The Glass of Poison, Part 1: Enter... The Mysterious Gypsy Lady!

Let's check in on everyone's favorite Golden Age detective, SPEED SAUNDERS, Ace Investigator.

"The Glass of Poison". Phew, this promises to be more normal than the average Speed Saunders story. Certainly as compared to "The Mystery of the Lost Ape", "The Voodoo Vengeance", or "The Bowling Ball Bombers".

And it guest-stars one of Speed's best friends!

This story is best read well after midnight, so if it's NOT well after midnight, this is the point at which you may wish to consider holding off on reading the rest of this post until it IS well after midnight. And do you own a smoking jacket? It's not necessary, but it certainly helps.  

Engrossed in his story. HIS OWN story, no doubt.  I bet he doesn't understand them any more than we do.

So, if I asked you to picture a man smoking a pipe and reading Detective Comics "well after midnight", I'll wager that somebody like smoking-jacketed Speed Saunders is not what you would picture. But such is the Golden Age.  As riveting as watching Speed reading is -- wait, that's actually ironic, since, if he has to stay up well after midnight, he is definitely slow-reading. Anyways, what happens next is:

SPEED IS ATTACKED BY A PROP FROM THE HORROR FILM "TALK TO ME" (2023)! DON'T LET IT IN, SPEED!

Uh-oh; Speed's newest client (?), threat (?), or Useful Female Informant (!) appears to be an itinerant hand model.

"It seems that my investment in a subscription to the Gypsy Woman of The Month Club has paid off handsomely!"

Whether this particular woman be Gypsy, Tramp, or Thief (based on that dress I have my own suspicions), she must have a reason for breaking in on Speed (who apparently doesn't lock his door) like this.

THAT old chestnut.  Ixnay those crocodile tears, lady; I bet the door WAS locked and you picked it. That's a thing gypsies do, I think.

Speed, having corralled his teeny floating pipe back into his mouth, decides to ASSERT how reality will be in order to force it to his will and, as usual, it works. He supposes that Madame Rose here is going to Tell Him All About It, and, sure enough, she does!

But what sent Madame Rose here to THAT chair?  Probably trying to hide the broken zipper on her dress before the dang thing FALLS OFF her.

That was some pretty fast exposition by our Mysterious Gypsy Lady, telling us:

• there's been a murder and 
• who the victim is and 
• what they did for a living and 
• why that endangered their life and 
• who the mostly like suspect is. PHEW!

Nevertheless. That's not fast enough for SPEED SAUNDERS, who WILLS HIMSELF into a new outfit ... and MORE!

"She lives below me  you are Betty Palmer, her secretery (sic), AND I'M SPEED SAUNDERS."
That balloon really deserved to include that last part.  Speed probably skipped because it saved time and because everyone KNOWS he's Speed Saunders.

A secretery (sic), by the way, is kind of like a secretary, but instead of taking notes, they destroy them, keeping information secret.  It's a Golden Age thing, like Mysterious Gypsy Ladies, Oriental Artifacts, Residential Hotels, and Never Needing a Search Warrant.

So, the victim lives -- okay, LIVED -- immediately BELOW Speed Saunders?!  That's... eerily and improbably convenient. And weird that Madame Rose here buried the lede and didn't just burst in saying "THERE'S BEEN A MURDER DOWNSTAIRS, HELP!" like a normal person in a non-Speed Saunders story would do.  

But I have a theory.

I suspect that author Phillippa Rowen did NOT live below Speed Saunders... UNTIL HE SAID SHE DID.  

Remember, it's well after midnight and Speed hasn't finished his comic book so his tolerance for delay has gone way into the negative.  He needs this particular murder dealt with STAT, so he simply ANNOUNCES that Phillippa Rowen lives below him and that this is Betty Palmer, her secretery (sic), and then THAT BECAME REALITY.  She WAS a gypsy cleaning woman named Esmeralda Rose, perhaps, but NOW she is Betty Palmer, secretery (sic), because that's who Speed Saunders damn-well SAID she is, and this is a Speed Saunders story, and he calls the shots.

And his next shot is Seeing The Body, because if there anything Speed Saunders enjoys looking at more than comic books, it's dead bodies, which we too will look at tomorrow.