Sarah Watson
Created by D.B. McCandless

Another of the lady dicks of the pulps, SARAH WATSON wasn't quite as hardboiled as Violet McDade or as attractive as Carrie Cashin. Sarah was middle-aged, heavyset and plainly-dressed, called her young male assistant, Ben Todd, a "whippersnapper," and brought her own lunch to work. Yet she was tough enough to threaten to beat an informant up if he didn't come across with the goods, and she admits she'd like to "beat up a man proper, for once! I'd begin on the nose...The nose is a nice tender place to begin. Maybe I'd break it -- after a while."

And she always had her eye on the geetus. She actually boasts at one point that she never gets out "from any given fracas with(out) somebody's goat and a substantial amount of dollars and cents."

In fact, the Watson-Todd team-up, with its large over-bearing lead detective, and her younger, thinner, long-suffereing male partner, bears more than a passing resemblance to the subsequent team-up of A.A. Fair's Bertha Cool and Donald Lam.

Sarah was a regular in Detective Fiction Weekly from 1936-37. "Sort of small-town hardboiled" is how Ron Goulart, in his The Dime Detectives, characterized them.

SHORT STORIES

• "Cash or Credit" (September 18, 1937, Detective Fction Weekly)