Lemuel De Bra: A Master of Mysteries

[Editor's note: Our thanks to pulp fan and collector John Locke, who provides this clipping from the October 1925 issue of Triple-X Magazine. The biographical info about writers that appeared in pulp magazines frequently was as interesting as their works.]

A Master of Mysteries

LEMUEL DE BRA, the famous Story-Writer and Man of Many Adventures, Tells of Some of the Thrills He Has Experienced in Real Life. One of His Inimitable Tales Will Begin in Next Issue of TRIPLE-X.

By C.J. Parker

In the next issue of Triple-X Magazine will appear the opening chapters of an enthralling serial by Lemuel De Bra, entitled Medicine of Mystery, that is warranted to hold the reader spellbound from the first paragraph to the end of the story. Nearly all lovers of detective and mystery stories that deal with wily and recondite Chinese characters have read one or more of De Bra’s yarns; but few, it may be assumed, know that nearly all of these stories are based on the author’s own experiences, gathered over a varied and adventurous career.

Not many men that have the ability to weave their experiences into absorbing narratives have had the opportunities that De Bra has had to make a close and intimate study of the Chinese type as it is known in the Chinese quarters in various American cities; for he was a federal narcotic agent for ten years.

When I entered his study in Lynn Haven, Florida, recently, I was at once impressed by a certain Oriental atmosphere. The walls were lined with books about Chinese and Chinatown, crime and criminals, and records of cases on which my host had worked while in the government service. To add to this impression, he picked up his long-stemmed Chinese pipe, stuffed it with Chinese tobacco, and began to puff contentedly as he turned to me with a smile to answer my question: “Mr. De Bra, in your adventurous life, what was your most thrilling experience?”

He hesitated. “That’s rather a difficult question to answer offhand,” he said. “Many incidents that happened during my early years in the service seemed very sensational to me at the time; but afterward they came to be all in the day’s work-or night’s work, I should say.”

“What did you do before you went into the government secret service?”

“Oh, several things,” De Bra answered, smiling; and then he told briefly of his early experiences. Before he was fifteen he had run away from home five times, beating his way on trains throughout the Middle West. He was arrested many times, but always his youth and a persuasive tongue saved him. Several times he barely escaped death in wrecks. Once a brakeman threw a coupling pin at him barely missing his head. Another time a passenger conductor fired three shots at him.

“But the biggest thrill of those days was one winter’s night when a hardboiled shack tried to throw me off the top of a boxcar. The car was coated with ice, and the train was hitting thirty on a rough stretch of track. I had been unable to find a door open, so was riding the toe-path and was about frozen. When the shack ordered me to jump off I told him I wasn’t ready to commit suicide. He came at me then with one of those hickory clubs used to tighten brake-wheels. I knew I hadn’t a chance with him on that swaying car coated with ice, but I couldn’t run; so we came to grips and like a pair of fools fought for five minutes, with me trying to keep away from his club and both of us trying to keep from going over the side of the car. Finally, I got a chance to pick up his lantern, and I swung it at his head with all my strength. I missed his head, but struck his arm. The club went spinning out of his hand, and while he stood there gripping his arm, I flung the lantern off the car and fled down the toe-path in the darkness. In five minutes the whole train crew was hunting me, but the train was taking an up-grade then, and I hopped off and walked into the next town.”

Looking back on those days, De Bra strongly advises against anyone’s trying to get experience via “side-door Pullmans.” However, bumming wasn’t all he did. He worked at various occupations, such as messenger boy, waiter, farming, clerk, mill hand, carpenter, lumber-shover, stenographer, shorthand teacher, detective, hospital interne, etc.

“At the school I read and studied with an accumulated hunger that amazed my teachers; but a year of that convinced me that I was not cut out to be a preacher, so I quit. Since I had to eat, I began selling books, then got a job as instructor for a correspondence school. The school sent me to San Francisco and I had the good fortune to arrive there at six o’clock the night before the earthquake.

“An account of the earthquake that I wrote was spread all over the front page of my hometown paper, the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Gazette. That fired me with an ambition to write. To gain more experience, and to piece out my education, I entered the government service.”

Mr. De Bra’s work in the federal narcotic service gave him material for more than a hundred stories that have been published both in England and in America.

Links:
You can find a story by Lemuel De Bra from Triple-X Magazine, "In Shanghai Alley," elsewhere on The Pulp Rack by clicking here.

Click here to view a bibliography of De Bra's work.

Posted by ds at January 16, 2004 04:57 PM

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