The Radio Red Killer. Richard A. Lupoff
BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY RICHARD A. LUPOFF
The Adventures of Professor Thintwhistle & His Incredible Aether Flyer (with Steve Stiles)
Killer’s Dozen: Thirteen Mystery Tales
Lisa Kane: A Novel of Werewolves
Sacred Locomotive Flies
Sword of the Demon
THE LINDSEY & PLUM DETECTIVE SERIES
1. The Comic Book Killer
2. The Classic Car Killer
3. The Bessie Blue Killer
4. The Sepia Siren Killer
5. The Cover Girl Killer
6. The Silver Chariot Killer
7. The Radio Red Killer
8. The Emerald Cat Killer
9. One Murder at a Time: The Casebook of Lindsey & Plum
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1997, 2013 by Richard A. Lupoff
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Doris Riley,
Myra Ferguson,
& Patricia Bush
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Readers familiar with earlier novels in my “Killer” series will recall that the preceding six books were all narrated from the viewpoint of Hobart Lindsey, a commercial insurance investigator. Having done some of that work myself, I felt reasonably confident in writing about it.
But with The Radio Red Killer, the viewpoint shifts to Sergeant Marvia Plum of the Berkeley Police Department. And what the heck do I know about police procedure? True, I put in a little time in the military police (as did Marvia), but that was long ago and far away, and my training in the proper method of guarding prisoners of war or of directing traffic at a crossroads is a far cry from learning how a detective tracks down a killer at large in an American city.
Thanks to the Citizen Police Academy conducted by the Berkeley Police Department, I now know a little bit about the world of police and the way a modern police force works. A thousand questions arose in the course of writing The Radio Red Killer, ranging from when and how an officer is required to Mirandize a subject to where the leftover dinner of a poisoning victim is sent for analysis.
My thanks to Sergeant Steve Odom and the faculty of the academy and to the entire BPD for their patience, concern, and all-around helpfulness. I know I didn’t get everything right, but their assistance helped me reduce the number of errors by a sizable percentage. One point that I got wrong “on purpose” concerns the parking facility at the Hall of Justice in Berkeley. There is no room in the parking lot for officers to leave their personal cars while they’re on duty. Thus, they have to park the better part of a mile away and walk to and from the hall. If only in a work of fiction, I spared them this chore.
My special thanks to Officer Jeff Katz, who started as my ride-along host and became my fast friend. He is typical of the intelligent, dedicated patrol officers and detectives I have met, and we are all better off to be served by men and women of his ilk. His contribution to this manuscript is incalculable. To the extent that its portrayal of police work is accurate and authentic, he deserves full credit. To the extent that any errors remain, chalk them up to my obtuseness, or better yet, to dramatic license.
Yes, dramatic license sounds a lot better than obtuseness.
And to any reader who ever gets mad at a cop—I know I have, and sometimes still do—all I have to suggest is, try walking a mile in their shoes. You have a lot to learn!
Radio station KRED and the Oceana Foundation are totally fictitious, as are all of KRED’s staff and on-air personalities. My own first experience in radio came as a news-writer for WIOD in Miami, Florida, in 1955. My boss and mentor was news director Gene Struhl. Less than a year later I was off to the army and never saw the inside of WIOD’s studios again. But in the few months I worked in that newsroom, Gene instilled in me a love for the medium that burns brightly to this day. In the years since I left WIOD, listeners’ ears in New York, Kansas City, Los Angeles and San Francisco have been assaulted by my silvery voice. From 1977 to 1997 I appeared regularly on KPFA in Berkeley, California.
Any resemblance between KPFA and its parent, the Pacifica Foundation, and KRED and its parent, the Oceana Foundation, is of course purely coincidental.
My thanks for Mr. Richard Brown and Mr. Harvey Jordan of dba Brown Records in Oakland, California, for guidance and information in the field of historic recordings. And my thanks to Mr. William Pfeiffer, the Old Time Radio Digest and its members, and to many generous old-time radio collectors for their assistance in developing Lon Dayton’s OTR program for KRED.
A final, special word of thanks to Ms. Carolyn Wheat, who proved to me that an old dog can still learn new tricks, and without whose wonderful advice The Radio Red Killer would have stalled somewhere around Chapter Six.
—Richard A. Lupoff
1997
INTRODUCTION
by Jim Harmon
Dick Lupoff often been said to have been at the leading edge of various waves of popular culture. He was among the earliest writers of serious ability to be interested in comic books as a fun part of the arts. He produced fan magazines and books on the subject, including his first mystery novel, The Comic Book Killer.
Other interests like Edgar Rice Burroughs, boys’ books from the start of the century, and the mystery genre in general were reflected in his output.
In this latest entry to his growing mystery list, The Radio Red Killer, Richard A. Lupoff offers a story involving a man who is a self-styled authority on Old Time Radio, who is at once hilariously insane and crunchingly poor. For this book, he offered me money to write the introduction, to take a break from writing my latest book concerning radio history, Boxtop Premiums on Radio and TV. He knows where to go for what he writes about.
The OTR program host, Lon Dayton, is only one of many remarkable characters, liberals, fascists, jazz musicians, hillbillies, to broadcast from fictional Radio Red—KRED—in the Bay area. One real radio station with an all inclusive philosophy in the Berkeley area, KPFA, carried an old-time radio program hosted by this writer for a time. The show originated at KPFK, North Hollywood, and lasted for several more years than its brief outing on sister station KPFA.
I observed only some of the political in-fighting Lupoff describes while I was there at the similar KPFK, but my biggest battle was over the type of splicing tape I used editing my masters.
It was Dick Lupoff who gave the audience the mixture of wit and personality that kept him on the air on KPFA for a record twenty years covering books and authors, probably some from radio, the medium that depended on the word.
An ear for correct dialogue is always useful for a writer. You not only have to put in good stuff, but throw out the bad. Hemingway called it a “shit detector.” Lupoff certainly has one, not only for his own characters in his story, but for the dialogue in the old radio programs he creates for oleo pieces to accompany his play. You will hear echoes of Gabriel Heatter, Jack Armstrong, Bob Crosby, Corliss Archer—echoes from a vanished world.
Dick has said I inspired him to actually go out and do professional things in what had been a hobby. I had a number of science fiction stories in print, and one article on comic books in a fan magazine before he did, but Dick has gone much farther than I have. He spent seven times more years at his radio station than I did. He has written more novels than I have chapters in my books such as The Great Radio Heroes. My latest venture is producing and performing in brand new commercial episodes of such radio classics as Tom Mix and I Love a Mystery. Dick