Monkey Business: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Films of the Marx Brothers

By Josh Pachter

Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Duck Soup, Animal Crackers…over the two decades between 1929’s The Cocoanuts and 1949’s Love Happy, the Marx Brothers—Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and sometimes Zeppo—entertained movie-goers around the world with their madcap antics, rapid-fire dialogue, and prowess on the piano, the harp, and in song.

Now, a Who’s Who of award-winning crime writers pays homage to the Marxes in fourteen short stories, each inspired by one of the brothers’ thirteen studio films. (Wait a second: fourteen stories inspired by thirteen films? How does that add up? You’ll find the answer to that question…and so much more!…inside the covers of this book.)

The authors? Donna Andrews, Frankie Y. Bailey, Jeff Cohen, Lesley A. Diehl, Brendan DuBois, Terence Faherty, Barb Goffman, Joseph Goodrich, Robert Lopresti, Sandra Murphy, Robert J. Randisi, Marilyn Todd, Joseph S. Walker, and editor Josh Pachter, who is a recent recipient of the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement and the editor of two previous “inspired by” anthologies from Untreed Reads, The Beat of Black Wings: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Joni Mitchell and Only the Good Die Young: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Billy Joel.

To paraphrase Groucho: Outside of a dog, this book will be your best friend. (Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Untreed Reads
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781953601650

Book preview

.. Introduction

As I write this introductory note, there isn’t all that much going on in the world that’s funny. The pandemic continues to claim lives in the US and around the globe, restaurants and small businesses are struggling to stay afloat, and many thousands of jobs have been lost, leaving many thousands of people struggling to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads.

There are vaccines against the coronavirus now, though, and I’m hopeful that, by the time this book appears in print, we’ll be ready to laugh again.

If so, I can’t think of a better way to get yourself laughing than by revisiting the thirteen films of those madcap brothers: Julius, Arthur, Leonard, and Herbert Marx. As Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo, the Marx Brothers began their show-biz careers in vaudeville in 1905—not as comedians but as singers, and the early iterations of their act also included a fifth brother, Milton, known as Gummo thanks to the rubber (or gum) soled shoes he favored. By 1912, the act was combining comedy and song, and by the early 1920s the Marxes were nationally known and beloved stars and had graduated from vaudeville to the Broadway stage, where they mounted successful productions of a musical review (I’ll Say She Is) and two musical comedies (The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers). With the advent of the talkies in the second half of the Roaring Twenties, Paramount Pictures signed the brothers to a film contract, and first The Cocoanuts and then Animal Crackers were adapted for the screen.

The rest is history: eleven more films, plus radio shows and eventually television appearances—including Groucho’s fourteen seasons on radio and TV as the host of You Bet Your Life, which was nominally a quiz show but really an opportunity for him to crack wise with his contestants and announcer George Fenneman.

*

In April 2020—a month after COVID-19 locked us out of our workplaces and our favorite restaurants and bars and stores—Untreed Reads published an anthology titled The Beat of Black Wings: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Joni Mitchell. I edited the book and wrote the title story, and it got good reviews and sold pretty well and even won some awards. Its success motivated me to embark upon a couple of similar projects, and I pitched The Great Filling Station Holdup: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Jimmy Buffett to Eric Campbell at Down and Out Books and Only the Good Die Young: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Billy Joel to Jay Hartman at Untreed. They both said yes, and the books came out in February and April of 2021, respectively.

Two crime writers I know well and respect enormously have stories in all three of these collections: Michael Bracken and John M. Floyd, each of whom is astoundingly prolific. Michael and John can write an award-worthy short story in the time it takes me to brush my teeth, and I can’t sing their praises highly enough.

Several other authors contributed to two of the three volumes—David Dean and Barb Goffman are in the Joni and Billy books, Alison McMahan and Elaine Viets are in both Joni and Jimmy—but I didn’t want to recycle the same cast of contributors every time, so for each new collection I made sure to include a number of writers who hadn’t written for me before.

For the Billy Joel book, one of the new writers I approached was Jeff Cohen, who I hadn’t met face to face but whose work I admired. Jeff signed on, and delivered a really effective take on the song Zanzibar. In the course of our emailed conversations, one of us—Jeff says it was me, but I’m pretty sure it was him—brought up the Marx Brothers, who both of us love with a love that is pure and eternal. I only half-seriously suggested that Jeff ought to edit a book of short crime fiction inspired by the Marxes’ films, but he wasn’t particularly interested in putting together an anthology and encouraged me to do it.

I laughed. And then I thought about it. After a while, I decided that it was actually a pretty interesting idea. I proposed it to Jay at Untreed.

And here we are.

*

Earlier in this introduction, I mentioned that, after The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, the Marx Brothers made eleven more films. With that in mind, I should perhaps explain why I’ve included in this collection a movie that might well take you by surprise, but excluded some Marx-related movies a different editor might perhaps have chosen to include.

If you’ve looked at this volume’s table of contents, you might have wondered why there’s a story titled Humor Risk.

