Here's an average person who is really anything but "Average." Meet Average Jones. He only appeared in fewer than a dozen short stories by Samuel Hopkins Adams, which were gathered into book form entitled simply Average Jones in 1911. They're astonishingly good stories, too. Several years ago, I did an audio review of Average Jones for the Classic Mysteries podcast. Here, mildly edited, is a transcript of that review:
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A century ago…when most advertising took place in newspapers, long before the birth of today’s alphabet-soup mix of federal agencies trying to enforce truth in advertising…classified ads could be found for almost anything, from ads for patent medicines to personal notices. There was little or nothing to help guide a reader through those ads, besides common sense…and little enough of THAT, to be sure. Which is why it’s worth noting a series of detective stories that began, really, with the following ad in a local new York city newspaper. It read this way:
Have you been stung?
Thousands have.
Thousands will be.
They’re laying for you.
Who?
The advertising crooks.
A.V.R.E.J. Jones,
Ad-Visor
Can protect you
Against Them.
An interesting ad, at a time, a century ago, when the general business philosophy was, let the reader – or buyer – beware. Who, you may ask, was this fictional ad-visor, A. Jones? His parents had given him the full name Adrian Van Reypen Egerton Jones, thus giving him the initials A. V. R. E. before the J. of Jones…which explains why he was known to his friends as Average Jones. And what he did, in a series of short stories, was to chase down criminals – rogues, thieves, kidnappers, even murderers – through their newspaper ads. It’s all on display in Average Jones, by Samuel Hopkins Adams.
Samuel Hopkins Adams had an important day job: he was an investigative journalism who made a name for himself as a muckraker, particularly in the field of public health, railing against medical quackery and fraud. According to the Golden Age of Detection wiki and Wikipedia, Adams’ pioneering journalism is generally credited with having pushed Congress into passing the Pure Food and Drugs Act that created the federal bureaucracy that eventually became the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA. But Adams also wrote a number of crime novels and stories, including a series that was collected into a book, Average Jones, which was published in 1911.
Average Jones is – as his own ad says – an ad-visor (which proves that puns were just as awful a century ago as they are today). The newspapers of the day had a great many more classified ads than modern papers, and Jones would scan them every day looking for ones that interested or intrigued him. Often, clients would bring him ads that, in some way, affected their lives, and he would try to make sense out of them – and, frequently, would find himself fighting a criminal conspiracy of some kind.
There are eleven stories in Average Jones – two of those, actually, are halves of the same story, so there really are only ten. They are thoroughly entertaining. Here are a few examples:
"The B-Flat Trombone," the first Average Jones story, tells how and why Jones got into his unusual business of vetting newspaper ads. It also discovers how a trombone almost becomes an instrument of murder…and a crooked politician is uncovered.
"Red Dot" is a bizarre story about attempted murder in a seemingly locked room.
"The Mercy Sign" is a two-part story which involves a disappearance, some very bizarre scientific experiments – and a murder.
"The Man Who Spoke Latin" revolves around a man who claims to speak only classic Latin…and a remarkable scheme to find what could be a unique and priceless document.
And "The Million-Dollar Dog" deals with an unfortunate plot to kidnap and murder a small dog that stands between a man and a fortune – and the unusual way in which that plot was thwarted.
All the stories are like this. In most cases, a seemingly bizarre situation or an unexplained crime turns out to have a rational, scientific explanation. Often, a series of coincidences furnishes Jones with the information he needs to solve a puzzle – but, says Jones, that’s okay. At one point he explains, “Detective work, for all that is said on the other side, is mostly the ability to recognize and connect coincidences".
Another point jumps out from these stories: Average Jones – and his creator, Samuel Hopkins Adams – have a very low opinion of most politicians, and of the police in general, and an even lower one of the big combines and trusts that ran so much of American business in those days. As I’ve said, Adams was a muckraking journalist, and it certainly shows in these stories.
All the same, they are very good early American detective stories, and I think they’re not only worthwhile but highly enjoyable in their own rights. As the stories are more than a century old, they’re available in some inexpensive paperback editions – and some entirely free electronic ones. Samuel Hopkins Adams and Average Jones were quite important and popular in their day. Read these stories to find out why.
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You can listen to the original audio review by clicking here.
Next: Mrs. McGinty's Dead, by Agatha Christie.
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