Lester del Rey's Uncle and THE SCALES OF JUSTICE
After gaining some good traction on how Del Rey Books brilliantly marketed a so-so fantasy novel, I’ve figured out that blog posts on long forgotten novels are the key to internet fame. So, let's milk this cow dry!
Today's entry: Dr. George L. Knapp and The Scales of Justice (1910). For the record, this is not an SFF novel ... but, naturally, it has a heavy biographical connection to fantasy.
You see, George Knapp was uncle to Lester del Rey -- and a hugely influential uncle, at that. In 1931, Uncle George offered to finance his nephew's education at George Washington University, even putting the kid up in his own house, despite (probably) never having met Lester in person. Nor was George Knapp especially close to his half-brother, Lester's father Wright, either. (**If you're wondering at the names, Lester was originally "Leonard Knapp.")
Overall, he published a dozen books, non-fiction and novels alike, mainly for younger readers. But his first novel, The Scales of Justice, is thoroughly adult, and it's actually quite good .... I breezed through it in just two days. Overall, Scales is a witty and gripping potboiler that features a heroic journalist named Arthur Kern -- a guy who looks suspiciously like Dr. Knapp himself (see picture) -- and who winds up battling rampant fin de siècle police corruption while nominally attempting to solve a murder.
This journalist protagonist, Arthur Kern, is your typical Tough Guy hero. He's always ready with a snappy comeback while jawing back-and-forth with villains, and don't you mess with his killer left hook, either. The murder victim is some random plutocrat named Harteley -- a real dastard of a fella, and given Knapp's Progressive Era sympathies (he thought strike-breakers the scum of the earth), Kern oddly isn't too broke-up about Harteley's murder.
Unfortunately, the victim's daughter, Miss Harteley, is a true peach of a gal, so there's hints of an incipient romance ... but that doesn't stop Kern from saying, "[Yeah], my sympathies are with the criminal at least half the time" (111).
Anyway, why does our Tough Guy journalist hero sympathize with the baddies? Because they're at least honest about their criminal activity, which is more than you can say about City Hall ... and, inter alia, the Boys in Blue.
Seriously: the police are corrupt as hell. Just imagine any old-timey police force from old gangster movies -- The Godfather's a good one -- and you're halfway there. As often as not, the police are extorting the criminal underworld rather than mitigating their abuses. Here’s a short laundry list of felonies the police in Scales are guilty of:
- Election stealing. They strong-arm criminals in the Under World into voting for their preferred candidates, and round up opponent clerks into the paddy wagon come election day. (p. 69)
Worse, ole' Billy Brown of Brown County, the police lieutenant, is an old pro at ballot stuffing. On why the mayor don't get rid of him, despite various unsavory accusations:
Billy cast seven hundred and nineteen straight ballots that election in a precinct that never contained a hundred legal voters. Talent like that can’t be turned adrift because of a trifling dispute about an attempted murder. (21)
Notably, Knapp’s description of election-stealing tactics c.1910 is probably 100% correct. In Edward Keating’s memoir, The Gentleman from Colorado (1964), he tells one story about introducing his friend, who's then researching Scales, to Frank J. Medina, an amateur poet who also worked actively in machine politics for the Democratic party. “Frank counted on his fingers—one two, three, four, five .... [and then] described to Dr. Knapp the correct way to steal an election” (Keating 319).
For my more honest readers out there, Keatings's joke is that Medina needed to determine the statute of limitations for activities past.
Anyway, as terrible as ballot stuffing is, The Scales of Justice has a bigger target:
- Police corruption, brutality, and the “third degree.”
About halfway through the novel, Kern basically stops caring about Harteley's murder, and instead he works at exonerating Kid Brace, an ex-con on whom the police are trying to pin the rap.
And the police, let us say, aren't particularly keen on the gentler arts of verbal persuasion. For recalcitrant criminals who simply refuse -- out of pure cussedness, mind you -- to confess to murders they didn't commit, the police prefer a more direct approach. I.e., beat the shit out of them until they sign whatever paper you lay in front of them.
Thus, the “third degree” isn’t just sweating some poor slob under the interrogation lamp. It’s explicit police torture.
If Knapp’s political target seems dated, remember, that's probably because the Progressive Era won its political battles so thoroughly. We take those successes for granted, even if they needed a few more decades to bear total fruition. (If you remember the old Al Pacino movie Serpico during the 1970s, that helped create Internal Affairs for police departments.)
It's hard to recall, too, just how corrupt old-time police departments used to be. For instance, Knapp keeps returning to the allegedly "optional" aspect of the Fifth Amendment:
[The] provision of the law which declares that a man may not be compelled to testify against himself is a dead letter in nine police departments out of ten. (152)
So, the police beat a false confession out Kid Brace, and it looks like he's up the river. With 19th-century forensic techniques, you have two ways of proving your innocence. First, an alibi. Second, find a citizen in good standing to vouch for your character. Problem is, Kid Brace don't have a good character nor an alibi. That's mostly why, besides convenience, the police target him.
Enter the heroic journalist. He gets a lawyer, Mr. Landis, to basically destroy Mike Evans and Billy Brown, the two main policemen, on cross-examination during trial. The jury eventually returns a verdict of non-guilty. Hooray!
So Knapp gives us a happy ending, and he even reinforces the (apparently radical) viewpoint that just because a guy has a prior criminal record doesn't mean he should go to prison for stuff he didn't do. Even if it is convenient for City Hall.
Despite "merely" being a potboiler, then, The Scales of Justice also becomes a solid turn-of-the-century political novel ... and all written by the man, George L. Knapp, who gave his nephew Lester del Rey a much-needed leg up during the height of the Great Depression.
(Btw, here's another target for Knapp: rewards. The innocent Miss Harteley offers a reward for any information leading to a suspect in her father's murder, but this, Knapp implies, only leads to people being falsely accused for the reward money.)
At this point, there's only one thing missing: who the hell did murder that crass old plutocrat, Harteley?
Well, that’s the twist, folks. The murderer is none other than ... our heroic reporter himself, Arthur Kern.
In Knapp's final chapter, we get a long letter from Kern admitting to the deed, but he has Very Good Reasons. You see, as a dastardly villain, Harteley had done dastardly things ... and that includes hoodwinking Kern's father, stealing all his money, and causing poor dad to kill himself. Kern then spent the next several years seeking vengeance, which he eventually gets.
But sadness (!), because now the reader realizes why our hero can’t marry Miss Harteley. Cuz despite the killing, Kern is still a Stand-up Guy, and we're fully supposed to sympathize with him.
Granted, in narrative terms, I think Knapp's twist is merely so-so, but at least it reinforces his message about plutocrats being rat bastards. Arthur Kern is like Boondock Saints for the Progressive Era. And for anyone interested in a formative influence on Lester del Rey, the godfather of modern genre fantasy, a close look at George L. Knapp wouldn't hurt.
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