On January 29, 2005, Hal Masur, still alive and doing reasonably well in Baton Raton, Florida, turned 96. For many years after moving there from New York, he was active in the Florida Chapter of Mystery Writers of America (MWA). His debut novel Bury Me Deep was published in 1947 by Simon & Schuster under their Inner Sanctum Mystery imprint. That same year Mickey Spillane’s hardboiled classic, I, the Jury, also hit the bookstands.

Spillane’s protagonist Mike Hammer might’ve well retained Masur’s Scott Jordan for his legal counsel. Jordan was certainly tough enough to keep up with Spillane. Scott Jordan, however, relied on his legal smarts, not his fists or handgun to push a case to its conclusion. Perhaps this lawyerly touch explains why Masur’s Jordan series has been mislabeled as “medium-boiled.”

Masur’s first novel has an interesting pedigree. The 1949 Pocket Books paper edition went through at least five printings. Dell Books reprinted Bury Me Deep softbound in 1957 with a cover by Victor Kalin. Bantam Books issued it in as a mass-market paperback in 1969.

More modern interest came when Otto Penzler brought out a reissue in 1984 in the William Morrow/Quill Mysterious Classic Series (McNally & Loftin published in the U.K.). This edition (probably the most widely available) features an alluring, half-dressed blonde poised on a pink sherbet armchair. Irving Freeman/Steve Macanga are credited for this cover design. The French Gallimard Séries Noires published it under the title Les pieds devant (1949 and 1973). The English first edition was in the American Bloodhound series from Boardman (1961).
Bury Me Deep also reached both the big and small screens. It was made into a 1963 Japanese movie titled “Watashi o fukaku umete”(Bury Me Deep) directed by Umeji Inoue (also the screenplay writer). A TV adaptation (The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen) aired on January 2, 1959 with a script by William Mourne using Masur’s plotline to star Ellery Queen. The show featured George Nader, Patrick McVey, Joanne Linville, and Richard Long.

Masur graduated from the New York University School of Law in 1934. He practiced law from 1935-1942 when he then served in the U.S. Air Force. Starting from the late 1930s, he honed his writing craft by publishing short stories in various pulp magazines like Argosy (1939), Popular Detective, (1941), and Detective Story Magazine (1949). He was also President of MWA (1973-74) and the recipient of MWA’s 1992 Raven Award (in part for his providing pro bono legal counsel to mystery writers).

Masur’s Scott Jordan series spanned nine novels and one short story collection over three decades, a respectable run. Comparisons of Scott Jordan to Erle Stanley Gardner’s contemporary legal eagle Perry Mason can’t be helped. Critics such as Art Scott draw distinct differences between the two sleuthing lawyers, citing Jordan’s more active investigative role. Masur commented on how he created the protagonist: “The series character, Scott Jordan, a New York attorney, was first conceived to fall somewhere between Perry Mason and Archie Goodwin . . . with the dash and insouciance of Rex Stout’s Archie.”

Bury Me Deep opens with Scott Jordan returning from Florida to his New York City apartment. He discovers a half-nude blonde (“bright jonquil-yellow hair”) on the sofa sipping brandy and batting her eyes at him. This attention-getting device does Spillane one better by frontloading the undressed babe (“She was wearing black panties and a black bra and that was all.”) in its pages instead of a striptease at the end. The trouble only begins for the weary lawyer when he ships her home in a cab and she winds up dead.

Scott Jordan, like many returning WW II vets, learned savvy survival skills from his war service. Early on the reader learns Jordan was “one of Donovan’s bright lads in the cloak-and-dagger department” and “studied law at night.” Later at the morgue Jordan says, “Death was old stuff to me. A few years ago the war had shown me death in wholesale quantities.”

Early in the series, Jordan forms an uneasy alliance with Lieutenant John Nola of NYC’s Homicide Bureau. The foundation is set in place for Jordan’s future murder mystery capers. From
page one, the reader is pitched headlong into the narrative’s conflict. Masur explained that “instead of being approached by prospective clients, Jordan would be himself involved in each case. And the reader, hopefully with the hero, would be thus drawn into the simmering kettle, intensifying interest and suspense.”

