School For Murder by C.K.M. Scanlon

Book Details

In School For Murder (1936), Special Agent Dan Fowler takes a lesson in Death from the Masked Dean’s course in crime—while Murder and Pillage, smashing through state lines on a rampage of wholesale lawlessness, cringe from the onslaught of the G-Men…

Murders, hijackings, kidnappings, prison break outs and more, all according to the Masked Dean’s master plans…. But don’t give up hope, Special Agent Dan Fowler- Man-Hunter, is on the case.

Chapter I – Reign of Terror
Chapter II – One Gigantic Mob?
Chapter III – Fowler Is Trapped
Chapter IV – Battle!
Chapter V – School for Murder
Chapter VI – Strange Death
Chapter VII – Death from Above
Chapter VIII – Man Trap
Chapter IX – Enter the Dean
Chapter X – The Dean Strikes Again
Chapter XI – Fowler’s Bargain
Chapter XII – The Crime Capital
Chapter XIII – Death at the Corner
Chapter XIV – Unmasked
Chapter XV – Snatch!
Chapter XVI – Bound for Hell
Chapter XVII – War on Fourteenth Street

C.K.M. Scanlon is a “house name” that Thrilling Publications used on their Dan Fowler stories for several years.

School For Murder contains 28 illustrations.

Files:

1. Scanlon-SchoolForMurder.epub

Excerpt: School For Murder

Chapter I

Reign of Terror

GANG lightning strikes three times. In three great cities of the United States mobsters move in, terrorizing, looting, killing —smashing through state lines, defying the majesty of the Government, ruthlessly disregarding the rights of the law-abiding. . . .

It is morning. Union Station, St. Louis.

Under the sooted glass and steel-ribbed canopy human beings heading for a hundred destinations make crisscrossing paths on the cement apron to and from the train gates. Engines breathe throatily as their driving wheels start. Steam hisses, rises, melts into the atmosphere. Couplings clank. Wheels grate against steel rails. Dispatchers bawl the names of a score of cities. Hordes stream in and out of waiting rooms.

“All aboard!”

There is the happiness of arrival, the sorrow of departure. Comedy—pathos—tragedy. And here are the beginnings of drama. Stark, cold, bitter drama.

A neatly dressed woman in her late twenties holds the hand of a boy of five. The lad is alert and curious. He points to a briskly walking group of four men as they move across the apron toward a gate bearing the legend: “Kansas Special.”

“Mummy,” he asks, “why are those two men locked together by the hands?”

“One of the men has done something wrong and is going to jail,” she says. “Never mind that, honey. Your daddy’s almost here. See, there’s the train!”

A string of cars is being backed down the rails. Air brakes scrape. The cars clank to a halt. There is the hiss of escaping steam.

The mother has turned her eyes from Herbert Frawley, tall, lean, grimly good-looking Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, shackled to dour, heavy-featured “Knucks” Melton, heading for a life sentence at Leavenworth. Knucks Melton is ex-leader and sole survivor of the notorious Harper-Magnin gang, wholesalers in murder, kidnaping and robbery. Balmer and Billings, of the St. Louis police department, are the men in plainclothes who walk behind the G-man and his charge.

It all happens in a trice—

Among the travelers are five men, all at strategic points. Hard-faced they are. They, too, carry suitcases.

Suddenly, with a signal from one of the men, those cases drop open, exposing tommy guns. Special Agent Frawley has been trained to have eager, searching eyes. As the five men, scattered about him and his escort and his charge, act, he whips his free right hand to his shoulder holster. He has been ordered to deliver Knucks Melton into the hands of the warden at Leavenworth—and he’ll do it or die—true to tradition.

An ominous chattering bites through the air—stills the other man-made sounds in the station.

Hot lead cuts into Billings and Balmer. Frawley fires— A mobster—the hood who has opened up—shudders, plops forward on his face over the tommy gun. Some spectators flee for the shelter of anything, like rats when the lights go on. Others are frozen by fear—staring at what seems unreal to them. They can’t understand this. Not so quickly. Their expressions are ludicrous.

Hood number two trips his trigger and his gun splatters lead. Frawley’s gun belches an answer.

But he’s slow this time. A bullet knocks him sideward. Billings is writhing in his own blood. Balmer is strangely still, a brownish-scarlet patch splashed over his white face.

Another gun cuts loose.

The little boy screams—sees his father running onto the apron. Instinct and terror propel his feet as he breaks from his mother—darts across the apron for protection—his father’s arms.

“Daddy! Daddy!”

He plunges into the chopping path of bullets.

A strange pained, puzzled look twists his small features as he falters. He falls face downward, knotted grotesquely.

The chatter of the gun dies. The slaughter is over. In that one brief instant of silence there is the heartrending wail from the boy’s mother.

Three hoods train their guns on the crowd. A fourth gets the keys to the manacles from the ring of the now inert Frawley, unlocks them. Melton runs to the fallen mobster, snatches up the tommy after rolling him off it. He joins the four. They march from the station. The snouts of their weapons menace the bystanders. No one does anything.

Excerpt From: C.K.M. Scanlon. “School For Murder.”