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MR. CLACKWORTHY: AN INTRODUCTION, by Steve Lewis

There are very few people around today who might be considered experts on the life and fortunes of Mr. Amos Clackworthy, whose adventures you are about to read in this collection, but on the basis of doing a little research on the net and elsewhere, perhaps I could be counted among them. His stories, about 50 of them in all, appeared in the pages of Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine back in the 1920s and 1930s. Two collections of these stories appeared in hardcover, about which more later.

What I know about the author, Christopher B. Booth, is that he was a prolific writer for the pulp magazines, with just under three and a half pages of entries in Cook and Miller’s massive index of the detective pulps, Mystery, Detective, and Espionage Fiction, the work you absolutely must have if you are a collector or researcher of pulp magazines, rather than only a reader.

These are only the detective stories. On Bill Contento’s FictionMags website you can also find a smattering of west­ern stories for him, and I know these are only the tip of the iceberg, as relatively few of the western magazines have been indexed yet.

According to Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, Booth wrote ten novels under his own name, all from Chelsea House, and eight more as by John Jay Chichester, also all from Chelsea House. Also to his credit is one book on which he shared the writing duties, and that was with Isabel Ostrander, another long-time writer for the pulps.

To point out that you can not always trust the Internet for factual information, some sites suggest that Christopher B. Booth was a pseudonym for Isabel Ostrander. Not so, even though Ostrander (who died in 1924) really was the lady behind ‘Robert Orr Chipperfield,’ ‘David Fox,’ and ‘Douglas Grant.’

Chelsea House was the hardcover publishing arm of Street & Smith Publications, which also produced Detective Story Magazine, where most if not all of the novels it published were serialized first.

Or cobbled together out of short stories, as was Mr. Clack­wor­thy (Chelsea House, 1925), the first collection of his ad­ven­tures. The second volume, Mr. Clackworthy, Con Man (Chel­sea House, 1927) was produced the same way.

How much overlap there is between those books and this, I do not know, but it is more than likely that there will be some. The truth is that neither book is easy to find. Better that you have this one than you burden yourself with locating either of the two earlier ones.

Enough of the general background. If you did not know before (but if you were paying close attention, you will know now), Mr. Clackworthy was one of those protagonists so often on the wrong side of the law in the 1920s, a con man. I imagine someone could write a thesis if not a dissertation on such individuals in the world of crime fiction.

Here is an off-the-wall question. What fictional character would qualify as the last in the line of con men, preying mostly on the rich and unscrupulous, but not necessarily giving to the poor, of which Mr. Clackworthy does not make a general practice?

This is not a question for which I have an answer, nor will I even attempt to list any other characters who fall into the category. If you can help, please do, otherwise we shall leave the matter to someone who needs a thesis if not a dissertation on their academic record. (Of course such a someone then would be also obliged to put into perspective why con men who preyed mostly on the rich and unscrupulous were so prevalent in the 1920s. One can guess, however.)

As a start to such a project, it belatedly occurs to me, if you will allow such an interjection, may be Yesterday’s Faces #3: From the Dark Side, by Robert Sampson (Bowling Green Press, 1987), a rollicking account of all sorts of bad guys who inhabited the pages of the pulp magazines.

And by the way, before it slips my mind and we head off into more specific commentary, I would like to point out that in the pages of Detective Story Magazine Mr. Clackworthy met another of that magazine’s regular characters, Johnston McCul­ley’s lisping pickpocket, Thubway Tham: “Mr. Clack­wor­thy and Thubway Tham” (Detective Story Magazine, March 4, 1922). Even though Cook-Miller suggests that only Booth was the author, this may be the first team-up on record between two characters created by separate authors. (Does one count, however, Arsene Lupin Versus Holmlock Shears, by Maurice LeBlanc [Richards, 1909]? One must posit some ground rules, one supposes.)

Further investigation into the subject reveals another story of interest: “Thubway Tham and Mr. Clackworthy,” by Johnston McCulley (Detective Story Magazine, February 18, 1922, or two issues earlier). You can read this story in the recent edition of Tham thtories published by Wildside Press, Tales of Thubway Tham, although in the Wildside edition the story is retitled “Thubway Tham Meets Mr. Clack­worthy.”

One source suggests that the team-up was a three-part serial. This may be so, but if indeed it is, I have not yet uncovered a third tale in the triptych, and to this date, the matter rests, at least for now.

Let’s get on with things. The best way to do that, I decided the moment I started reading it, is to quote the opening paragraphs of the first story in the first Chelsea House collection, right from the beginning:

“The greed of the human heart!” Mr. Amos Clackworthy, confidence man deluxe, sighed as he laid down his newspaper, which was folded to the want ad pages. He had been for some time engrossed in an analytical perusal of the “Business Chances” column.

James Early, whose record at police headquarters credited him with the alias of “The Early Bird,” was standing at the window of Mr. Clackworthy’s [Chicago] Sheridan Road apartment, gazing glumly at the stream of traffic that flowed past in its usual Sunday afternoon flood. The Early Bird was a lost soul during those times when there was none of Mr. Clackworthy’s nefarious schemes under way to occupy his mind and to keep his wits sharpened.

All con men naturally work on the concept of greed, as many a Nigerian knows full well today. Booth’s prose style is not dissimilar to that of his contemporary (at the time), Erle Stanley Gardner, whose Lester Leith stories for Detective Fiction Weekly started out in very much the same fashion.

Most of Mr. Clackworthy’s victims well deserve it—greedy bankers, swindlers, unscrupulous investors, and so on—getting their comeuppance in a rough-and-tumble sort of justice, in a naïve, twinkle-in-the-eye sort of way, but even innocent banks sometimes fell afoul of his various and sundry plots and plans. (But were banks truly innocent of wrongdoing in the 1920s? Perhaps Booth’s readers did not really think so.)

In any case, these works were written, read and enjoyed in a different time and place. If you’ve made it this far into this introduction, however, I see no reason why you shouldn’t read and enjoy the Amos Clackworthy stories, too, even if no one is writing them like this any more.

— Steve Lewis

January, 2006