. “It is my business” (“Diamonds of Dread,” p. 90)

  From the dying Malay whom he has shot, Gar learns of “’the one who walks badly … always in white’” and follows Ferraro aboard a Japanese liner, Cheyo Maru, bound from Manila to Honolulu, kills him, and obtains one diamond (“The Man in White”). From The Man in White, Jo picks up the trail of “ ‘the blind—Chinese—Honolulu.’” Escaping an ambush in the Hawaiian countryside at night, he finally comes upon Tan Ying, The Blind Chinese; three deaths ensue in the finale but no diamonds (“The Blind Chinese”). A name, Mendez, was given Jo, and in “Red Dawn” the detective learns from the man that diamonds were divided among the gang members. Mendez is killed in his own trap which he had set for Jo.

  Once again aboard the Cheyo Maru (“Blue Glass”) now bound for San Francisco, Jo picks up five diamonds from gang member Eugene Tracy who is shot and killed by the mysterious Woman in Black (Rosa Jetmars), also a gang-member. She has the remaining four Rainbows. She slips them on to Raaker, the renegade Dutchman, mastermind of the caper, and whom Jo Gar had driven out of Manila some years before. Out near the Cliff House, outside of San Francisco, the two men face each other.

  “You stayed out of Manila, Raaker—you couldn’t risk coming back. You hired men. Some of them tricked you—and each other. The robbery as successful, but you lost slowly. All the way back from Manila, Raaker, you lost” (“Diamonds of Death,” p. 89).

  In the shoot-out, Jo kills him. He now has the “diamonds of death,” as he has dubbed them. He is so right; at least fifteen people are dead because of them.

  Jo Gar found a package in his pocket, lighted one of his brown-paper cigarettes.

  He said softly to himself: “I have all—all the Rainbow diamonds. Now I can go home, after the police come. I hope my friend Juan Arragon knows.” … And he thought … of the Philippines—and of Manila—and of his tiny office of the Escolta. It was good to forget other things, and to think of his returning (“Diamonds of Death,” p. 91).

  Returning to the Pasig River, where the Sampans moor, side by side; to the Bridge of Spain which spans its dark waters; to the Luneta where the Constabulary Band plays in the late afternoon; to the Escolta, with its mélange of peoples and a sprinkling of American soldiers on liberty; the Intramuros, its old walls dating back to the late sixteenth century; and the spectacle of the fan-shaped, blood-red sunset across the Bay, with Cavite always in sight from the Luneta.

  Returning to where he belongs.

  I have a question: Whatever happened to him when the Japanese invaded Luzon? He got along with them better than any Asians. Did he remain in the city? Did the Japanese throw him into Bilibid along with the others? Or did he join the American forces on Corregidor? Was he in Manila during the bitter fighting to liberate it in 1945?

  He was last heard of in mid-1937. After that, silence. Before Arragon’s death, he and Jo were talking and Jo said, contemplatively:

  “A poet once wrote: ‘There is mystery in the black-watered Pasig.’ I shall go towards the river, because the poet is accurate. It is so.” (“Death in the Pasig,” p. 105).

  Maybe he did …

  Whatever … whatever, Jo—Paálam! Mabuhay!

  1 For six of the stories, I used the text as reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; for “Death in the Pasig,” I used the text in The Hard-Boiled Omnibus; for the remainder of the stories, I followed the text in Black Mask and Cosmopolitan. Xxiii

  2 It is interesting to note that in FBC he does have an assistant, Sidi Kalaa, half Malay, half Arab!

  3 Arnold Carlysle, an American, heads the Manila force, composed of Americans and Filipinos.

  4 Ratan does not resign. In “The Mystery of the Fan-backed Chair” and “The Great Black,” he is very much around.

  5 For all I know, this situation may pertain today. No one in this country can ever deny that the lot of Filipinos in California before 1941 was less than happy. They were considered below the Chinese and Japanese, and jokes about Filipino houseboys were standard nightclub routine. If one thinks there has been improvement, he is invited to tour the Filipino barrio along Temple Street in downtown Los Angeles.

