Mr. Jones
Creator: Leo Margulies
Written By: Dennis Lynds (as Robert Hart Davis)
Characters
Dr. Samuel Sears (Mr. Jones)
Kim Ree
Miss Agatha Bridge
Commissioner Angelo Pinto
Detective
Captain Murry Brian
Bon vivant and famed medic by day, scourge of the underworld by night,
Mr. Jones is the man of a million faces! This is the story of Dr. Samuel Sears,
brilliant society favorite, and successful plastic surgeon. Mr. Jones knows how
to kill just as easily as Dr. Sears, his real self, knows how to live! As Mr.
Jones, he can penetrate the inner circles of organized crime and bring his man
to justice, dead or alive!
A Lt. Col. in the Army medical field, Sears was
transferred to OSS while in Korea. He has light brown hair and cool blue eyes,
hard as sapphires. At 190 pounds, he is a shade under six feet tall. He was a
deceptively slender man, with shoulders broader than they seemed. Mr. Jones
could appear taller or shorter at will, and could control his facial muscles.
When his friend, the police commissioner, had bitterly raged against a
high-and-mighty criminal the police could not touch, Sears had instantly
realized something he had wanted to do for many years— catch and punish the
hidden criminals who walked free and above the law.
He had caught that particular
high-and-mighty culprit, and another, and Mr. Jones was born. Sears had never
regretted his second life: the disguises pleased him, the acting challenged his
mind, and the pursuit excited him. He was forced to admit that he had always
wanted to be a detective, even in secret. Sounds a little like The Phantom
Detective, doesn’t it?
Kim Ree is Sears’ Korean chef, valet, and general major domo. He was a
sergeant in the R.O.K. Army when he met Sears.
Commissioner Angelo Pinto is a small, peppery man. He speaks as much
with his hands as with his voluble old-country-style voice. He knows the identity
of Mr. Jones.
Miss
Agatha Bridge is his medical assistant at the hospital. She’s a tough
fifty-year old R.N. that runs the office like a chief petty officer.
Detective Captain Murry Brian is a short, stocky man. He wears an old
gray suit, and battered felt hat over gray hair.
Sears lives in a plush apartment in The Carleton Towers on Park Avenue.
The suite directly below his is rented year-round by Reginald Trott, a wealthy
gentleman from Trinidad, but in reality belongs to Mr. Jones. Inside a locked
closet in his apartment is a spiral staircase leading down to a secret room in
the suite below. His offices are located at the Hippocratic House, a private
hospital.
Pulp historians conclude that Captain Zero was the last pulp hero to be
created during the pulp era, and perhaps basically this is true. However, Leo
Margulies never lost interest in the pulp hero, or creating house names. For
twenty years Leo was ramrod of Ned Pines’ Standard pulp house, and he oversaw
the hero line of character pulps for their magazines. He probably created most
of them—though possibly through editorial committee. The pulp line included The
Phantom Detective, Dan Fowler (G-Men Detective), Black Bat (Black
Book Detective), The Masked Detective, Purple Scar, The Eagle, and probably
a few I’m forgetting. When Leo was let go from Standard as Head Editor, he
quickly started his own publishing house, Renown Publishing, bringing out a
slew of digest magazines. His mainstay was the Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine,
but there were several companion titles: Satellite Science Fiction, Zane
Grey Western Magazine, Shell Scott Mystery Magazine, Charlie Chan Mystery
Magazine, and his highly successful Man From UNCLE and Girl From
UNCLE titles; these latter were under the byline of one of his final house
names, Robert Hart Davis, named in honor of an editor at Argosy who gave
Leo his first job. Cylvia Kleinman Margulies, Leo’s wife, told me the “Hart”
came about because of Robert Davis’ kind heart.
With the ending of the popular UNCLE series in January 1968, Leo
was looking for a replacement title to fill the void. Keeping the Robert Hart
Davis house name, he created his final pulp hero, Mr. Jones, ‘The Man of a
Million Faces’. Mr. Jones was another wink at the old days, when one of
Standard’s widely used house names was G. Wayman Jones. A byline used on the
Black Bat, among others.
Although Mr. Jones appeared to be a mixture of both The Phantom
Detective and Purple Scar, he did not wear a costume. The days of costumed pulp
heroes were gone. However, he is a master of disguise, bringing to mind Secret
Agent “X,” the Man of a Thousand Faces.
To test the water for a new magazine, Leo decided to publish the first
story in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and see how it went over with the
readers. Preparing some notes on the character he wanted, he asked one of his
prolific writers, Dennis Lynds, to come up with a good yarn.
Leo’s intentions were good, but Dennis wasn’t comfortable with the pulp
concept, even though he had written the Belmont Shadow novels ten years
earlier. He told Leo the story didn’t work, and he hated it. But Leo Margulies
was determined to try for a new series. He ran the story in the June 1968 issue
of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and it met with poor response. The new
magazine never got off the ground, and Mr. Jones died a silent death. A shame,
I really think the time was ripe for a new character. Readers were still
screaming for more Man From UNCLE stories. I’m afraid Dennis went into
the story feeling the pulp style was wrong, and this hurt the story. Perhaps,
if another writer had been given the task of writing the story, they might have
put it over. Michael Avallone would submit a number of articles on the old pulp
heroes for the M.S.M.M. a few years later, and the readers loved them.
Five years later, Renown did launch a new magazine, the Charlie Chan Mystery
Magazine, in November 1973. Although the title only lasted a few issues, it
proved a new title might have worked in 1968.
But for pulp historians, Dennis Lynds goes down in the history books as
not only bringing The Shadow into the 1960s, he was also tagged to write the
final pulp hero novel, under the last pulp house name. Leo Margulies—the Little
Giant of the pulps—saw to that!
The Man of A Million Faces MSMM (June 1968)
