DEOSNEWS Vol. 2  No. 13.
Copyright 1992 DEOS - The Distance Education Online Symposium
   
Editor: Morten Flate Paulsen, MFP101@PSUVM.PSU.EDU
   
DEOS was established with a grant from the Annenberg/CPB Project.
   
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EDITORIAL
   
DEOS has now been in operation for more than a year and has proven its
value to distance education around the world. Due to the continuing growth
of DEOS and its need for expanded resources, I would like to establish an
advisory board that can provide advice and contribute to the future
operation of DEOSNEWS and DEOS-L. My plans to leave Pennsylvania State
University this fall have also contributed to this decision. I am especial-
ly looking for board members who can contribute to quality control,
marketing, financing, and operation of DEOS. If you are interested in
serving on the DEOS Advisory Board, please send a note to Morten Flate
Paulsen <MFP101@PSUVM.PSU.EDU> and explain how you can contribute to the
future of DEOS.
   
     The following article was published in Vol. 6 No. 1 of The American
Journal of Distance Education.
   
   
                          Amateurs, Tough Guys,
                          and a Dubious Pursuit:
                      Crime and Correspondence Study
                            in Popular Culture
   
                              Von V. Pittman
                      <vpittman@ccp-po.ccp.uiowa.edu>
   
   
   
     I opened a letter and read it.  It offered me a six months' correspon-
     dence course in finger printing at a special professional discount.  I
     dropped it into the waste basket . . . .
          Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, 1939.
   
     While little more than a century old, correspondence courses have
become a fixture in the media of American popular culture.  References to
correspondence courses and schools frequently appear in films, novels,
short fiction, and plays featuring detectives.  The amateur sleuth who had
trained through a correspondence course quickly became a comedy cliche.  As
time passed, the correspondence school became a metaphor for seediness,
marginality, and incompetence in the hard-boiled genre of detective novels
and films.  Occasionally, the correspondence school has even provided an
ideal scene of the crime.
     Many large, respected American universities operate correspondence
study programs.  The American military enrolls millions of personnel
annually, making the Department of Defense the largest single provider and
user of the medium.  The better proprietary schools register millions of
students a year in sound, practical courses of instruction. Correspondence
study, therefore, represents a solid, established medium of education.  Yet
the public's image of this method, at least as expressed in works of
popular film and literature, is that of the worst of the proprietary
institutions. Such schools are portrayed as entrepreneurial ventures
featuring flashy, misleading advertising, extravagant promises of wealth
and success for their graduates, and frequent legal scandals. According to
the administrators of collegiate programs, this image of superficiality,
hype, and, sometimes, even criminality has retarded the growth of corre-
spondence study as a legitimate instructional format within postsecondary
institutions (Wedemeyer and Childs 1961).  The image of the proprietary
correspondence schools has never fully recovered from the stereotypes
inspired by its more reckless, irresponsible, and criminal practitioners.
     From the beginning, the most popular content areas offered by the
proprietary schools have been writing and private investigation, both of
which appear frequently in crime fiction (Flagler 1956).  Writers and film
makers have enjoyed skewering both.  They quickly made the correspondence
school-prepared "detective" a stock character in popular entertainment and
fiction.  He (always "he") was a comic figure, incompetent but usually
lucky, in a bumbling sort of way.
   
The Correspondence School Detective
   
     As early as 1930, this character had already become a cliche. James
Hulbert, a University of Chicago English professor, complained to a meeting
of university extension program administrators that this stereotype had
harmed legitimate, university-level correspondence study by casting doubt
on the instructional method itself:
     The lack of belief in the method has gone so far that correspondence
     teaching is, at times, the object of ridicule; in fact, it used to be
     rather a common thing in the cinema or on the stage, to have a
     character, who revealed himself as a graduate in crime detection from
     a correspondence school and who was represented as having not much
     more sense than one of Shakespeare's fools. (NUEA 1930, 122)
   
