Murder of the Pigboat Skipper: A Sheridan Doome Mystery
By Steve Fisher
As chief detective for U.S. Naval Intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Sheridan Doome’s job was a grim one. Whenever an extraordinary mystery or crime occurred in the fleet, on a naval base, or anywhere the navy worked to protect American interests, Doome was immediately dispatched to investigate it. Fear and dread would always precede Doome’s arrival in his special black airplane. An explosion during WWI had left Doome monstrously disfigured. Much of his skin had been burned away, leaving his head and face an expressionless bone-white lump of scar tissue. But behind the ugliness was a brilliant mind. Sheridan Doome always got his man.
Before Sheridan Doome became a staple in the pages of The Shadow magazine, two Doome hardcover mysteries were written in the mid-1930’s by acclaimed hard-boiled author Steve Fisher (I Wake Up Screaming) and edited by his wife Edythe Seims (Dime Detective, G-8 and His Battle Aces). Murder of the Pigboat Skipper was originally published as the first in Hillman-Curl’s new Clue Club Mystery series which would publish outstanding novels by distinguished writers each month.
The original dust jacket sets the plot:
The band played, people said goodbye, and with the whispering notes of “Auld Lang Syne†choking in the downpour of rain, the little submarine moved through wind-swept Pearl Harbor carrying aboard men to whom she was to be mother and devil . . . Ashore, watching as she disappeared, was the pale young man who could not forget his past, the man who said: “Fools, they are fools. . .â€
Then . . . with cataclysmic 
abruptness comes the horror of murder . . . Skipper Rex Brandon dead! The pig boat called back, and Sheridan Doome of the Naval Intelligence is summoned to the islands to probe the mystery. A host of people move before his light of suspicion: Maggie Millaradscoba, the rooming house hag; the victim’s flirtatious wife; jaunty Tim Sanders; unhappy lieutenant Leo Masters; beautiful Sally Benson; and the debutante who waits on tables . . . all with their own stories, in a drama of tropic nights, and a chain of murders which has its beginning on a submarine.
It is a tale well told and the reader will find a new sort of pleasure and a new sort of detective who is bound to intrigue!
Age of Aces Books had originally present this title along with Fisher’s other hardcover Sheridan Doome story Murder of the Admiral as a special Age of Aces Double Flip book. Murder of the Pigboat Skipper is the second in this series.