If you missed the last one…
Walter Archer Frost (1875-1964) is not a name that rings a bell with Mystery fans like Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler. He was one of many Pulpsters that existed before the hey-deys of Black Mask or Dime Detective. Flynn’s Weekly, later renamed Flynn’s Detective Fiction Weekly was a Munsey soft weekly devoted to detective stories. Dozens of writers produced reams of ‘tec tales for hungry readers but were never collected or even remembered in the course of the genre’s history. Who remembers Louise Rice, Winston Boule, Joseph Gollumb, Emily Calloway or H. M. 
Egbert? Walter Archer Frost is one such writer. He is better remembered in Hollywood where he produced more memorable work. (Other names of writers alongside these ghosts that would rise to greater fame later include Jack Bechdolt, Edward Parrish Ware, R. Austin Freeman and Arthur B. Reeve.)
Some of these writers that worked between Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe were called “Humdrums” by writer and critic Julian Symons, because of their workman-like reliance on plot and puzzle, sacrificing style or originality. Many were popular in their time, like J. S. Fletcher, who was praised by President Woodrow Wilson. The works of writers like Fletcher (and many more less famous) have slipped into the public domain largely because no one cares. This is a good thing for the Mystery fan who doesn’t need a Poirot or a Sam Spade to pique their interest.
Frost had several different series characters but the one we will look at here is Ruggles, a kind of American Sherlock Holmes. (That name is suspiciously close to Raffles, isn’t it?) Frost describes him thus:
In age, he was still in his early thirties; and he was marvelously well equipped to tread the dark ways along which his strange profession led him.
He was well over six feet in height; he weighed always between tow hundred and five and two hundred and ten pounds stripped; he combined the tremendous strength and hitting power of the best heavyweight with the speed and endurance and catlike activity of foot which one expects to find only among the lighter middleweigthts.
Ruggles is the master of all things related to the underworld. He knows all the players, their gangs, their MOs. He has a list of them all that he is working his way through, bringing them to jail. He learned all this because he was once named Garrison and involved with a gang, but no longer. He uses all his brains, brawn and skills to fight crime. He can pick a pocket, trail a witness, even kill but only to further the cause of justice. More like the future Doc Savage than the past’s Sherlock Holmes perhaps.
Of course, any good Holmes clone has a Watson to match. That is Dan Crane, who loves to regale us with previous case like the one with the garlic bulbs, the Bali kris or Gadsby the murderer who to the day of his execution was a sartorial delight. (You look marvellous!) It is Crane’s job to write down all of Ruggles’ cases in a manner we all know.
“The Living Ghost” (Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction, March 10, 1928) was the sixteenth entry in the series known as The Benevolent Sins of Mr. Ruggles (future book title?), which ran for nineteen tales in that magazine from September18, 1926 to July 13 1929.
The client in this tale is Mortimer Hastings, who feels he is being haunted in his own home. Ruggles shows his incredible memory and knowledge when he calls Hastings out for actually being Henry Scott of California. He also knows that Scott’s shady past have put him on the run from the mysterious Tolliver.
From a letter and half of a photo Ruggles stole from his client, they learn that Tolliver wants a hundred thousand –or else. On the back of the photo is a half-map of a site in California where the detective believes two men found great wealth. Ruggles figures the photo was split to insure neither man took the entire fortune. This suggests a plot similar to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Crooked Man” which ACD borrowed from Wilkie Collin’s The Moonstone (1868). It is the classic man-from-the-past who haunts the wrong-doer for some slight long ago scenario.
Ruggles takes off, leaving Dan to get Hastings home safely. After a misunderstanding, where Hastings takes Carson’s gun, the haunted man has a nap, locking the bedroom door. He wakes suddenly to find Tolliver sitting beside him. Carson breaks in but the invader escapes out of Ruggles’ secret door. (Only two other people in the world know about that secret door, Branley and Mueller, Ruggles’ long time enemies from his gang years.)
Carson takes Hastings home to find that the man’s dog has been killed and his butler run off. An assassin shoots at him through the window. The Shadow, as the two detectives have named him, comes to house. He captures Carson without any difficulty and ties him up, though the narrator gets a good look at the horror that has haunted Hastings:
…on a bare wall slightly at my left a brilliant light suddenly flashed, and on it stood out a shadow black as the pit, and the most hideous apparition I had ever seen.
Apparition, I say, the most hideous, and it was that. For though it was a shadow, it had eyes that opened and glared out, fierce, savage, human eyes that could see.
It was not a shadow, by heaven, it was what Hastings had called it: a living Ghost; a dread, terrible thing which would haunt one’s brain until his dying day.
Tolliver arrives to accuse Hastings of murdering Ross McAndrew fifteen years ago. The hideous specter is McAndrew risen from the dead!
It’s Ruggles to the rescue. In the darkness he begins a fight with two men, Tolliver and another. It takes Carson some time to get untied and find the light switch. In the light, we see Ruggles finish off Tolliver and his old enemy, Mueller. Tolliver takes his revenge on his accomplice Mueller by throwing a knife into his throat and killing him.
With the baddies done, Ruggles shows Hastings that the Shadow is actually a dummy built into the wall by Mueller, who was a master engineer and builder. While Hastings was away from home the criminals had installed the device. Tolliver’s part was to blame Hastings for McAndrews death even though Tolliver killed him and had served a prison sentence for the crime. Hastings had fled California before he could learn of his own innocence. The second half of the photo doesn’t show a lost mine but the spot where McAndrews’ body was buried. Ruggles and Carson take a moment to realize only Branley remains of the detective’s underworld enemies. Ruggles will have to wait until this final villain strikes…
The supernatural element proves to be a fake. No big surprise since the magazine is called Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction, not Weird Tales. The Shadow device smacks more of William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki (when the ghosts prove to be phonies) than Arthur Conan Doyle. The idea of haunting a man into getting a big check out of him seems over-elaborate. Simple blackmail would have worked, though I suppose the villains wanted to keep Hastings off balance so he wouldn’t inquire back in California about McAndrews’ death.
I have to say something about that title. It instantly reminded me of a famous comic story also called “The Living Ghost”. It was written by Frank Belknap Long, the Horror/Science Fiction writer in 1948, twenty years later. He appeared in the first issue of ACG’s Adventures Into the Unknown, the first all-Horror comic book. Long’s Living Ghost is a kind of zombie-like monster that was so popular he returned for a more helpings in later issues. I doubt FBL had ever read this story but you never know. Pulp titles have a certain exaggeration to them and this is more likely coincidence.
Conclusion
There are a few other story titles that hint at the supernatural in the adventures of Ruggles: “In the nGaka’s Medicine Bag” (Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction, June 18 1927) and “Unseen Hands, (Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction, January 14 1928) especially but since the stories haven’t been collected I must wait patiently until issues of Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction appear to fill in the blank spaces. The series wasn’t really a supernatural one, like John Thunstone or Jules de Grandin, but like many Mystery pieces flavored with a little ghostly atmosphere. In some ways, Ruggles suggests a very popular detective superman to come, Doc Savage. Doc also had several adventures with fantastical sounding elements that all proved to be mundane enough in the end. After his nineteen adventures, Ruggles and Carson rode off to be obscured by detectives brighter and more fantastic.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
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