Static and Spirits: Anarchic Airwaves, Prohibition, and the Return of Philo Gubb, Correspondence School “Deteckative”

As I said, I had no idea that Ellis Parker Butler or Philo Gubb had anything to say on the subject.  Even before I chanced upon the radio angle, though, I felt pleased to meet Mr. Gubb, however belatedly.  Decades of relative neglect and near oblivion had made the Correspondent School “Deteckative” a prime candidate for appreciation in a journal largely devoted, as broadcastellan has been since 2005, to erstwhile popular culture presumably past its sell-by date.

Regarding those “circuitous routes”: I was heading back to Wales after a mystery-filled holiday in Devon.  As secretly planned by my partner in crime, the tour began with a sea tractor ride to Burgh Island, where Agatha Christie wrote two of her best-known novels—And Then There Were None (1939) and Evil Under the Sun (1941)—and where I, along with other guests staying at the Burgh Island Hotel, was tasked with solving a case of murder.  I failed.

Then it was off to Torquay, where Christie was born, and to nearby Greenway, her summer home, which served as a setting for Dead Man’s Folly (1956).  I duly purchased a copy of the novel on location, even though I had read it more than once and remembered a central element of the plot: I mean, literally and architecturally, the “plot.”

I shall probably say more about my visit to Greenway in a subsequent entry in this journal.  Suffice it to say for now that the novel, published when the so-called golden age whodunit was felt and, by some, argued to be past its prime—a time when spy stories and private eye thrillers were on the rise—seems to comment, obliquely and self-consciously, on the datedness of its design, introducing cold-war references to its structure as if they were mere detailing.

Reflective of a quarter century in the business of mystery, Dead Man’s Folly—featuring Ariadne Oliver, a stand-in for its author—is concerned with the archaeology of a crime.  But what about the archaeology of crime fiction?

From the late 1920s onwards, Christie was such a towering figure that she, Poirot and Miss Marple gradually overshadowed, eventually outlived and ultimately put to rest, many of the detectives that had cornered the crowded market of crime fiction in her youth, by which time the genre was already so well established that parodies such as the misadventures of Philo Gubb abounded—no matter how long it would take me to catch up with them.

Catching up I finally did.  Returning to Wales via Bristol, I paid a visit to The Last Bookshop, where I caught sight of and purchased American Sherlocks and The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, two anthologies of gaslight-era detective stories, the former of which contains “Philo Gubb’s Greatest Case.”

The concluding story of a Philo Gubb anthology published in 1918, “Philo Gubb’s Greatest Case”—although far from being Gubb’s last—was reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in March 1943, the fifth in a series titled “The League of Forgotten Men.”  Apparently, popular though Gubb had been a quarter century earlier, the “forgotten” one did not rival the longevity of the detective among whose rivals he has been named.

Around 1921, Gubb could be seen sleuthing in a series of comedy two-reelers such as “The Hound of the Tankervilles,” based on one of Butler’s stories and starring Victor Potel, who later played minor roles in a number of Preston Sturges films. “The Hound of the Tankervilles” was first published in October 1916, though, and Butler seems to have closed the book on his bumbling amateur investigator before the USA entered the Great War in April 1917.

The last and, by my count, thirty-seventh of the Philo Gubb stories to be published, beginning in May 1913, in The Red Book magazine (or Redbook, as it was later called), appeared in January 1917.  An anthology of seventeen Gubb adventures was published the following year.  

According to Butler, parting with Gubb paid off: “My income from Philo Gubb for the year 1931 was greater than I received from Philo Gubb in any one year when the stories were first published,” he wrote in an article that appeared in Writer’s Digest in November 1932.

Meanwhile, Butler had kept writing. In tune with—or, rather, tuned into—the zeitgeist, he soon caught up with a craze that captured the imagination of an audience apparently—and, from the perspective of a published author no doubt alarmingly—eager to turn away from the printed page and go in search of sounds instead.

Butler began telling wireless tales.  That is, stories about radio rather than scripts designed to be broadcast.  Beginning in January 1923, a decade after Gubb first came onto the crime scene in a delightfully Runyonesque caper titled “The Hard-Boiled Egg,” Butler contributed monthly to Radio News magazine, writing amusing vignettes such as “Mr. Murchison’s Radio Party,” “Mr. Brownlee’s Loudtalker,” and “Casey’s High-Voltage Cat.” Then, in September 1923, Philo Gubb obliquely found his way back into the pulps, via Radio News, in “The McNoodle Brothers’ Radio Mystery.”  

