Leopold's Way Read Free Page B

with the New York City Police Department. In the late 1950s he returned to head the city’s Homicide Squad. He had married several years earlier but the ten-year relationship shattered a few years after he accepted the Monroe position, and he never saw his wife again until her tragic reunion with him in “The Leopold Locked Room” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, October 1971). After the divorce he lives an exceptionally lonely life, drowning his solitude in work. His one serious affair of the ’60s comes to an end when he has to arrest the woman for murder in “The Rusty Rose” (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May 1966.) Thereafter his only pleasures in life are the solitary satisfactions of smoking and reading. By the late ’60s he’s fighting to kick the tobacco habit, as were countless Americans who were frightened by the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report, and apparently he licks it at last. But he remains as avid a reader as ever, referring at various times to Chesterton, Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Oscar Wilde, Hemingway and Le Carré among others. In the tales of the ’70s he’s described as “middle-aged and stocky,” but gratifyingly enough, feminism and the sexual revolution enrich his emotional life as he encounters a number of younger professional women. With policewoman Connie Trent, who enters the saga in “Captain Leopold Gets Angry” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1973) and presently holds the rank of Detective Sergeant, he is clearly tempted to have more than a working relationship, but he resists for the same reason that he won’t bring his personal auto to be washed at the police garage, and forces himself to think of her only as the daughter he never had. His relationship with pathologist Dr. Lawn Gaylord, whom he first meets in “Captain Leopold Looks for the Cause” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, November 1977), is less inhibited but leads nowhere. His luck improves with defense attorney Molly Calendar, whom he first encounters in “Captain Leopold Beats the Machine” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1983) and who becomes the second Mrs. Leopold at the close of “Finding Joe Finch” ( Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1984). Whether this marriage will work out or run into snags like that of another divorced police captain with a beautiful defense attorney who are the Thursday evening favorites of millions of televiewers (including Ed and Pat Hoch), only time will tell.
    In many respects the Leopold stories mirror the development of American social concerns over the past quarter century. There’s a clear line of evolution, for example, from the primitive brutalizing tactics of Mat Slater in the pre- Miranda days of “Circus” to the quiet professional interrogations of suspects in the later tales, and another evolution in Leopold’s attitude towards women from the early years when he says flat out that their function is to stay home and have babies to the affirmative action decade when he comes to accept the opposite sex not only in his personal life but in the police department. But not every detail in the lives of Leopold and the other continuing characters of the saga is worked out in advance. Indeed the Leopold stories are like virtually every other long-running series—including the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Hopalong Cassidy, Ellery Queen, Nero Wolfe, and my own modest creations—in being strewn with inconsistencies that reflect the author’s forgetfulness or changes of mind or both. Some of those in the Leopolds can readily be explained away. In the early “Death in the Harbor” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1962) the captain’s office is on the upper floor of a high-rise headquarters building, and in “Reunion” (The Saint Mystery Magazine, December 1964) and all