Erle Gardner - The Casebook of Sidney Zoom

Among the two-score series characters created by Erle Stanley Gardner for the pulp magazines of the 20s and 30s were such colorful and colorfully named individuals as Ed Migrane, the Headache Detective, Speed Dash, the Human Fly, Señor Lobo (whose exploits will appear in the next volume in this series), The Man in the Silver Mask, Go Get ’Em Garver, and Fish Mouth McGinnis. None, however were more unique, well-developed, or eccentric in name and nature than Sidney Zoom, the Master of Disguises.

Zoom is a strange, complex man, a true rugged individualist. Tall, slender, purposeful, cultured, independently wealthy, possessed of fierce hawklike eyes and a dominant, aggressive personality, he lives on an expensive yacht, the Alberta F., with a tawny police dog named Rip and a devoted young secretary, Vera Thurmond. He is a loner by nature, adopting a hardboiled manner with women that borders on the rude — a pose, Vera Thurmond suspects, because he is secretly afraid of the female sex. He “hates civilization and all it stands for,” believing instead in the sanctity of the individual; “scoffs at laws which sought to curb crime and safeguard property rights” and has his own ideas of how to balance the scales of justice. His mission is to right wrongs, to “live for good” by rescuing would-be suicides and other downtrodden individuals and providing them with new leases on life. He refers to himself, in all seriousness, as a Doctor of Despair, a Collector of Lost Souls.

Disguises of one sort or another figure prominently in all of his adventures. He maintains a large closet filled with wigs, mustaches, spectacles, hats, coats, beards, grease paint, stains, and other methods of altering his identity. His reputation as a carefree man about town is another masquerade, carefully established and nurtured to conceal his mission and the fact that he once served in the intelligence departments of three nations.

The Zoom series, a total of sixteen short stories and novelettes, ran in Detective Fiction Weekly between March 1930 and May 1934. The ten collected here, all reprinted for the first time, represent the best of these tales. Each demonstrates Gardner’s remarkable skill at finding new twists on staple pulp storylines involving stolen jewelery and artworks, confidence swindles, hidden fortunes, missing wills, disappearing bodies, murder frames, and the like. The stories also make clever use of disguises as integral plot devices, and contain plenty of swift action as the pulp markets of the day required.

Eccentric though he may be, Sidney Zoom ranks as one of the most interesting early characters to come from Gardner’s fertile imagination. It’s a pleasure to introduce him to modern readers after three-quarters of a century of dusty and undeserved obscurity.

Petaluma, California

June 2005

The editor and the publisher are grateful to Lawrence Hughes of Hughes and Hobson LLC, agents for the Erie Stanley Gardner literary rights, for permission to publish this book; and to Monte Herridge for copies of several of the Sidney Zoom stories that follow.

It had been known as “Lovers’ Lane” until a dejected sweetheart, jilted by his lady, had chosen to blow out his brains on the very bench where caresses had been exchanged.

He was rather artistic about it, too. He waited until the big clock at City Hall chimed the hour of midnight. The cough of the revolver merged with the last booming note of the clock.

The newspapers featured the story. The girl in the case cried and had her picture taken with a handkerchief at her eyes. She had pretty knees, so the newspapers put her on page one.

It was a good idea. Another rejected swain, lacking originality, but appreciating the publicity, committed suicide in the same place a week later. The hour was after midnight. Evidently he had almost lost his nerve and had battled the decision for some thirty minutes.

A newspaper made the mistake of calling the spot “Suicide Park.”

Now the psychology of suicide is subtle and but little understood. Police know that suicides run in epidemics. An account of one suicide inspires others to take the step.

And this relates to places. Let a certain locality once become known as a spot for suicides and it can never live down the name. Morose persons with a suicide complex will see that the reputation is kept alive. Niagara Falls found this out. And there are other spots.

Hence the casual remark of a newspaper writer changed Lovers’ Lane overnight. Lovers no longer resorted to the place. The benches were grim, the shadows filled with stalking specters. Lone men came to the spot to brood over their troubles. Occasionally one of these men failed to leave the place. He would be found sprawled on a bench in the shadows, the cheap revolver at his side.

Then the newspapers would build up more hypnotic complexes.

An extra policeman was assigned to the park. The city government decided to erect a municipal building there and eliminate the shadow-filled stretches of midnight menace.

But all of these things take time, and, in the meantime, while architects labored over plans and specifications, while voters waited the issuance of bonds, the park continued to beckon the unfortunate. There was in its very silence a hint of rest. Its shadows became psychic vortexes in which a weak soul might spin down into oblivion.

For the most part men did not come to the park twice. They came to it at night, as though drawn by an invisible cord, sat upon the benches in silence, watching the patrolling forms of the special police officers. Then they departed in slinking, cringing silence.

One man alone came there regularly, night after night.

Tall, slender, purposeful, grimly silent, a tawny police dog trailing his steps, this man strode through the night shadows as though upon some gruesome sentry duty.

The police sought to find out more about him.

The man was courteous, but reserved. He gave them such information as they could have found out by other means. Beyond that he was as a clam.

His name was Sidney. Zoom. He lived upon a small, expensively equipped yacht, which lay anchored in the harbor just, beyond the park. The police dog was named Rip, and needed exercise.

The park was a convenient place to stroll. It was a lovely evening, and good night to you, officer.

And the grim, silent figure, walking, walking, always walking, became a midnight fixture of the park. At times the dog trailed behind, at times ran ahead. Sometimes the dog would revert to wolf habits, and come skulking through the shrubbery, a tawny shadow against the midnight black of the grass. Twice he had given one of the officers such a start that the minion of the law had tugged at his holstered weapon.

They had suggested to Sidney Zoom that dogs must be leashed and muzzled. And Sidney Zoom had shown them a clause in the old deed by which the park had been dedicated. That clause had made it a condition of the dedication that pets could run free within the confines of the park.

The officers yielded the point, but in such a manner that boded no good for the police dog, should he give the patrol any legitimate excuse to send a bullet crashing into his tawny body.

But Sidney Zoom and his dog seemed entirely oblivious of any danger. They continued their midnight pacings through the park.

The officers noticed that, at times, some unfortunate attracted the attention of Sidney Zoom. At such times there would be long conversations, then the unfortunate would leave the park, arm in arm with the well-dressed figure of Sidney Zoom, the police dog bringing up the rear.