"Ace" Rozovsky, backstage photographer

This week I read two books and shot some actors.

The books were The Big Bite, by Charles Williams; and Wake Up to Murder, by Day Keene, but it appears you'll have to wait till tomorrow to hear about them.

The actors were the cast of Lafferty's Wake, at the Society Hill Playhouse in Philadelphia. Deen Kogan, the theater's artistic director and also director of this production, is an acquaintance through Philadelphia's Noircon crime fiction convention, and she invited me to take photos at a run-through of the play, which opens this weekend.
By this stage, a show is virtually a finished product, and the cast, in full costume, ran through the entire show without interruption, but with a warm-up session, with discussion of lighting and music beforehand and a short presentation by the director afterward. This included a detailed — and I mean detailed — review of the rehearsal: a slurred line here, a suggestion for altering an entrance there. It was my first time behind a theater production, and I loved the interaction before and after, even the tiny occasional bit of testiness at the give and take.

During was pretty good, too. Lafferty's Wake includes four or five of the best-known Irish songs, including "The Rising of the Moon" and "Wild Rover" — a good thing, and as near as I could tell, the cast's accents were not shite.

The theater world was once a popular setting for crime fiction. Ngaio Marsh set mysteries there, as did Bill S. Ballinger. Theodore A. Tinsley's Jerry Tracy, celebrity reporter, moved amid the great and not so great of Broadway.

Theater no longer is as central to popular entertainment as it once was, though, and everyone who entered the rehearsal I attended left the building alive (though Lafferty's Wake does include a crime-fiction-like twist).). But I shot 574 photos, and I had a fabulous time, and the next time a director calls, I'll be there with my trusty shooter.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The Titles That Screamed, or how did paperback originals get their names?

The last eight novels I've read are A Night for Screaming, A Ticket to Hell, Any Woman He Wanted, The Body Beautiful, Brute in Brass, Nothing in Her Way, The Diamond Bikini, and A Touch of Death, in the last of which a character wakes up screaming.

Aside from making me a confirmed fan of Harry Whittington, Charles Williams, and Bill S. Ballinger, the books got me wondering how paperback originals got their titles. Of the eight novels above, five and maybe six have generic titles. As evocative as those titles are, they could easily have been swapped among the books without any loss of effect, or something just as chill-inducing substituted for any one of them. (The two exceptions, with titles that either get directly and specifically at the novel's core or else highlight a recurrent and unusual motif, are Williams' Nothing in Her Way and The Diamond Bikini.)

Today one thinks of a title as personal to the author (or publisher) and specific to the book. Back then, it seems, things were more generic. One could easily imagine a Whittington or a Williams beginning with a title, and writing a book to match. (It may be significant that a number of paperback originals appeared under more than one title. Williams' A Touch of Death, for instance, was also published as Mix Yourself a Redhead, which refers to a minor incident in the book, but which would have made a much better title for one of Richard S. Prather's Shell Scott novels. Could the title have been an attempt to capitalize on Prather's popularity?)

So, readers, especially those familiar with paperback originals and their history, How did these books get their titles? Did their authors take titles as seriously as we take titles today?  Did publishers assign the titles? And which came first, the title or the book?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Bill S. Ballinger and hard-boiled writing in the 1940s, with a question for readers

1949 was an in-between time in mass-market hard-boiled crime fiction, at least the variety written by men. Black Mask was nearly dead, and Manhunt had not yet appeared. Raymond Chandler was almost done writing, and Mickey Spillane was one book into his career.

Into the breach stepped The Body Beautiful by Bill S. Ballinger, who liked the letter b. (The novel's predecessor is The Body in the Bed, and their protagonist is a private investigator named Barr Breed.)

Photo by your humble
blogkeeper of a kind of
sign Bill S. Ballinger
might well have seen in
the1940s.
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Appearing as it did in between two well-defined eras, The Body Beautiful looks like a pastiche of trends, motifs, and narrative techniques from the 1920s through the 1950s. Breed is a tough dick who clashes with the cops, one of whom is a friend. The Body Beautiful contains at least one passage as chilling as anything Jim Thompson wrote, but the story takes place in and around a theater, decidedly a nod to an earlier era.

At the resolution, the dick gathers all the suspects at the theater, and he relates in detail how he had solved the crime, like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. But the crime and its rational solution are more in the manner of a traditional mystery.

Breed and occasionally other characters say "coulda" and "woulda" and "gotta" and "lotta" and "kinda" and "outa" and "musta;" you know Ballinger and audience shared a common grounding in the tough-talking 1920s and '30s. The novel is also shot through with the yearning romanticism of the 1950s David Goodis sort.

And I like to think Barr Breed might have had
 drink here. This one's also by your humble
blogkeeper.
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Ballinger does almost all of this well. (My only complaint concerns the climactic revelation scene, where we know tension is high because Breed/Ballinger keep telling us tension is high.) Ballinger could plot well; the mystery was nicely laid out and would have kept me turning the pages had I not been reading an e-book. Ballinger also knew his way around a theater or else did a convincing job persuading me that he did. The backstage details made for terrific color and background.

OK, now you know Bill S. Ballinger. Your next job is this: Sum up 1940s hard-boiled crime writing in just a few words.

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The Body Beautiful is part of a useful, exciting list published by 280 Steps. The catalogue includes new books, older ones both neglected and not, and critical works. I've been reading their editions of Harry Whittington, and I have a few more of their titles lines up.
© Peter Rozovsky 2015