Cops at the circus

Two out-of-town visitors found their way to the Pen & Pencil Club this evening, where one of the regulars warned them about the rough treatment fans of the Philadelphia Eagles football team sometimes hand out to supporters of visiting clubs.

"But I wouldn't worry about these two," the regular said, turning to us while indicating the visitors. "They're Chicago law enforcement."

Imagine my delight, then, when I read the following in the last chapter of Jim Tully's Circus Parade:

"Gorilla Haley's skull was fractured. He became insane. He later became a member of the Chicago police."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Jim Tully, a father of hard-boiled

Brian Lindenmuth recommended Jim Tully, and when Brian speaks, I listen.

Tully, who lived from 1886 to 1947, was  a "vagabond, pugilist, and American writer" who achieved commercial success and critical favor in the 1920s and '30s with a series of novels and hard-boiled memoirs. 

He was not a crime writer, but Harvey Pekar's foreword to Tully's Circus Parade (1927) says Tully's legacy is perhaps "most clearly seen in detective stories beginning about 1930. His work often had a rough quality, but it is genuine, not affected, like Ernest Hemingway's."

Circus Parade's first sentence is suitably Hammettian in its matter-of-factness and brevity ("It was my second hobo journey through Mississippi") and the ending of its third story/vignette is wryly humorous ("Cameron's loss was several thousand dollars. Finnerty had gained eighty cents"), a bit like Hammett's story "Slippery Fingers."

So if you like Hammett (and I know that you do), you just might like Jim Tully.

Thanks, Brian.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011