The Whispering Master

by Frank Gruber

Amateur detectives Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg are up to their necks in back bills, madly trying to parlay bank accounts, rubber checks and pawn tickets into cold, lovely, welcome cash. With their luck running true to form, they hit a loaded jackpot. They're called in to solve a murder in the very hotel from which they are in danger of being evicted.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

Frank Gruber was an enormously prolific author of pulp fiction. A stalwart contributor to Black Mask magazine, he also wrote novels, producing as many as four a year during the 1940s. His best-known character was Oliver Quade, “the Human Encyclopedia,” whose adventures were collected in Brass Knuckles (1966), and will soon be republished in ebook format as Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia,featuring brand-new material, from MysteriousPress.com, Open Road Integrated Media, and Black Mask magazine.

Reviews

[Randy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Johnny Fletcher and Sam Craig get caught up in a murder, as always, involving a master recording of a popular singer's last song before his death in a plane crash.

Someone is willing to kill for it and while Johnny has a love of a fast buck, he also has a sense of honor and wants to solve the young woman's murder even though it could bring his check kiting scheme down around his ears.

[Tyson Cocks · Rating 3 out of 5]

The characters are fun, but I wasn’t invested in the trousers subplot and it felt like there was more focus on that than the mystery.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

Between 1940 and 1964, Frank Gruber penned a series of 14 mystery novels featuring Johnny Fletcher and Sam Cragg as small time hucksters who were always short of cash but were also amateur sleuths with a knack for solving mysteries and criminal cases. The Whispering Master, published in 1956, is the 13th book in the series. In this episode, Johnny and Sam are engaged in a cheque kiting operation to raise funds and avoid being evicted from their hotel in New York. A murder takes place in the hotel room opposite their window and an important piece of evidence comes into their possession. From this point forward the story is a description of both their cheque kiting activities and their efforts to identify the murderer and solve a mystery surrounding the master copy of a phonograph record.

Frank Gruber was a seasoned pro when it came to cranking out these kinds of novels and this one is certainly a well written and entertaining mystery. Fletcher and Cragg are different types but likeable characters. The plot moves along at a quick pace with a few twists and turns, scattered episodes of violence and a lot of intuitive guesswork by Johnny Fletcher that invariably pays off. The mystery is resolved - though not necessarily on the basis of evidence or clues, which are few and far between. In this case, Gruber has not written a mystery for readers to solve themselves but rather a mystery that simply entertains. I found the story quite unusual; especially the cheque kiting operation. Also enjoyed the overall atmosphere and ambience, which to me felt very much like the 1930s or 1940s. Definitely an entertaining read! 3½ to 4 stars