Eaton Kenneth Goldthwaite was an American author (1907-1994) whose series character was police Lieutenant Joseph Dickerson. His papers are held at Boston University, https://archivesspace.bu.edu/repositories/9/resources/1269. The description of the repository on BU’s website is informative. Also helpful is a site devoted to Saranac Lake in New York where Goldthwaite lived for several years, https://localwiki.org/hsl/E.K._Goldthwaite.
See also this memory of Goldthwaite as a Marine during World War II: https://vmb433.com/memories.htm. He was a Sergeant Major according Bill Parks of the Marine Bombing Squadron 433, who was in awe of Goldthwaite. Parks says that Goldthwaite’s ability to type earned him multiple promotions. He was a reporter before the war and continued to write during his tour of duty, composing his first book on an island in the Pacific. He wrote ten novels, many short stories and magazine articles, and edited and published newspapers.
Root of Evil (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948) is Goldthwaite’s fifth book with another appearance of Lieutenant Joseph Dickerson. Emily Englund is chatting with her husband Karl’s business partners whom she had not met previously. They are waiting for Karl to finish up in the laboratory adjacent to the house so that they can all sign the corporation and business agreements that describe the plan to develop and market a lucrative new version of a medication that would undercut the profits of the pharmaceutical group that owns the original patent. An explosion destroys the lab and sets the house on fire, killing Karl and one of the partners.
The police considered the explosion suspicious and opened an investigation. The remaining business partners, known to the police under other names, decided to blackmail Emily into giving them the formula by threatening to accuse her of murdering her husband. Since Emily didn’t have the formula, all she could do was offer them her husband’s papers and hope they would be adequate. Dickerson was aware of the unsavory characters Karl Englund had gotten involved with and wondered if they had killed Karl because they thought Emily would be easier to manipulate.
This is a thriller and a mystery combined. Was Karl Englund murdered? And if so, how and by whom? What became of the salesman that he had just hired and sent to Chicago with $10,000? How did he become enmeshed with the so-called business partners? And how is Emily going to escape these people?
I don’t know that I have ever seen a scenario quite like this one. This plot seems wholly original. The characters are developed enough to get a sense of who they each are and why they are in the story but the focus is on the action. The writing is competent, not lyrical or especially flowing. It’s clear Goldthwaite was a journalist: his writing is informative and descriptive without a lot of frills but not as clipped or terse as a pulp. I found the story innovative and the action well-paced. Definitely readable. I will watch for his other books to come my way.
In his Criminals at Large column in the New York Times of 08 Feb 1948, Isaac Anderson said of the book:
“A terrific explosion wrecks the laboratory in which Karl Englund has been conducting secret experiments designed to revolutionize the drug industry. A body, charred beyond hope of identification, is found in the ruins. Is it the body of Englund? Emily Englund believes she is a widow; Police Lieutenant Dickerson is not so sure. What Englund’s two partners, Plummer and Gorky, believe is neither here nor there—all that concerns them is whether or not they can obtain possession of the notes of Englund’s experiments, and here the obstacle is Emily, who has distrusted them from the beginning. The ensuing contest unreels in a story packed with suspense.”