The elusive Pentecost story

After casually searching for 35 years, I found a copy of “Alfred Hitchcock’s Daring Detectives,” a collection of short crime stories published in 1969. I purchased it for 50 cents at a library used book sale.

Why did I want the hardcover? It reprints a crime tale by Judson Philips (1904-1989) of East Canaan.

I will tell you a little about Philips as a companion to an essay about his co-founder of Sharon Playhouse, Guernsey LePelley (May 30 issue). The theater is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.

I knew Philips casually. I interviewed him about his early career writing stories for pulp fiction magazines such as Detective Fiction Weekly. He wrote novels under several names including Philip Owen (“Murder at a Country Inn,” the setting loosely based on The White Hart in Salisbury and the Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Mass.). I helped introduce that book to this newspaper’s readership in a story for its At Your Pleasure arts and leisure section Dec. 6, 1979.

The writer’s byline, Hugh Pentecost, actually sold better than his real name, to the writer’s bemusement.

Philips’ first crime tale written under that pseudonym, “Cancelled in Red,” was a numismatic puzzler serialized in Argosy Weekly in 1939. It has just been reprinted by Bold Venture Press.

The story I was looking for first appeared in This Week in 1958 and was titled “The Day the Children Vanished.”

Philips, who for several years wrote a column for this newspaper, told me he often spun off headlines in crafting his plots. In this case, the reverse happened.  His story made headlines.

The mystery involved a school bus missing with driver and children aboard. It disappeared somewhere between a fictionalized Clayton/East Canaan and Eastview aka Lakeville. 

It’s something of a locked room puzzle, only outdoors.

Philips told me he liberally altered his setting, but had in his mind the Northwest Corner’s terrain with several quarries and narrow, tree-canopied  mountain roads.

Then the Chowchilla kidnapping happened in California in 1976 — someone hijacked a bus and its young passengers for real. 

One thread authorities briefly pursued was the plot of the Pentecost tale, which seemed to read like a blueprint for the crime.

“We don’t know if there’s any connection, but we’re looking at the book [short story],” Madera County Sheriff Ed Bates told The New York Times, July 17, 1976.

The children were soon rescued and their kidnappers arrested.

Philips saw opportunity. He hastily expanded the story for paperback publication four months after the West Coast crime. I’ve long had a copy of the actual novel and in fact didn’t realize it had been reprinted until I scanned the contents of the collection at the library sale shelf.

I’d given up ever locating a copy of the original This Week newspaper supplement. I’ve just learned the story was also included in Otto Penzler’s “Black Lizard Big Book of Locked Room Mysteries” (2014). Penzler has a home in Kent.

Comparing the two versions of the mystery, I found that Philips kept the same plot and most of the prose but padded the telling in several places and skillfully added a subplot.

The Lakeville Journal gave the book a favorable review in its Dec. 30, 1976, issue, noting, “In order presumably to strengthen the similarities to the Chowchilla kidnapping, he introduces three spoiled local youngsters in a subplot, but retains the original twist and the excellent characterization of Pat Maloney, ex-vaudevillian who is the only one able to see through the kidnappers’ ruse.”

So, cross that story off my want list.

The writer is a regular reader and occasional collector of crime fiction.