The Casebook of Sidney Zoom

Introduction

Among the two-score series characters created by Erle Stanley Gardner for the pulp magazines of the 20s and 30s were such colorful and colorfully named individuals as Ed Migrane, the Headache Detective, Speed Dash, the Human Fly, Señor Lobo (whose exploits will appear in the next volume in this series), The Man in the Silver Mask, Go Get ’Em Garver, and Fish Mouth McGinnis. None, however were more unique, well-developed, or eccentric in name and nature than Sidney Zoom, the Master of Disguises.

Zoom is a strange, complex man, a true rugged individualist. Tall, slender, purposeful, cultured, independently wealthy, possessed of fierce hawklike eyes and a dominant, aggressive personality, he lives on an expensive yacht, the Alberta F., with a tawny police dog named Rip and a devoted young secretary, Vera Thurmond. He is a loner by nature, adopting a hardboiled manner with women that borders on the rude — a pose, Vera Thurmond suspects, because he is secretly afraid of the female sex. He “hates civilization and all it stands for,” believing instead in the sanctity of the individual; “scoffs at laws which sought to curb crime and safeguard property rights” and has his own ideas of how to balance the scales of justice. His mission is to right wrongs, to “live for good” by rescuing would-be suicides and other downtrodden individuals and providing them with new leases on life. He refers to himself, in all seriousness, as a Doctor of Despair, a Collector of Lost Souls.

Disguises of one sort or another figure prominently in all of his adventures. He maintains a large closet filled with wigs, mustaches, spectacles, hats, coats, beards, grease paint, stains, and other methods of altering his identity. His reputation as a carefree man about town is another masquerade, carefully established and nurtured to conceal his mission and the fact that he once served in the intelligence departments of three nations.

The Zoom series, a total of sixteen short stories and novelettes, ran in Detective Fiction Weekly between March 1930 and May 1934. The ten collected here, all reprinted for the first time, represent the best of these tales. Each demonstrates Gardner’s remarkable skill at finding new twists on staple pulp storylines involving stolen jewelery and artworks, confidence swindles, hidden fortunes, missing wills, disappearing bodies, murder frames, and the like. The stories also make clever use of disguises as integral plot devices, and contain plenty of swift action as the pulp markets of the day required.

Eccentric though he may be, Sidney Zoom ranks as one of the most interesting early characters to come from Gardner’s fertile imagination. It’s a pleasure to introduce him to modern readers after three-quarters of a century of dusty and undeserved obscurity.

Petaluma, California

June 2005