The Covid pandemic was bad, really bad. But if you were lucky enough to survive it, it wasn’t all bad. Forced to quarantine at home with my darling, high-risk, type-1 diabetic wife, I found myself with unlimited reading time. I took advantage of those hours to read – and often re-read – the classic hardboiled pulp stories of Chandler and Hammett and Woolrich and Erle Stanley Gardner. I rediscovered an old favorite, Norbert Davis, and found that in addition to all the wonderful Davis collections available, there were many uncollected Norbert Davis stories in vintage pulp magazines. I believe Davis had the richest sense of humor of any of that group, and his fast-paced, funny and thrilling pulp tales always delighted me. Then, in Real Detective, I found this:

 

For unknown reasons, that pseudonym, H.N. Tevis, had slipped through the cracks and vanished. Every reference work consulted about Norbert Davis failed to list this as one of his pen names.
The pen name is transparent: Norbert Harrison Davis reversed his initials and made the short jump from Davis to Tevis. He would use his middle name Harrison as a pen name again, publishing a book as Harrison Hunt with W. Todhunter Ballard supplying the Hunt half.

• As H.N. Tevis he wrote seven short stories for Real Detective, his first in August 1930 and then six in 1931. The stories are very short, fast, funny crime tales with a twist ending, and sometimes with more than one twist at the end. In fact the best of them, “Too Many Maniacs” has so many twists (and maniacs) you need a scorecard to remember which character is most probably - for now - the escaped murderer. And so, for the record book, here are the stories Norbert Davis wrote as H.N. Tevis for Real Detective:
• Snappy Stuff – August 1930
  The Shake-Down – January 1931
  A Hot Racket – February 1931
  Money For Murder – March 1931
  Two Last Laughs – April 1931
  The Ice Melts – May 1931
  Too Many Maniacs – June 1931
• Norbert Davis was still a law student at Stanford when he wrote these, and the April 1931 issue has a photo of the young author, the first known published photo of one of the true kings of the hardboiled pulps:

Although Real Detective would later become a true crime magazine, they were including fiction in each issue at first. Three of his earliest stories appeared under his own name there in 1932 & 1933. Then he began selling stories to Black Mask.

I highly encourage you to seek out and chase down all the wonder-filled stories by Norbert Davis hiding in plain sight in those old pulp magazines. If you prefer just to get recent reprints, those are available as well:

 

THE PRICE OF A DIME– The Complete Black Mask Cases of Ben Shaley (Black Mask, 2021)

 

DOAN AND CARSTAIRS (Argosy Library, Altus Press, 2016)

 

THE COMPLETE CASES OF MAX LATIN (Altus Press, 2013. There is a 2022 second edition now in print.)

THE COMPLETE CASES OF BAIL-BOND DODD (2 volumes, Altus Press, 2015 & 2019.)

 

DEAD MAN’S BRAND (Black Dog Books, 2011) Eight Western stories.

Another major re-discovery was Erle Stanley Gardner. I thought I knew him well from the bestselling hardcovers, but there is a whole other world of Gardner out there to be enjoyed.
Gardner was an amazingly prolific writer with over 650 pulp stories on his bibliography. One of my favorite Gardner pulp series was about Lester Leith. If you’ve never read a Lester Leith story, try one and get hooked. I learned there were 65 Lester Leith stories on Gardner’s bibliography, and although it sounded impossible I set out to find and read them all. But one story on Gardner’s list had never been found: “A Sock on the Jaw”. Nobody had turned up a pulp with that story in it in all the years people have been collecting and cataloging these.
Another funny thing, there were 65 story titles on Gardner’s Lester Leith list including “A Sock on the Jaw”, and 65 stories on the Lester Leith online crime and mystery magazine checklists. But those stories were all cataloged, so “A Sock on the Jaw” was not there. A meticulous comparison of the two lists turned up one title the collectors had listed that was not on Gardner’s list: “Vanishing Shadows”. The other 64 titles matched. It seemed like an obvious no-brainer that “A Sock on the Jaw” and “Vanishing Shadows” had to be the same story. But in the 90+ years people had been enjoying these stories, nobody had ever put those two together. I decided to do that, but I couldn’t locate a copy of “Vanishing Shadows”. It was published in the February 8, 1930 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly, and no copies of that now-rare pulp were found for sale. I contacted a pulp dealer who told me the guy I needed to get in touch with was a man in Europe named Markus Rauber, who was building a collection and a reputation as the greatest Gardner expert in the world. I sent an email to Markus, who is Swiss, living in Germany. I introduced myself and asked him if he had a copy of “Vanishing Shadows”.

Now to wait. Getting stories from Europe had taken a month or longer in the past, and there was no guarantee Markus might have it or even be willing to send me a copy. So you can imagine my surprise when a complete copy of “Vanishing Shadows” arrived in my email a couple hours later.

This was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

As it had to be, “Vanishing Shadows” proved to be a story all about a sock on the jaw. One of the chapter headings was even titled “A Sock on the Jaw.” That was Gardner’s title, but it must have been unsatisfactory to the editors. Leith gets rid of some police shadows in the story, and so they retitled it “Vanishing Shadows”. But it is very clearly, unmistakably, the missing story. Gardner was correct, there are 65 Lester Leith stories.