     Professor Hulbert correctly linked this stock character to correspon-
dence study's developing image problem.  He erred, however, in assuming
that by 1930 the correspondence school detective had passed from the scene.
     Perhaps the first correspondence school detective/fool--and certainly
a prototype--appeared in the 1913 novel, Philo Gubb: Correspondence School
Detective, by Ellis Parker Butler.  Butler, largely forgotten today, was a
renowned American humorist during the early years of this century.  His
protagonist, a paperhanger living in an Iowa river town, represented
exactly the kind of naive fool about whom Professor Hulbert would later
complain.
     Philo Gubb had enrolled in a correspondence course offered by the
Rising Sun Agency of Slocum, Ohio in response to a magazine advertisement
promising students "big money."
     "We can make you the equal of Sherlock Holmes in twelve lessons,"
Rising Sun had claimed (Butler 1913). That Gubb, a semi-literate, gullible
rube easily graduates from Rising Sun's course testifies to its lack of
rigor. In fact, in his first case, Gubb is bamboozled by a mysterious
"doctor" who takes his instructions from a book entitled The Complete Con
Man, which had been advertised on the same page of the same magazine as the
detective course.
     Yet, in the tradition of the rustic innocent, Gubb uses good will, a
stout heart, and extraordinarily good luck to prevail in case after case.
And Butler takes care to keep the correspondence school connection in the
foreground. Gubb graduates from Rising Sun in the early chapters, but
continues to quote from its texts as he pursues his investigations. He also
buys all manner of worthless gadgets and disguises from the agency. Thus,
the correspondence school detective is an enduring "sucker."
     With Philo Gubb, Ellis Butler--firmly and in great detail--established
as a stock character the innocent who tries to investigate crimes after
taking a correspondence course.  Gubb is not a real detective, merely
someone who purchased spurious credentials through the mails from a shady
operator. This stereotyped character soon began to reappear with consider-
able frequency.
     The comic amateur detective established by Butler, trained in schools
like the Rising Sun, turned up repeatedly in the entertainment media of the
1920s. Such a character appeared on Broadway in the 1924 play Badges, a
comedy by Max Marcin and Edward Hammond. A "frail and absurd little hotel
clerk" graduates at the top of his detective class in a Brooklyn correspon-
dence school. He is inept, but sincere, as he mistakes swindlers for postal
inspectors while trying to help a "dumb blonde"--another stereotype of the
day--recover some stolen bonds. His persistence and comic dumb luck win the
day (Young 1924).
     Fox Studios adapted Badges  into the 1929 motion picture "The Ghost
Talks." In this film, an early "talkie," the hotel clerk/correspondence
course detective becomes an even more absurd character. He identifies with
Sherlock Holmes to the point of keeping a deerstalker cap and a calabash
pipe under the hotel desk. Variety's  review labeled the correspondence
detective "sappy"; The Motion Picture Guide  called him "daffy." According
to contemporaneous reviews, his skills and education are even less import-
ant than they were in the play, and his dumb luck is even dumber (Variety
1929; The Motion Picture Guide 1927-1983; Hall 1929).
     Between "Badges" and "The Ghost Talks," several silent films used an
inept correspondence course detective for comic effect. In the 1924
"Sherlock, Jr.," for example, Buster Keaton is a hapless movie projection-
ist and janitor who takes a crime detection course by correspondence. He
loses his girlfriend to a rival, who, to make matters worse, steals the
girlfriend's watch and pins the theft on Keaton. While trying to solve this
"crime," Keaton only manages to exhaust himself. He falls asleep, then
finds himself, his girlfriend, and his rival on the screen, characters in
the movie he is projecting. In the end, naturally, he recovers his girl-
friend and her watch (The Motion Picture Guide: Silent Film 1910-1936; New
York Times 1925).
     Metro-Goldwyn Pictures, the producers of the 1925 Lon Chaney film The
Monster, based on a 1922 play by Crane Wilbur, apparently intended to make
a horror film. However, The Monster includes so much comic relief that the
New York Times  review called it a "slapstick melodrama"  (Hall 1925). Lon
Chaney is a crazed surgeon who likes to abduct passing motorists in order
to perform experiments on them. One of his victims is fortunate enough to
have in his employ a junior clerk who has just received his diploma, a
badge, and a pistol from a detective correspondence school. The clerk
begins a search for his employer. His ineptitude enables the doctor to take
more captives, including the clerk's sweetheart. In the end, however, the
clerk manages to summon help, just before Chaney places his scalpel on the
girlfriend (The American Film Institute Catalog: Feature Films 1921-1930;
The Motion Picture Guide: Silent Film 1910-1936; Variety 1925).
     All of the correspondence school detectives featured in these 1920s
plays and films fitted the stereotype that Professor Hulbert lamented in
1930. And while the use of stereotypes would generally take another
direction thereafter, they were not a thing of the past, as he had hoped.
     After 1930, references to correspondence study in crime-genre films
and fiction became less direct, farcical, and good-humored. While authors
and film makers by no means took correspondence study seriously as a means
of education, they began to use it as a means of establishing mood,
setting, or character, usually with brief, almost throwaway, lines.
     Raymond Chandler, in particular, skillfully used quips about corre-
spondence study to characterize people, places, or situations on the
margins of society. Such references helped establish his hardboiled tone.
In the quotation given at the beginning of this article, Chandler tells the
reader something about Phillip Marlowe's life and detective practice by
having him review his mail. An offer from a correspondence school for a
course in fingerprinting tells us what kind of world Chandler's private eye
lives in, one in which only people running scams and collecting debts
bother to communicate with him (Chandler 1939).
     Also in The Big Sleep, Chandler describes an office building by having
Marlowe read its directory:
     Plenty of vacancies or plenty of tenants who wished to remain anony-
     mous. Painless dentists, shyster detective agencies, small sick
     businesses that had crawled there to die, mail order schools that
     would teach you how to become a railroad clerk or a radio technician
     or a screen writer--if the postal inspectors didn't catch up with them
     first. A nasty building. (Chandler 1939, 161)
   
