The Casebook of Sidney Zoom

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Among the two-score series characters created by Erle Stanley Gardner for the pulp magazines of the 20s and 30s were such colorful and colorfully named individuals as Ed Migrane, the Headache Detective, Speed Dash, the Human Fly, Señor Lobo (whose exploits will appear in the next volume in this series), The Man in the Silver Mask, Go Get ’Em Garver, and Fish Mouth McGinnis. None, however were more unique, well-developed, or eccentric in name and nature than Sidney Zoom, the Master of Disguises.

Zoom is a strange, complex man, a true rugged individualist. Tall, slender, purposeful, cultured, independently wealthy, possessed of fierce hawklike eyes and a dominant, aggressive personality, he lives on an expensive yacht, the Alberta F., with a tawny police dog named Rip and a devoted young secretary, Vera Thurmond. He is a loner by nature, adopting a hardboiled manner with women that borders on the rude — a pose, Vera Thurmond suspects, because he is secretly afraid of the female sex. He “hates civilization and all it stands for,” believing instead in the sanctity of the individual; “scoffs at laws which sought to curb crime and safeguard property rights” and has his own ideas of how to balance the scales of justice. His mission is to right wrongs, to “live for good” by rescuing would-be suicides and other downtrodden individuals and providing them with new leases on life. He refers to himself, in all seriousness, as a Doctor of Despair, a Collector of Lost Souls.

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