This Masur gambit had its competent success. Scott Jordan narrates this novel’s episodic structure in first person point of view. The heady pace, muscular prose, cryptic dialogue, and intelligent plotting represent all the classic hallmarks of the hardboiled fiction school. Art Scott finds “the Jordan novels are compact and fast-paced, the dialogue is crisp and convincing.”

What critics perhaps overlook is Masur’s evocative yet controlled prose style. For instance, he writes about New York City after-hours: “Broadway had pulsed into neon-glaring night life. Swollen throngs milled restlessly with a rapacious appetite for pleasure. Box-office windows spawned long queues, and the traffic din was a steady roar in your ears.” This same passage could’ve been just as easily lifted out of a Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, or O’Hara literary novel.

The premise behind Bury Me Deep is driven by a lawyer’s sensibility. Scott Jordan breaks it down in laymen’s terms. “Here are two married people in a common accident. It’s a question of survival. Suppose the wife died first. A dead person cannot inherit. Hence she could not take her husband’s estate and her heirs would be out in the cold. But if she survived him by one single instant, his estate goes to her, and on to her death to her relatives instead of his.”

A lot is at stake here. A half-million dollars in 1947 money, to be precise. Jordan is caught between the two combatant families out to grab it. Meantime, Jordan’s romantic interest is Dulcy, a twenty-two-year old socialite from Chicago with “bronze hair and blue eyes.” His falling in love is “like being caught in the propeller of a B-29.” Jordan stows a fifth of bourbon inside a hollowed out edition of Shakespeare’s plays. He keeps a “fairly good Luger” around the office. His flirty banter remains fresh if not droll (especially the sequence with Dulcy inside a nightclub) even read almost fifty years later.

Throughout the book, Jordan never sees the inside of a courtroom and very little of his law office. His secretary Cassidy (“plump, forty, and very efficient”) keeps things humming along there. Jordan appears honest though admits “almost any lawyer will flavor the facts to fit the case.” His mercurial temper often gets the best of him, especially when dealing with obdurate cops or low-level thugs. Gunplay develops in the mix. Jordan gets shot at and squeezes off a few rounds himself.

Though troubled individuals do seek him out for his professional legal insight, Jordan operates more as a maverick PI. Lacking a sidekick to do any of the heavy lifting, Jordan is compelled to carry the main action himself. Indeed, the urbane, sophisticate attorney in him (if there even is one) doesn’t enjoy much of an opportunity to shine. He is quite human, too. Attending the funeral of a close friend killed in an ambush, Jordan wonders if there is “a better way of saying this last farewell.” The mystery’s requisite twists play out as smooth and plausible.

This title was a top-notch inaugural effort from Harold Q. Masur to establish a crime fiction series. Faint echoes of PI Max Thursday (Wade Miller) and Carney Wilde (Bart Spicer) ring in its pages. Yet, Scott Jordan remains his own man. The analytical turn of his legal mind and his broader understanding of jurisprudence give him a dramatic edge over the typical PI tales of his time. Jordan is also an affable personality. Though this first book didn’t make the cut for review in Anthony Boucher’s “Criminals at Large” column in the New York Times, subsequent Scott Jordan titles did. Finally, Bury Me Deep mustered enough interest to win an entry in Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller’s classic critical work 1001 Midnights.

Sources and References

Reilley, John M., editor. Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery
Writers. 2nd Edition. New York: St. Martin’s, 1980. “Harold
Q. Masur” by Art Scott.

The Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com.

Muller, Marcia, and Bill Pronzini, editors. 1001 Midnights: The
Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction. New York:
Arbor House, 1986.

Zeman, Barry and Angela. “Mystery Writers of America: A
Historical Survey.” MWA web site.
http://www.mysterywriters.org/pages/about/history.htm.