  6 No question about it, Decolta/Whitfield was an innovator in seriously using an Asian protagonist during this period. Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu was an arch-villain; Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan, while enormously popular, was essentially a comic figure. On 30 June 1934, Hugh Wiley introduced in Collier’s James Lee Wong, a Yale-educated Chinese-American, who is a U.S. State Department secret agent. Wiley was followed by John P. Marquand, who introduced his Japanese detective, Mr. Moto, on 30 March 1935 in the Saturday Evening Post.

  7 “Diamonds of Dread,” “The Man in White,” “The Blind Chinese,” “Red Dawn,” “Blue Glass,” and “Diamonds of Death.”

  West of Guam

  Introducing Jo Gar, Manhunter. …

  Coral reef and green cliff—one showing a jagged edge of white in the blue water; the other a rising splash of color—were falling astern of the Army transport Thomas. The heat was terrific; the breeze was a hot blast sweeping the decks of the heavily laden transport. Five days more, with favorable weather, and the boat would reach Manila.

  Five hot days and nights, west of Guam.

  Colonel Dunbar, infantry officer in charge of troops aboard, sat in the wicker chair of his cabin, let the electric fan bathe his sticky skin with warm air and cursed. It was his second Island job—and he didn’t look forward to the arrival with much enthusiasm. He was sore because the West Point assignment hadn’t come his way. He was sore because the transport was crowded with troops and civilians. He was sore because it had been so infernally hot since they had put out from Honolulu. A rotten trip.

  There was a sudden pounding of heavy shoes along the deck. Burker, his orderly, stiffened near the open door of the cabin. His face was strangely white; the muscles of his mouth were twitching.

  “It’s—Captain Lintwell sir!” he muttered. “Major Jones found him—”

  The orderly broke off. He was breathing heavily. Evidently he had run up from a lower deck. The colonel was impatient.

  “Captain Lintwell—what about him, Burker? Get on with it—”

  “He’s dead, sir!”

  The orderly got the words out all bunched up, but the commanding officer understood them. He jerked himself out of the wicker chair.

  “The hell you say!” he snapped “Lintwell—dead? How?”
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  The orderly was calmer now. He stood stiffly, as though he were reciting a section of the manual.

  “Major Jones said he was murdered, sir. The major found him. Up front, on C Deck. A bullet through his head—the back of it—”

  The colonel swore sharply. He swore because it irritated him to think that after twenty-five days aboard a transport his orderly could be stupid enough to designate a spot on the boat as “up front.” His lips formed the word “forward,” and he forgot about the orderly, and the orderly’s stupidity. He moved out of the cabin, went forward. His lean, browned face held a frown.

  There had been three deaths at sea, from natural causes. There had been one drowning. A civilian’s wife had lost all of her hair and a portion of her scalp, through carelessness near an electric fan. A sergeant had run amuck because of heat and smuggled booze—and had put two of the transport’s crew in the ship’s hospital. And now—Captain Lintwell had been murdered!

  The colonel descended the forward companionway. He hadn’t particularly liked Lintwell. The captain had played too good a game of bridge, and had played too loose with other officers’ wives. But murder—that was a rotten trick. It would have to be cleared up. Before the transport reached Manila. Five days, five nights. The colonel was on B Deck now. He swore savagely. Perhaps there had been some mistake. He’d get a different orderly, anyway. “Up front!”

  He was descending the companionway between B and C Decks now. There was a circle of khaki clad figures below—ten feet or so from the bottom step. A voice called—“’Tention!” in a husky tone. Men straightened up—most of them were officers.

  “‘’Ease!” Dunbar snapped. “Where’s Major Jones?”

  The adjutant moved up close—the others moved away. Major Jones was short and thickset. He had a bristling, gray mustache, and even the heat of the tropics failed to destroy his efficiency.

  “Rotten business, Joe,” he muttered in a low voice. “They got him—back of the head. I was going below, found him.”

  The colonel stared down at the handsome face of Captain Jerry Lintwell. The man had a half smile on his face; his lips were drawn back slightly over his white, even teeth. The deck boards were stained with red. The colonel swore grimly. He started to kneel beside the dead captain, changed his mind.