     The last three words are scarcely needed. This description leaves no
room for doubt about what kind of building Marlowe is walking into, and
what kind of people he will encounter there.
     In The Long Goodbye, Marlowe needs to locate a physician about whom he
has virtually no information. He reflects on how difficult a task this will
be:
     There are eight counties within a hundred miles of the City Hall and
     in every town in every single one of them there are doctors, some
     genuine medical men, some just mail-order mechanics with a license to
     cut corns or jump up and down on your spine. (Chandler 1953, 76)
   
Correspondence schools and their students, then, were believable and
appropriate tenants of Chandler's mean streets.
     In Farewell, My Lovely, Marlowe is kidnapped, beaten, and drugged. As
he struggles to regain consciousness, he hallucinates about having become a
detective through correspondence study: "So you want to be a detective?
Earn good money. Nine easy lessons. We provide badge. For fifty cents extra
we send you a truss." He seems to remember that the school had even sent
him the fine set of fingers on his hands. Even as he begins to become
lucid, Marlowe cannot quite shake his hallucination:
     I took hold of the corner of a rough sheet and wiped the sweat off my
     face with the numb fingers the correspondence school had sent me after
     the nine easy lessons, one half in advance, Box Two Million Four
     Hundred and Sixty Eight Thousand Nine Hundred and Twenty Four, Cedar
     City, Iowa. Nuts. Completely nuts. (Chandler 1940, 157-158)
   
A mail-order background obviously represents the height of absurdity to a
true, tough-guy detective.
     In the 1946 film version of The Big Sleep, Marlowe, played by Humphrey
Bogart, uses banter about learning the investigator's trade to fend off
Lauren Bacall's curiosity about why her father has hired a private eye, and
what he has so far revealed. In a scene charged with sexual tension, Bacall
asks what Marlowe's first step will be. He tells her, "The usual one." When
she asks what that is, he replies,
     It comes complete with diagrams on page 47 of How to be a Detective in
     Ten Easy Lessons , correspondence school textbook, and uh, your father
     offered me a drink.
   
Thus, the screen writing team, which included William Faulkner, maintained
Chandler's tone with respect to Marlowe's opinion of correspondence study.
   
Recent Works
   
     In the years since Chandler, a number of authors and film makers have
used references to correspondence schools to mark something or someone as
second-rate or marginal, or to establish a character as incompetent or
suspect. A few words can suffice. In English fiction, such usages tend to
be understated or even gentle. American works are usually more sarcastic.
     In her extremely successful 1954 play, The Mousetrap, Agatha Christie
has her novice innkeeper protagonists wonder about their lack of commercial
experience. The young husband tells his wife and partner,
     I can't help thinking we ought to have taken a correspondence course
     in hotel keeping. We're sure to get had in some way. (Christie 1978)
   
The audience immediately knows these two are in trouble.
     John Mortimer's crusty London barrister Horace Rumpole is renowned for
welcoming and defending dubious clients. In "Rumpole and the Judge's
Elbow," he is able to sum up a new client quickly when he learns that the
man, who owns a chain of massage parlors, has earned his degree in theology
from a Canadian correspondence school. Rumpole is dubious about the value
of his client's supposed theological training. It might be helpful, Rumpole
says,
     if you want to be well up in the Book of Job or if you want to carry
     on an intelligent chat on the subject of Ezekiel. I just don't see how
     it helps with the massage business. (Mortimer 1987, 126)
   