"Humor Risk? I hear you scoff. The Marx Brothers never made a movie called Humor Risk!"

But in fact they did, a silent film, produced in 1921, previewed one time but never distributed and generally assumed to be irretrievably lost. Hope springs eternal, though—and, hey, Netflix finally arranged for the release of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind in 2018, more than forty years after its last day of shooting, so who knows?....

After Humor Risk, eight years would go by before 1929’s The Cocoanuts, a sound film, first introduced Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo to film audiences. It was followed in quick succession by four more pictures, all of them—like The Cocoanuts—from Paramount: Animal Crackers (1930), Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup (1933). It’s worth noting that the brothers appeared in a brief sequence in another 1931 Paramount release, The House That Shadows Built, which was made to celebrate the studio’s twentieth anniversary, but it’s not a Marx Brothers film, so there is no short story inspired by it here.

By the time A Night at the Opera came out in ’36, Zeppo had left the act to become an engineer and open a theatrical agency, and the three remaining Marx Brothers had switched studios to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. A second MGM feature, A Day at the Races, followed in 1937, and then—after one picture for RKO (Room Service, 1938, the first Marx outing based on material that wasn’t originally written for them)—they returned to MGM for three more movies over the next three years: At the Circus (1939, Hollywood’s best year evvah!), Go West (1940), and The Big Store (1941), which was intended to be their final appearance as a team.

As things turned out, though, Groucho, Harpo, and Chico came back two more times, in A Night in Casablanca (1946) and Love Happy (1949), both produced for United Artists.

That’s a total of fourteen films over a twenty-eight-year span, if you count the never-released Humor Risk, an average of one every other year, and each of those fourteen is represented in these pages. (If you only look at the films that had theatrical releases, then it’s thirteen in twenty years, or a new release every eighteen months!)

In addition to Humor Risk and the thirteen released films, Groucho, Harpo, and Chico appeared in separate cameos in a Warner Brothers picture, The Story of Mankind, in 1957, and in 1959 Harpo and Chico starred in The Incredible Jewel Robbery, an episode of the General Electric Theater television series, with Groucho in an uncredited cameo. Like The House That Shadows Built, though, these were not Marx Brothers movies, so they too are unrepresented in these pages.

The same applies to the dozen or so films in which only one of the brothers appeared, from Harpo’s pre-Cocoanuts turn as The Village Peter Pan in Famous Players-Lasky’s Too Many Kisses and Zeppo’s cameo in Paramount’s A Kiss in the Dark (both 1925) to Groucho’s bit part (as God!) in Otto Preminger’s Skidoo (1968) and final appearance on the big screen in an uncredited cameo in the Robert Redford vehicle The Candidate (1972).

Gummo, who was part of the act on the vaudeville stage, never appeared in a film. For many years after I quit the stage, he was quoted as saying, people referred to me as an actor, but during my career most people vehemently denied this. He does have a couple of cameos here, though—or at least his name does….

*

Before I turn you over to the fourteen stories included in this volume, I should point out that they do not represent the first time the Marxes have intersected with the world of crime fiction. Groucho actually played a private eye in two of the brothers’ thirteen released films: The Big Store (1941) and Love Happy (1949). In Stuart M. Kaminsky’s You Bet Your Life (1978), Hollywood P.I. Toby Peters is hired to protect the Marxes from the cops and criminals of Miami and Chicago. Between 1998 and 2006, the prolific Ron Goulart wrote half a dozen delightful novels with Groucho as a bumbling but ultimately successful amateur sleuth. And I dipped a toe in Marxian waters myself as a teenager with a short story titled The Groucho Marx Murders that finally appeared in print almost two decades later, in Wayne Dundee’s sadly-no-longer-with-us semiprozine Hardboiled.

Most of the stories you’ll read in this collection are funny, some fully in the spirit of the Marxes and some in other ways. What all of them have in common is that they were inspired by the cinematic antics of Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and sometimes Zeppo Marx.

So without further ado (or adon’t): Fenneman, bring out our next fourteen guests…and the contributors and I hope that Monkey Business: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Films of the Marx Brothers will be the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever read!

Josh Pachter

Midlothian, Virginia

May 14, 2021

Humor Risk

(filmed in 1921)

directed by Dick Smith

written by Jo Zwerling

never released

MAIN CAST

Villain—Groucho Marx

Henchman—Chico Marx

Watson—Harpo Marx

Playboy—Zeppo Marx

A Girl—Mildred Davis

Heroine—Jobyna Ralston

Humor Risk

by Barb Goffman

Dominic Romano sat in a booth at Romeo’s, chewing a slice of the best pizza in town—plain cheese, the way God intended. His thoughts ping-ponged between wondering how to get a big enough score to pay off Tazio, his bookie—that last bet shoulda paid off!—and how hard it would be to get a new identity and get the heck outta town before Tazio’s guys caught up with him. He liked living in Passaic, but he liked being alive even more.

What’s wrong? a woman behind him said.

What’s wrong? a guy replied. I’m a freaking hypocrite, that’s what’s wrong.