Markus and I entered into a mutually agreeable pact. He would supply me with all the Lester Leith stories I was missing, and I would use all of my book sleuth skills and library training to locate stories he did not yet have. I was successful, but he also had on his list “lost or missing” stories Gardner wrote, sold, recorded, and then lost track of. Sometimes the publisher would retitle the manuscript. Sometimes the publisher would change the magazine the story appeared in.  And Gardner collectors have been chasing those “lost” stories for decades.

Among the titles on his list:
“The Cave” as by Charles M. Green, sold to The Smart Set, 1924.
“A Bachelor an’ a Orphan”, Munsey magazine, 1925
“The Jazz Baby”, Macfadden, 1926
“Payoff at Spillway” as by Kyle Corning, Western Story, 1930.

My first search was to locate “The Cave”.
For many years The Smart Set was very obscure and hard to locate. That all changed recently when the back issues were all put online at the Internet Archive. Familiarizing myself with the unique style of Gardner’s other stories for that magazine (most Smart Set stories are set in Manhattan, Gardner’s stories were all set in the California desert), I dove into the archive and started reading every story in every issue. In the November 1924 issue of The Smart Set I unearthed a forgotten story, “Anything Can Happen”, published with no byline. The style of this story matched Gardner’s style, and the story ended up with the discovery of a corpse in a cave. Later on we got a manuscript copy of “The Cave” that Gardner left in his archives (now housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas), and it matched “Anything Can Happen”.

Remembering that Munsey also published Argosy, I then began searching Argosy archives for the missing story “A Bachelor an’ a Orphan”. Just like “Vanishing Shadows”, there proved to be an existing, cataloged Gardner Argosy story not found on his own checklist. I tracked down a copy, “On the Mojave Trail” in the September 1925 issue of Argosy. This story matched the manuscript for “A Bachelor an’ a Orphan.”

“The Jazz Baby” proved more difficult to locate, the search lasted over a year. We had the manuscript, it seemed to be one of those “true confession” stories popular in romance magazines of the day. The problem was that publisher, Macfadden. They published a whole bunch of similar magazines in 1925, most notably True Story and True Romances. Each issue of each title had to be reviewed, and those magazines are hard to get today. They have not been collected, cataloged and saved like the classic pulps have. Most libraries that do keep old magazines don’t have these.  One day I noticed an ad in a 1925 True Story that read “see our other magazines now at your newsstand”, listing other titles including one I had never heard of, True Experiences. An ad for the April 1926 True Experiences included a list of the stories appearing that month. One of them was “You Can’t Run Away From Yourself”, which is a line from the end of “The Jazz Baby”. The Library of Congress holds some back issues of True Experiences, and they provided us with a copy of “You Can’t Run Away From Yourself”. It was a match for “The Jazz Baby” manuscript. So now, if you look at Gardner’s bibliography on Wikipedia, you will find “You Can’t Run Away From Yourself” by Anonymous has been added.

Gardner collectors have searched every issue of Western Story for “Payoff at Spillway” without success. The pen name was Kyle Corning, and there proved to be a Kyle Corning story not in Gardner’s archives: “Silent Code” in the October 25, 1930 issue of Detective Story. Western Story and Detective Story were published by the same company, and even though “Payoff at Spillway” is a Western, the editors retitled it and moved it to Detective Story, a move that obscured it enough that Gardner lost track of it.

Markus noted that some of Gardner’s stories for Clues Magazine were later reprinted with different titles in Rapid-Fire Detective.  A deeper dive into the pages of Rapid-Fire Detective revealed more Gardner reprints with new titles AND new bylines. Since Gardner did not list these on his bibliography, either he forgot about them or he never knew about them. Clues and Rapid-Fire Detective were published by the same company, Clayton Magazines. Gardner’s 1928 Clues story “Hard Boiled” reappears in the December 1932 issue of Rapid-Fire Detective as “With Both Fists” by Stephen Caldwell.
Stephen Caldwell appears again in the March 1933 issue with “Framed for a Rap”. This proved to be an uncredited reprint of “Fall Guy’ by Erle Stanley Gardner from the first August 1928 Clues. And another story in that March 1933 Rapid-Fire Detective, “The Blue-Green Death” by Edward Leaming, is the same story as “The Cards of Death’ by Erle Stanley Gardner in the March 1927 Clues.
Edward Leaming appears again in the May 1933 issue of Rapid-Fire Detective as the author of “The Ghost-Crook”, which is Gardner’s “A Point of Honor” from the first November 1928 issue of Clues. The same illustration is even used for both stories. The May 1933 Rapid-Fire Detective also has a story called “Yellow Claws’ by Carl Franklin Ruth. This is Erle Stanley Gardner’s “State’s Evidence” from the November 25, 1928 issue of Clues. So we can add Stephen Caldwell, Edward Leaming and Carl Franklin Ruth to the long list of Gardner pen names.
Clayton had used the house name Stephen Caldwell once before. The May 1927 issue of Clues included a Gardner story, “Fair Warning”. The same issue has “The Crime Trail” by Stephen Caldwell. “The Crime Trail” is a Gardner manuscript held at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, and a look at it confirms it’s a match for the Stephen Caldwell story. It was common for a publisher with two stories from the same author to use a house name on the second story. What was funny about this one was that “The Crime Trail” is a Sheriff Billy Bales tale. Gardner wrote a couple more stories about this lawman for Clues. The correspondence files at the Harry Ransom Center include a letter from the editor of Clues to Gardner telling him how much they loved “The Crime Trail” and asked for more Billy Bales stories. It’s ironic that the first story in the series then appeared with a different byline on it.