The Time Capsule | Roy Marshall

 

Four years ago in this column, we wrote of a book that would include reference to Montgomery County, a book I felt history and mystery buffs would find interesting. It was scheduled for release in 2014.

Curt Ladnier, an Alabama resident and author, tells me the delay has been the result of several events, including the discovery of additional material. Publication is now on for late next month. 

Ladnier has spent years researching the life and times of Jack Boyle, who arrived in this area in the summer of 1915. He was an ex-con with a lengthy rap sheet. He was also an alcoholic, a reporter, a drug addict, a writer of short stories, and an apparent bigamist. One of his arrests was for violation of the Mann Act, a charge that resulted when he took two girls, one under the age of consent, across a state line for the purpose, the report read, of “debauchery.”   He claimed this was a frame-up, and Ladnier thinks he has a point. Some of the crimes hung on him, in Ladnier’s opinion, were not his. 

Boyle came here as a crime reporter with the Kansas City Post, his purpose to obtain information on a three-year-old multiple homicide in Villisca. Most readers know that part of story; are aware of the unhealthy alliance a creative reporter formed with a corrupt private detective. Ladnier tells me he makes reference to the bizarre events that unfolded while Boyle helped construct a case; a case The Post exploded in a sensational story picked up by other papers throughout the Midwest and beyond. That, however, is not the focus of Ladnier’s book. 

A year before Boyle started stirring things here, a short story he had written was published in The American magazine. He had contrived the plot while in prison and submitted it with a pen name, “6606.”  This had been his penitentiary inmate number. The main character was a glorified version of himself; a hardened criminal and addict who would evolve, as the stories continued, into a crafty private detective with a heart of gold. He was Boston Blackie. 

James Newton Wilkerson, the Burns detective assigned to the Villisca case, referred to Boyle as a “writer of the premier class.” Others agreed. While I find his writing difficult--overstated, sentimental and circuitous—that was the style of many at the time. He was apparently working on stories while here, as several were released soon after he left. He quit the newspaper in December of 1916, was arrested on a drug charge about a month later, and left the area to focus on Boston Blackie. 

Boyle sold stories to Redbook and Cosmopolitan. The first movie was made in 1918. A book, a compilation of Boyle’s short stories, followed. There were more movies, silent films to talkies, then a radio series. By the early 1950s Boston Blackie, by then a Hollywood detective with a convertible and highly intelligent German shepherd, became a TV series. 

As the character he created rose in fame, moving from magazines to movies, Boyle, unable to overcome his addictions, withdrew. By the mid-1920s, his publishers had no idea where he was, how to reach him. For decades, neither editors nor researchers knew when or where Boyle was born or died, where he was between intermittent jobs and prison terms, and next to nothing about the women in his life. 

Ladnier’s research fills the gaps. If his book is as good as the excerpts I’ve read, he should do very well. 

Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.

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