Charles G. Booth: What do you know about him?

Charles G. Booth is largely unread today, according to The Black Lizard Big of Pulps, where I have just read his story "Stag Party." Even the Thrilling Detective Web Site, my first source for posts like this.

That's all too bad, because "Stag Party"'s stripped-down toughness reminds me a bit of Paul Cain, the greatest of the hard-boiled writers who followed Dashiell Hammett at Black Mask, and one of the very few, perhaps the only one, whose writing qualifies as noir.

"Stag Party"  doesn't dig as deeply into the doom and resignation that make noir what it is, and its plotting is weaker, but it does contain such Cain-worthy bits as:

"I've been in pictures.' Her voice was husky. `That's where you've seen me.' 

"`No, it isn't,' McFee said. `Sit down.'"

and

"Cruikshank was careless with his eggs."

Booth also worked bits of social-realist type description into the story a good deal less obtrusively and to better narrative purpose than is often the case with such writing, and his bitter cops sound a good deal more like real people than such characters often do. So maybe Booth has a touch of Horace McCoy in him, too.

"Stag Party" has its protagonist, McFee of the Blue Shield Detective Agency, address one female character continually as "sister," and the story repeatedly mentions another by her last name only.  Each is reminiscent of Cain's referring to the protagonist's girlfriend in Fast One most often solely by her last name: Granquist.

Here's the most thorough discussion I've been able to find of Booth, on the Bear Alley blog. All right, readers: What should I know about Charles G. Booth? What should I read by him?

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Theodore Tinsley's multivalent pulp patter

I was ready to prepare a post on Mike Nicol's tight-as-a-drumhead South African thriller Black Heart when I came upon this bit of patter, action, and narration from "Park Avenue Item" (1932) by Theodore A. Tinsley, a Black Mask writer whom I did not know about until this week, but am glad I know now:

"`If you wanta slip me the dough—I'm his babe.'"

"She was his babe—and he left two days ago—he must have come back and left all over again according to the Swede in the cellar. What the hell were they all lying about?

"Tracy looked keenly at her eyes, the nervous hands, the pale lips with the sagging flesh-lines at their corners.

"He said, coolly: `Nix. This is Johnny's dough. I'll hold it for him. I'm not staking his babe to a trip through Switzerland.'"

"She grinned at that. Her right fingertips jerked suddenly to her left forearm with a slow rotary movement of which she was entirely unconscious."

"She said, sneeringly: `You're a pretty wise jasper, at that. Only I don't sleigh-ride. Morph's my dish, dearie.'"

First I was dizzy with the heady fizz of the slang. Then the pathos hit me, and the harshness, before a return to the hard glitter of the slang, with the final line. I'd call that a nice summation of the pleasures to be derived from pulp writing. Good job, Ted Tinsley.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

The great and the good, Part III

Raoul Whitfield's 1931 story "About Kid Deth" (that's not a spelling mistake. Deth, not death, is correct.) is as chilling and hard-edged as anything this side of his fellow Black Mask writers Paul Cain (Fast One) or Dashiell Hammett (The Glass Key). 

Whitfield's story takes its place alongside Cain's and Hammett's novels on my list of crime fiction written in the early 1930s that reads, entirely or in part,  as if it could have been written today.  But, like some of his colleague Frederick Nebel's writing, Whitfield's story is rife with verbal quirks that have dated badly and that keep its author out of the Hammett-Raymond Chandler pantheon. (Cain might be part of a hard-boiled Big Three had he written more than just Fast One and Seven Slayers.)

In "About Kid Deth," these quirks often take the form of periphrasis — a fancy, though scientifically and grammatically precise word for wordiness. Current preference in American English (and, damn it, in stories that come across my desk at work) calls for the car's engine rather than the engine of the car, the girl's body rather than the body of the girl. Not so in Whitfield's story.

Then there's Whitfield's weird penchant for the word tone. No one ever speaks bitterly in "About Kid Deth." No one ever says anything, his voice casual. No one ever speaks grimly or easily. Rather:

"She spoke in a low, bitter tone."

“`Hello, Deth,' he said in a casual tone."

