Death Freight and Other Murderous Excursions

The American Magazine was a glossy, lavishly illustrated “slick” aimed primarily at middle class women readers, filled not only with dastardly murders, but beautiful women and handsome men living the high life, the sweet spice of romance adding to the sordid criminal proceedings. Here are four clever, sophisticated mysteries from the pages of The American Magazine written by Hugh Wheeler in the early 1950s as “Patrick Quentin.” Each story takes the reader on a world tour of murder… The trip begins with “Mrs. B.’s Black Sheep” as a European Tour for Girls is quickly disrupted by theft and murder. In “Death Freight” a world-traveling writer bound for Zanzibar is thrown into a shipboard murder mystery involving an old flame and a pouch of stolen diamonds. “The Scarlet Box” takes us to Rome where an artist must solve the murder of a famous director to prove the innocence of a young woman he has grown to love. And in “The Laughing Man,” a San Francisco police inspector is pitted against a would-be serial killer who cackles as he kills.

The writing team of Patrick Quentin―also known as Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge―began as a collaboration between Philadelphia pharmaceutical executive Richard Wilson Webb (1901-1966), a native Englishman, and American writer Martha Mott Kelley (1906-1989). After Kelley left the partnership to marry and settle in England, Webb briefly wrote with future Harper’s Bazaar editor Mary Louise White Aswell (1902-1984) before joining forces in the mid-1930s with native Englishman Hugh Callingham Wheeler (1912-1987). The early Q. Patrick books were written as elaborate puzzle mysteries, but Webb’s and Wheeler’s crime writing increasingly became more psychologically acute with deepened characterization; the later Patrick Quentin novels, in particular, became increasingly dark and brooding. In the 1940s Webb’s writing input decreased and he retired from his partnership with Wheeler in 1951. Wheeler went on to write solo as Patrick Quentin until 1965, after which he wrote exclusively for television, film and the stage. One of his last works was the book for the 1979 musical Sweeney Todd, for which he won a Tony award.