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Overview: Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg may claim to be private eyes or even book salesmen, but what they really are, are scam artists supreme, always one step from the poorhouse or jail, it seems.
Johnny’s the “brains” of the two, the one with the gift of gab, the one who comes up with the con, the scheme, the play that will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. Or at least enough to get a meal or a room for the night. Sam is the muscle, and then some, a musclebound galoot whose bicep flexing is more than enough to help Johnny sell multiple copies of Every Man a Samson which, in the normal scheme of things, would be enough to earn the boys bed and board. But the boys have bigger dreams than just some food in their stomachs and a place to crash…
Genre: Fiction > Mystery/Thriller
The Talking Clock (1944)
Thrown into jail for vagrancy in a little Minnesota town, Johnny and Sam wake up to find that one of their cell mates has been murdered in the night. That was bad enough, but the murdered boy was Tom Quisenberry, heir to the Quisenberry clock fortune. In the confusion, Johnny and Sam wasted no time breaking jail because they knew they would be charged with the murder.
They did the only thing they could do; they started out to solve the murder to clear themselves. Working their way east, they went to the fantastic Quisenberry estate outside New York City, home of the remarkable Quisenberry family and of the Quisenberry collection of thousands of valuable clocks. They followed the erratic wanderings of the Talking Clock, the incredibly valuable item stolen from the collection. Johnny hoped that the answer to all their troubles would be found in what the Talking Clock said.
The Honest Dealer (1947) aka Double Dealer
It’s a cinch that when there’s, trouble brewing, Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg will be mixed up in it. Trouble blew in with the hot wind of Death Valley the night the stranger with a bullet hole in his chest died at their feet on the lonely highway. And trouble followed them to Las Vegas — blonde trouble, cop trouble and murder.
Johnny and Sam, no strangers to violence, determined to find out who shot the unknown man. Impoverished, but inexhaustible they arrived in Las Vegas with a purple gambling check, a match pack and a deck of cards as the only clues to his identity. Their curiosity was soon rewarded — with a right to the jaw.
The Leather Duke (1950) aka A Job of Murder
Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg have faced many a tough problem in their lives, but never one so dismal as the one they come up against now. Circumstances beyond their control (and for once, beyond their ability to twist, sidestep, or disregard) force the boys either to take jobs in order to cat or to sit out a Chicago winter on a park bench. So, fighting every inch of the way, they become the employees of “the Leather Duke,” Chicago’s biggest operator in the leather business.
Most leather workers grind drearily along for years with nothing to break the monotony. Not so Johnny and Sam. Before they’ve been there half a day, Sam finds a corpse where he should have found a barrel of leather counters. Then the uproar begins. Whether they’re fighting in poolrooms in Little Italy, mixing it up at Turnverein dances, or merely adding a fine new lustre to their well-developed art of deadbeating, these two lads are at it every minute. Johnny Fletcher fans will find this full of excitement. So will everybody else.
The Limping Goose (1955) aka Murder One
Johnny Fletcher is close enough to being a private eye that he might as well be one, but the true profession of both he and Sam Cragg is that of traveling book salesmen, even though they are so broke at the beginning of The Limping Goose, they have no money to even buy books for sale — usually encyclopedias, as I recall.
Eating being a very habitual habit of theirs, especially Sam’s, Johnny decides to hire himself out as a skip-tracer. Soon enough, though, he gets himself mixed up in a case of murder, and the story is off and running. The limping goose of the title is a “piggy bank” in the form of a goose with one leg longer than the other, and even though it is filled only with old coins with no particular value, there are plenty of people who seem to want it.
The Whispering Master (1956)
Here are those two old favorites, Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg, in their usual strategic position, up to their necks in the soup. The boys are back at that beloved caravanserai, the Forty-fifth Street Hotel, and appear likely to stay there for some time since Mr. Peabody, the manager, is lurking in the corridor with the French key.
Then things take a turn for the better — not for the lovely across the airshaft who skims master phonograph record into their window before being throttled — but for Johnny and Sam themselves. They get Sam’s pants out of hock (luckily) and they’re off. Now you see them and now you don’t. But when the eye is quick enough to follow their activities, you’ll find them kiting checks, pawing wrist watches, getting beat up, busting in where they’re not wanted, and driving Mr. Peabody — among many, many others — crazy.
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