“`Think so?' he said in a strange tone." [ed. note: What is "a strange tone"?]

"`You can’t—not that way,' he said in a hard tone."

“`At Old Andy’s,' he replied in a low tone."

"He said in an uncertain tone: `Watch what you do, Kid.'”

"He spoke in a low, easy tone."

"He said in a grim tone: `Yeah? Did he do that job?'”

By today's standards, that's the stuff of an early, rough draft. Then there's swearing. Publishing mores in the 1930s did not permit curse words, and the results can look odd to readers today, our eyes and ears assaulted by four decades of artistic and literary cursing. "The skunks!" exclaims a character in Nebel's Crimes of Richmond City, and a reader today can't help but smile.

Here's how Whitfield handles his era's prohibition on swearing:

"The Kid swore."

"Joey Deth lowered his hands and swore."

"Kid Deth swore."

"Rands swore hoarsely."

"He swore shakily."

"Then he sat back and swore softly and more steadily."

Granted, the brisk, monosyllabic swore conveys the right, er, tone for a hard-boiled story, but at the risk of a certain sameness. Chandler, on the other hand, turned the prohibition on swearing to entertaining, creative advantage in The Big Sleep in 1939, as Hammett had in "The Girl With the Silver Eyes" in 1924 — seven years before "About Kid Deth."

I may be lazily leftish in my politics, but I'm a cultural conservative in one respect: I believe in artistic discrimination and artistic standards, with absolute, if hard to define, differences between bad and good, and between good and great. Whitfield and Nebel are good, and worth seeking out today. Hammett and Chandler are great. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Reading fun from Faust to the Federalist

My reading has been both eclectic and promiscuous in recent weeks. Here are some highlights:

• 
  Fiction from outside one's own country comes with a burden of greater expectations. We expect such fiction to contain clues to the essence of the country where it originates, and I sometimes wonder if this is unfair to authors who may just want to show the reader a good time. I don't know yet what Mike Nicol's thriller Black Heart says about South Africa, but it sets a fine mood of tension, suspense and paranoia.
  
  
• 
  Christa Faust's Hoodtown is as much alternate-universe fantasy as it is crime. In this case, the universe is a neighborhood populated entirely by luchadors and luchadoras (masked Mexican wrestlers) and their descendants. Sure, fetish sex is part of the mix, but this is mainly a story of outcasts, a protagonist with a dark past, thwarted love, and this bit of musing on the decadence of today's youth: "It was easier back then. Not like now when you got joints all through Hoodtown with Hood girls in máscaras that might as well not exist, string bikinis for the head that cover barely more than a Halloween domino. You couldn't pay me enough to leave the house like that."
  
  
• 
  Frederick Nebel's writing has not dated as well as that of his fellow Black Mask authors Dashiell Hammett, Paul Cain, or Raymond Chandler. Period slang and dated locutions weigh more heavily on his work than on theirs. But Nebel was at least as good as the big three at creating an atmosphere of  menace and uncertainty, and his writing at times has as hard an edge as Cain's. He deserves to be better known and more widely published.
  
  
• But the hardest-edged writer I've read this week, the one with the bleakest (or most clear-eyed) view of humanity, may be Alexander Hamilton. Here are some selections from Federalist Paper #6:

"(M)en are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.  ...

"Have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies? Are not the former administered by men as well as the latter? Are there not aversions, predilections, rivalships, and desires of unjust acquisitions, that affect nations as well as kings? Are not popular assemblies frequently subject to the impulses of rage, resentment, jealousy, avarice, and of other irregular and violent propensities? Is it not well known that their determinations are often governed by a few individuals in whom they place confidence, and are, of course, liable to be tinctured by the passions and views of those individuals? Has commerce hitherto done anything more than change the objects of war? Is not the love of wealth as domineering and enterprising a passion as that of power or glory? Have there not been as many wars founded upon commercial motives since that has become the prevailing system of nations, as were before occasioned by the cupidity of territory or dominion? Has not the spirit of commerce, in many instances, administered new incentives to the appetite, both for the one and for the other?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011