Enjoying "Brother Murder"

THOMAS THEODORE (T.T.) FLYNN spells it out perfectly in his 1939 story, "BROTHER MURDER."
"There's a cold blooded touch to murder," Flynn wrote. "Crooks, thieves and swindlers are mostly ordinary people with ordinary weaknesses. A lot of us would like to collect from life the easy way. But we're all born knowing murder is out of bounds."
I read "Brother Murder" yesterday in "THE BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF PULPS."
Flynn's story is one of the best in the massive (52 stories, 1,150 pages) collection of crime fiction from the 1920s, 30s and 40s.
Private detective Mike Harris and his partner, Trixie Meehan, infiltrate a compound of a mystic in the hills above Hollywood in this 1939 tale. It reminded me that Los Angeles was a hotbed of mysticism in the 1930s, with numerous gurus, esoteric preachers and even cult leaders catering to the lost souls who had moved to Southern California in search of something.
Harris and Meehan are searching for a murderer, and discover things aren't as they seem, even among the oddballs populating the mystic's fence-enclosed compound.
Flynn was a great writer, known more for Western fiction than detective fiction. One of his novels, "The Man from Laramie," was filmed. Anthony Mann directed the film and Jimmy Stewart starred.
Not all of the stories in the "Big Book of Pulp" could be classified as "great" -- but they are all entertaining.
"Brother Murder" fits both categories.