The Line Is Dead
By E. Hoffman Price
EVEN FOR the French Quarter of New Orleans, Jeff Carver’s apartment was a conspicuous litter. A Smith & Wesson .38, a Crescent Agency badge, a blackjack, a fifth of Spanish brandy, and a file of patrol service reports competed for the space he had cleared to make room for working out his second income tax instalment. What made him frown was not the figures on the paper but the missing exemption, as he called Alma Foster.
Alma was Carver’s neighbour. Her second-floor apartment was across the patio from his, and because of the Rube Goldberg methods of remodelling buildings a century and a half old, converting a French or Spanish mansion into a dozen or more studios and apartments, the quickest way from Alma’s door to the stairs leading down to the patio was a bridge across to the balcony on his side. But Alma was finding less and less time to cross over for coffee or to straighten things out. Her last visit, a breathless three minutes, had been to leave her income tax tangle.
“After all, darling, you’re a detective; you can figure out what’s wrong with it!”
She would have stayed longer, except that she had a dinner and dancing date with an important-looking lug who drove a red and black convertible Cad. And that was not two-timing: first, she had been entirely frank about her capering around with Herb Lowry, and second, she had never made Carver any promises. Her story was that, through meeting Herb Lowry’s friends, she would have a grand chance of switching to a better job. Positions and promotions went primarily based on friendship or kinship, perhaps not much more so than in other parts of the country, though with the difference that in this colourful and fun-loving city, people blandly admitted the facts.
A clannish place, the French city is proud of its Old World background yet hearty in its welcome to outsiders.
All this left Carver in the unpleasant situation of wondering whether he was being tolerant and generous-minded or merely a chump.
Read or download Book
E. Hoffman Price
Edgar Hoffmann Trooper Price (July 3, 1898 – June 18, 1988) was an American writer of popular fiction for the pulp magazine marketplace. He collaborated with H. P. Lovecraft on “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”.
Biography
Price was born in Fowler, California. During his early years, he became interested in China as a result of his interactions with a Chinese salesman in his hometown. As a form of punishment, his mother once threatened to leave Price with him. He did not see this as a punishment. His interest in China also had a sexual aspect. His wife later noted that “Oriental women fascinate [him]”.
Prices served with the American military in Mexico and the Philippines, before being sent to France with the American Expeditionary Force in France during World War I earlier. He was a champion fencer and boxer, an amateur Orientalist, and a student of the Arabic language; science-fiction author Jack Williamson, in his 1984 autobiography Wonder’s Child, called E. Hoffmann Price a “real live soldier of fortune”.
Originally intending to be a career soldier, Price graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1923. Starting in 1924, Price took a job with Union Carbide at a plant outside New Orleans. He purchased a typewriter and in his spare time started to write stories. After numerous rejections, he sold his first piece, “Triangle with Variations,” to the magazine Droll Stories in 1924, followed almost immediately by the first of scores of acceptances by Weird Tales, “The Rajah’s Gift” (January 1925).
In 1932 Price was fired from his Union Carbide job and turned to writing full-time. He moved to Manhattan and began to write extensively for pulp magazines. In his literary career, Hoffmann Price produced fiction for a wide range of publications, from Argosy to Terror Tales, from Speed Detective to Spicy Mystery Stories. Yet he was most readily identified as a Weird Tales writer, one of the group who wrote regularly for editor Farnsworth Wright, a group that included Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Price published 24 solo stories in Weird Tales between 1925 and 1950, plus three collaborations with Otis Adelbert Kline, and his works with Lovecraft, noted above.
E. Hoffman Price
