A big game hunter, an explorer, and a master sharpshooter attend a magic show while on a cruise…not the setup of a disappointing joke, but rather the core idea at the centre of ‘The Hand is Quicker than the Eye’, a.k.a. ‘Lester Leith, Magician’ (1939), the fifth and final story collected in The Amazing Adventures of Lester Leith (1980).

My understanding is that when compiling a short story collection you want to start and end with among your best stories, so that a good first impression is made and a strong final impression remains. The previous four stories herein were presented chronologically, but this final one predates fourth entry ‘The Exact Opposite’ (1940) and so it seemed that editors Ellery Queen had followed this precept to the letter. Except that, well, I think that the three middle stories are far, far stronger than opening one ‘In Round Figures’ (1930), and that this final entry might well be the weakest of the lot. Subjectivity being what it is, your mileage will of course vary, but I’d’ve kept them chronological and blamed any dissatisfaction on that, instead of juggling them slightly to this anticlimactic effect.

The die is pretty well cast now: police spy Edward H. Beaver, serving as Leith’s valet and being called ‘Scuttle’ for his pains, once again trying to intrigue Leith in an unusual crime, this time the theft of a valuable pearl necklace…

He knew from experience that if he could turn Leith’s razor-sharp mind to the problem of the theft, it was quite possible that Leith, with no more information than was given by the newspaper accounts, would spot the thief. Once that had been done, the spy knew that a series of baffling and seemingly unrelated incidents would then occur which would culminate in Leith urbanely walking off with the loot under such circumstances that the police would be just one jump behind.

At least we get a sense of Beaver’s motivations this time around:

Beaver lived in anticipation of the moment when Leith’s smoothworking mind would overlook a bet, and the police would not be that one jump behind. So far that had not happened. At times the police had been almost on Leith’s heels, but they had never quite caught up.

And so, of course, Leith takes the bait, issues the usual list of unusual object he will require, and goes out to hire the services of a woman with attractive legs.

This all culminates in the magic show which the variant title of this promises, and the difficulty with magic — especially when contrasted with crime and detective fiction — is that it requires no explanation: indeed, as Leith himself points out “I trust that you will remember that explanation destroys the mystery”. And so we get an extended sequence in the middle of this where, because it’s a magic show, Gardner can write whatever he likes without having to explain how any of it was achieved (the one attempt — describing the fish bowl — was unhelpful enough that I sort of wish he hadn’t bothered). And that’s fine if you’re watching a show which is all about spectacle, but it doesn’t really was when it’s the central event of a mystery story about a lightning-brained super thief whose ingenuity is supposed to be laid out for the reader’s admiration.

A few interesting glimmers retain Gardner’s sharpness, like the notion that a man might have given his secretary the night off when the original theft occurred because he knew a theft was going to take place and wanted to spare her being an object of suspicion, but on the whole this feels like one of the padding stories that must inevitably exist when you’ve written 60 of them at high speed to satisfy the cravings of a pulp market. Read in isolation it wouldn’t feel cheap, but against the stronger entries in this volume it stands out to my eye, plotted with less ingenious acumen than the others, divested of any singular clever notion that cleverly misleads the reader…it’s mostly a lot of chat, a bit of smoke and mirrors, and then Leith (spoilers?) getting away with it once again. All fine, but we’ve already seen better elsewhere.

And, in fact, now I think about it…how does he profit this time around? We’re told that Scuttle knows that after each theft “one of Leith’s charities would be enhanced by the exact amount which Leith had received for the sale of the loot, less 20 per cent which the police shrewdly suspected was retained by Leith as the costs of collection”, and at the end a note stating that the necklace has been returned to its owners “less 20 per cent for costs of collection”…but how do you take 20% of the value from a physical object? He did remove a fifth of the pearls? Have I missed something?

Lester Leith, then, represents an interesting sideline in Gardner’s seemingly-bottomless output: as seems fairly common for a Gardner hero he’s whip smart, quick with a quip, and entirely uninterested in what those around him think of him (c.f. Perry Mason, Donald Lam), and yet, unlike the likes of Mason, Lam, and Doug Selby there’s absolutely no hint of romance or sexual attraction about the man, despite his repeated habit of hiring attractive young women to act in his schemes (Lam, for one, would have had them pawing him inside a minute). The few times there is any sense of Leith finding a woman attractive, it’s almost like it’s being done to salve that particular lady’s ego, rather than because he gets any joy from it…and it’s interesting, especially in the titillation-rich pulps, to see this seam so firmly repeated in these five stories. Maybe that’s a coincidence, and the other fifty-five have him acting as pure Lothario…but I doubt it.

A second Leith collection — the wonderfully-titled Hot Cash, Cold Clews (2020) — was published recently by Crippen & Landru, and on this basis I’d be interested in tracking a copy down to follow more of the character’s escapades. Rest assured, I’m a long way from being done with Gardner and his creations yet; plenty more will follow.