Intrigued, Dominic set his slice down to eavesdrop more easily. He’d heard this couple sit in the next booth ten minutes ago, but until now nothing they’d said had been that interesting.

A hypocrite? The woman laughed. She sounded chirpy. Blond. I find that hard to believe. Barry, talk to me. What’s going on?

Talk to her, Barry.

Barry exhaled loudly. You know that house my family owns over on Grogg? The run-down one?

Yeah, on the corner of Rudd, with the turrets, right? the woman said.

Right. It’s been in the family for a hundred years. My great-grandfather built it with money he earned working with the Marx Brothers. My grandpa grew up there. His parents were hoarders. The whole place was crammed with junk.

That had to be a hard way to live.

Yeah. Grandpa said he vowed, the second he inherited that house, he would clean it out and make it beautiful again, the way it must have been when it was first built.

Did he?

Nope. He hadn’t been inside in twenty years. When he shoved the door open, the amount of stuff was overwhelming. He couldn’t deal with it. So he closed the place up and left it like that for decades.

You’re kidding, Dominic thought.

You’re kidding, the woman said.

"Nope. My dad used to complain about the money Grandpa was wasting, paying taxes on that house year after year. So he said when he inherited it, he’d clean it out and sell it, so it’d bring in some cash instead of being a money pit."

Let me guess….

Exactly. He couldn’t do it, either. He went in there a few times over the years, but he never lasted more than an hour. It was easier, he said, just to pay the taxes.

That’s crazy. Why didn’t he sell it?

"Because it’s filled with things his grandparents thought were worth saving. And…I guess because doing nothing was easier than doing something. But I swore that, when I inherited the place, I wasn’t going to be a chump. I’d clean it out and sell it."

And?

You’re looking at Sentimental Sally here. Turns out I’m just as bad as my dad and grandpa were. I can’t sell it without cleaning it out, because there might be something worth saving in there. Photos of my grandparents, maybe. Or something valuable. But I can’t do it. I pushed my way in yesterday. The amount of stuff is unbelievable.

The house probably smelled, too.

Actually, the smell was bearable. I don’t think they ever had pets, so…. The problem is, the job’s overwhelming. I’m tempted to follow the family tradition and leave it for my kids to deal with. After all, it’s not like I need the money. But I can’t. It’s the principle of the thing. I hate being a hypocrite.

There are companies that’ll clean it out for you.

But do they toss everything, or will they set aside things that might be valuable?

I don’t know. It can’t hurt to ask.

That’s true. And if I finally sell the place, I could donate the money to the hospital, maybe get my picture in the paper and get a tax deduction at the same time. Barry sounded upbeat. You’re a genius, Judy. I’ll start calling around when I get home.

As they left the booth, Barry’s words floated through Dominic’s mind. My great-grandfather built it with money he earned working with the Marx Brothers. Dominic had seen a lot of their stupid movies growing up. When Uncle Mikey babysat him, he’d forced Dominic to watch ’em, raving how those idiots were geniuses and moaning about their very first movie, which was shown only once and then burned up or got lost or something. Dominic Googled the movie on his phone. Yep: a collector was offering a huge pile of cash for the missing print of Humor Risk. But it must be long gone, Mikey had said. Otherwise, whoever had it would’ve turned it over ages ago for the payday.

Unless, Dominic figured, whoever had it couldn’t find it.

It made perfect sense. The movie had disappeared. A hoarder who worked with the Marx Brothers could’ve taken it and lost it in his own house. Hot damn, this might be the solution to all his problems.

If he could find that movie, he could pay off his bookie and start living on Easy Street, instead of worrying he’d need to hit the road to avoid getting his legs broken. He could move outta his folks’ basement. Finally spring for nice Christmas gifts. A fur coat for Ma. Yankees season tickets for him and Pop. Some autographed Marx Brothers memorabilia for Uncle Mikey. A five-star trip to Vegas for his cousin Gino and his wife, Sophia. Gino loved Vegas. It’d be nice to have money he could share for once, instead of always being in the hole. And it wasn’t like Barry needed the money. If he could afford to donate the house proceeds to a hospital, the guy must be loaded.

Dominic swallowed the last bite of his lunch. The house was a five-minute drive away. He’d been planning on hanging with Gino this afternoon while Sophia was at work, but this would be a much better use of his time. If he was lucky, he’d hit the jackpot before dinner.

He called Gino to say he wouldn’t be able to make it, after all.

*

With Born to Run playing on his car’s radio, Dominic gazed across the street at the house. That had to be it: it was the only one at this intersection that looked like a castle.

The white paint was faded, peeling, in some places flat-out gone. The windows were filthy. The cement stairs leading up to the front door were cracked and crumbling. The neighbors would be thrilled if this eyesore finally got fixed up. Or bulldozed down.

Luckily, no one seemed to be around. But he pulled around the corner anyway so no nosy neighbors would see his license plate, just in case something went wrong. Before he exited his Mustang, he crossed himself, praying to St. Anthony that he’d find the movie, because Dominic knew actually going on the run would never live up to the promise of the Boss’s anthem, especially