His correspondence work, the client tells Rumpole, has led him to develop a
theory of the "spiritual alignment of the bones," which his employees
practice and which the police have called prostitution.
     "So that your defense," Rumpole asks, "is that without your knowledge
your girls turned from sacred to profane massage?" (Mortimer 1987, 127).
     Correspondence education also foreshadows or defines character in a
number of American works. In Hoopla, a 1983 novel based on the 1919 Chicago
"Black Sox" baseball scandal, author Harry Stein portrays pitcher Eddie
Cicotte, the key player in the fixing of the World Series, as a man deeply
troubled by the knowledge that his career is in its last years. In order to
deal with his worries about supporting his family, Cicotte constantly
orders information about correspondence courses in such varied areas as
law, bookkeeping, public speaking, dressing for success, and electricity.
Thus, he becomes easy prey for the gamblers. A man who would enroll in
correspondence courses is a man who would criminally defile the national
pastime (Stein 1983).
     Ross Thomas, one of the contemporary masters of the spy novel,
establishes the restlessness of the father of his protagonist, Dill, in
Briarpatch.  Dill remembers that his father had been a professional student
as long as the G.I. Bill had held out. Then,
     he became a crop duster, then a Kaiser-Frazer salesman, and once in a
     while he would be Mr. Peanut--you know, for Planter's Peanuts. Then he
     turned promoter--junk car racing, donkey basketball, stuff like that,
     and finally he bought out an almost bankrupt foreign language corre-
     spondence school. (Thomas 1984, 37)
   
With the introduction of the correspondence school as one of a list of
bizarre ventures, Thomas makes it clear that Dill is the son of a hustler,
a man in search of a quick dollar, someone who rejected business orthodoxy.
This, of course, helps establish Dill's persona. Readers know that this
investigator will not be a by-the-book dilettante.
     In Loren Estleman's Any Man's Death, an aging Detroit hit man tells
the mobster who engaged him that he (the hit man) is no longer willing to
carry out a previously agreed-upon contract. The mobster knows better. He
is aware that the hit man's wife has cleaned him out in a divorce settle-
ment:
     You can't live on what's left and you are too old to learn meat
     cutting by mail. You turn loose of this job and you won't get the
     contract on a sick goldfish. (Estleman 1986, 168)
   
In other words, not only is aspiring to a legitimate occupation out of the
question, even a mildly tainted one is now beyond the realm of possibility.
The mobster knows the hit man has no options.
     Donald Westlake needed a female character of ambiguous background and
character in Good Behavior. J. C. Taylor tells the protagonist about the
various facets of her "mail-order business," which includes several schemes
such as sex therapy manuals, a music business in which clients can send in
a song and receive a melody, or vice versa, and that old standby, the
private eye course:
     Allied Commissioners' Courses; be a detective, send for a one-volume
     correspondence course. No tests, no instructors, no salesmen will
     call. Free handcuffs and badge included as a special bonus if you act
     now. Endorsed by police chiefs and police commissioners all across the
     country.
   
Her listener questions the last statement. Taylor replies that she reads
the obituaries in the police trade journals, and, "You prove a dead man
didn't  give me an endorsement, and then we'll talk" (Westlake 1985, 85).
   
