BLACK MASK Stories I’m Reading: C. P. DONNEL, JR. “The Fourth Degree.”

C. P. DONNEL, JR. “The Fourth Degree.” Duc Rennie #2, First appeared in Black Mask, February 1941. Reprinted in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, December 1953. I don’t know very much about C, P. Donnel, Jr., the teller of this tale, nor his hero Doc Rennie. I believe in fact that this is my first time reading anything by the author. In a post on his Pulpflakes blog, Sai Shankar tells us that Donnel (1906-1977) was “a crime reporter on the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot for a decade before switching to writing fiction.” He wrote several dozen stories for the better detective pulp magazines in the 40s, of which 14 or 15 were Doc Rennie yarns. We don’t learn much about Rennie in “The Fourth Degree,” but elsewhere on the Internet, I discovered a short squib (since lost) describing him as a psychiatrist, perhaps retired or perhaps working for the government. He lives now is a small rural town where he helps he local sheriff solve the cases he comes across. (It is the latter who tells the…