The years between the two World Wars provided Butler with plenty of material for crime to beget chuckles, and he had a knack for making the most of the confounding and riotous now for his stories. “The McNoodle Brothers’ Radio Mystery” comments both on the effects of the Volstead Act—Prohibition, that is—and the anarchic days of unregulated wireless activity prior to the Radio Act of 1927.

The story sidelines Philo Gubb in favor of his neighbor, Orone McNoodle.  McNoodle is a “radio fan,” and, Butler quips, “everyone knows that radio fans are the meekest and sweetest people in existence.”  

In this passage, Butler captures—and mocks—the public’s fascination with radiophony.  For the enthusiast, the ether could elevate any sound to the sublime heights of mystery and revelation:

Orone was the sort of radio fan who took everything that came, and enjoyed it because it came out of the air.  He would sit before his loud-speaker and accept a bedtime story about Sammy Mud-turtle and a whang-bang jazz piece entitled “Mamma’s Bunion Kept Papa Awake Last Night,” and a lecture on Mah Jong, and the time signal, and a Philharmonic recital, and the shouts of somebody selling autographed theatre programs, and never utter a peep.  Anything that was radio was radio and he accepted it as such.  A kiss or a kick or a rotten egg were all the same to him as long as they came through his loud-speaker.

As it turns out, Orone is rather more discriminating.  Instead of taking in “anything” that goes out on the ether, as intended, he is listening out for interferences.  He is static collector.  I suppose that is the wireless equivalent of a trainspotter.

Orone not only hunts down unusual static on the air, he also records it:

He had eighty-six distinct and different varieties of zizzes, and forty-two kinds of howls, and nineteen kinds of zangs, and he had pips and pops and zurrs and wees and one splendid whang that he got one night in a thunder storm when the lightning struck his barn and burned out his lightning arrester.

Going further, Orone McNoodle tries to increase his chances of coming across new sounds in static. Sounds crazier than the radio craze? Well, it does to Gubb, who did not enjoy the benefit of exposure to Nam June Paik.

Now, Gubb’s one-eyed housekeeper, Betsy Phipps, who observes the goings-on in the neighbor’s house, suspects McNoodles and his brother Fenix of being “bootleggers and moonshiners and makers of hard liquor.” Rightly, as it turns out.

And yet, when Gubb and a posse of officials inspect the premises, McNoodle convinces them that he is merely installing an “arial” in his basement to enhance his collection of hisses.  

After Gubb’s departure, Orone’s brother Fenix steps out of the shadows to inquire whether the officious intruders discovered the hooch in the basement.  “No.” Orone replies with glee. “They stopped digging when they came to the underground aerial.”

“And that’s the end,” the narrator declares, only to add:

And all I have to say is that there was no excuse for Philo Gubb not being even more suspicious.  He should have known.  When any man really likes static he needs looking into.  There’s something wrong with him.

Be that as it may, the McNoodles get away with it.

While it does not live up to Gubb’s debut in “The Hard-Boiled Egg”—and Gubb does not get much along the “deteckative” line of work to do in it—“The McNoodle Brothers’ Radio Mystery” ingeniously aligns the public’s preoccupation—and frustration—with wireless technology with the intrigue of gangsterdom in the age of Prohibition, conjoining both, like Siamese twins on a monophonic bender.

Now, while Philo Gubb does not seem to have conquered the regulated airwaves that, in the 1940s, would feature the adventures of his namesake, Philo Vance, Ellis Parker Butler was heard on the air expounding in a “pallophotophoned” (that is, recorded) talk on “Some Facts about Humor.”  

Pallophotophoned? The term stumped readers even back then. As Radio News reported in January 1924, “Some folks not as up-to-date on radio as they should be immediately wanted to know if the humorist would recover.”

Well, he did. Butler died in 1937; Gubb returned once more in 1934, when he solved “The Sword-Swallower Murder,” published in the November issue of Leatherneck magazine.  Ten years before Butler’s death, one particularly tall radio tale, “Solander’s Radio Tomb,” appeared in Amazing Stories magazine, perhaps to foretell Butler’s now lost legacy. After all, if you keep going on about the wireless, you might as well be dead. I learned that the hard way—but apparently I learned nothing at all.

Not that I knew anything about Gubb or Butler before I sauntered into The Last Bookshop on that bright afternoon in May 2025 in Bristol.  And that, to my dilettante mind, is just how it ought to be.