Born in New York in 1913, Joseph Commings is today almost forgotten outside a diminishing circle of aficionados of impossible crime fiction. After a brief spell as a journalist, he began his sporadic and very varied writing career during the Second World War on overseas postings with the US Air Force. Initially, he wrote to entertain his comrades and, on being demobbed, he must have been delighted to find a ready market in the so-called ‘pulps’ such as Western Trails, Hollywood Detective, Mystery Digest and Killers Mystery Story Magazine. His crime fiction is characterised by undeniably improbable situations, unfeasibly trusting witnesses and extraordinarily clever solutions. In one story the murderer might appear to be a vampire and in another a giant, but what truly lifts his work out of the run of the mill is Commings’ sense of humour.
Commings’ best-known character is Brooks Urban Banner, a Senator in the Democratic party who is also a criminal lawyer and a practising magician. Banner is modelled very much in the style of John Dickson Carr’s heroic sleuth Dr Gideon Fell (himself inspired by G. K. Chesterton) and is ‘extra large’ in every sense: he weighs nearly 300 pounds, has a mop of shaggy white hair and dresses loudly. Fond of tall tales, the Senator claims to have had all manner of careers—including hobo, locksmith and comic book enthusiast—which provide some of the arcane knowledge that allows him to unravel the baffling mysteries with which he is confronted. While he doesn’t appear in any novel-length investigations, there are over thirty Banner short stories. Fifteen of these were gathered together by the late Bob Adey, the authority on impossible crime stories, and form the collection Banner Deadlines (Crippen & Landru, 2004); a second volume is forthcoming. Commings’ non-Banner stories—of which there are at least forty, some written under pseudonyms—are mostly mysteries, sometimes with an unusual setting, but none captures the eccentric genius of the Banner canon.
As a writer, Joe Commings is sometimes criticised for an overly frivolous approach to the business of murder. That was of course quite deliberate. In a letter to the New York Times Book Review, published in 1941, Commings protested that the vast majority of publishing houses were uninterested in publishing anything humorous and therefore unwilling to accept his ‘whimsical wares’. As he was unwilling to write in any another way his work remained largely confined to the pulps while a few novel-length manuscripts also failed to find a publisher.
In his fifties, Commings supplemented his income from crime fiction by writing pornographic paperbacks with titles like Man Eater (1965), Operation Aphrodite (1966) and Swinging Wives (1971), as well as a study of sex crimes whose aim seems to have been titillation more than education.
In the early 1970s, Joe Commings suffered a stroke and his writing career came to an end. He moved to a care home in Maryland where he died in 1992.
‘The Scarecrow Murders’ was originally published in 10-Story Detective magazine in April 1948.