The Scene of the Crime
   
     Because of their reputation for sham, sleaziness, deceit, and margi-
nality, correspondence schools provide excellent settings for crime
fiction. In Hearts of the West, a 1975 MGM release, an aspiring young
writer, an innocent played by Jeff Bridges, is learning to write florid
western novels with the help of a correspondence course from "Titan
University" in Nevada. When his father and brothers ridicule him, Bridges
decides to leave home to study on the Titan campus. He arrives in Nevada to
find that Titan University consists only of a set of post office boxes. He
soon encounters the crooks who run the school, then accidentally makes off
with thousands of dollars they had just collected. The correspondence
school's corruption foreshadows the depravity Bridges then finds in the
film industry, where he becomes an actor in silent westerns. The film ends
with a parody of a western movie shootout when Bridges confronts the
correspondence school crooks and is rescued by an alcoholic fellow actor,
played by Andy Griffith (Magill's Survey of Cinema: English Language Films
).
     Private-eye writer Shelley Singer places a murder in a correspondence
school in her novel Free Draw.  The Bright Futures Home Study Plan, Inc. is
a corporate enterprise that sells not only correspondence courses, but also
distributorships for marketing them. When the academic vice president is
murdered, every department, from instructional materials to sales, harbors
one or more suspicious persons who might have killed him. None are exem-
plars of higher education, or even seem to care much about it. The head of
instructional materials development, for example, is "a burnt-out wire
service reporter." The faculty includes "Some old woman who used to teach
first grade, a couple of moonlighting high school teachers, a CPA for the
accounting course, and a lawyer for the business law course" (Singer 1984,
29-30). Except for a couple of executives, who stand to make or lose a
great deal of money on the school, none of the faculty or staff even
believe in the efficacy of the correspondence method.
     Singer displays a detailed and accurate knowledge of proprietary
correspondence schools, right down to the cliches. She wrote Free Draw
from first-hand experience, having once worked as a writer in one of the
country's largest, best-known proprietary correspondence schools. It should
be noted that she also worked for a pyramid sales scheme in California. Her
experience in these companies, both of which must have had about the same
ethical tone, contributed to the authenticity of the Bright Futures Home
Study Plan, Inc. (Letter to author, 23 January 1991).
     Instances of correspondence study in film and fiction cited in this
article are by no means inclusive, but they are typical. Whether in passing
references or in extended treatments, correspondence study has a poor
reputation in the media of popular culture. Merely by mentioning it,
authors and film makers can introduce incompetence, low humor, suspicion,
or criminality into their works. These stereotypes are blatant and fre-
quent. The proposition that correspondence study might represent an effec-
tive educational medium receives virtually no credence in crime-related
fiction and films. Crime and correspondence study continue to have a
special, sleazy relationship.
   
References
   
Butler, E. P. 1913. Philo Gubb: Correspondence School Detective. New York:
     Houghton Mifflin Co.
Chandler, R. 1939. The Big Sleep. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
Chandler, R. 1940. Farewell, My Lovely. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
Chandler, R. 1953. The Long Goodbye. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
Christie, A. 1978. The mousetrap. In The Mousetrap and Other  Plays, 226.
     New York: Dodd, Mead & Co.
Estleman, L. D. 1986. Any Man's Death. New York: Mysterious  Press.
Flagler, J. 1956. Onward and upward with the arts. The New Yorker, (April
     14):142.
Hall, M. 1925. Film review of The Monster. New York Times, (February
     16):24.
Hall, M. 1929. Film review of The Ghost. New York Times, (February 18):28.
Hearts of the West. Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1975. H. Zieff
     (Director).
Magill, F. N. 1981. Magill's Survey of Cinema: English Language Films,
     second series, vol. 3, Hearts of the West, 1005-1007. Englewood
     Cliffs, NJ: Salem Press.
Mortimer, J. 1987. Rumpole and the judge's elbow. In Rumpole's Last Case,
     126. New York: Penguin Books.
National University Extension Association (NUEA). 1930. Proceedings, Vol.
     13. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
New York Times. 1925. Review of Sherlock, Jr., (May 26).
Singer, S. 1984. Free Draw. New York: St. Martin's Press.
Stein, H. 1983. Hoopla. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc.
The American Film Institute Catalog: Feature Films, 1921-1930, s.v.The
     Monster.
The Big Sleep. Distributed by Warner, 1946. H. Hawkes (Director).
The Motion Picture Guide: Silent Film, 1910-1936, s. v. Sherlock,  Jr.
The Motion Picture Guide: Silent Film, 1910-1936, s. v. The  Monster.
The Motion Picture Guide: Silent Film, 1927-1983,  s. v. The  Ghost Talks.
Thomas, R. 1984. Briarpatch. New York: Penguin Books.
Variety. 1925. Review of The Monster,  (Feb. 18).
Variety. 1929. Review of Ghost Talks, (February 27).
Wedemeyer, C. A. and G. B. Childs. 1961. New Perspectives in  University
     Correspondence Study. Chicago, IL: Center for the  Study of Liberal
     Education for Adults.
Westlake, D. E. 1985. Good Behavior. New York: Mysterious Press.
Young, S. 1924. Review of Badges, by Max Marcin and Edward Hammond. New
     York Times, (December 4):25.
   
--------------------- End of DEOSNEWS Vol. 2  No. 13 ----------------------
   

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