Hooray for Pete Hamill

Pete Hamill's long literary and journalistic career includes at least one crime novel that crosses borders (The Guns of Heaven, Northern Ireland), but that's not what gets him mentioned here.

He makes it because his introduction to the Penguin Classics Damon Runyon collection, Guys and Dolls and Other Writings, contains in the space of two paragraphs three salient attributes of Runyon's work that I noticed in his story "Sense of Humor":

• "Sometimes we can hear Runyon's people talking above their stations, playing social roles that are lies, but we certainly don't mistake them for characters out of Edith Wharton, who do the same thing."


• "This is, of course, a fictional world. The gangsters don't speak the way real gangsters spoke in that era, or in ours."


• "Runyon is often accused of sentimentalizing his gangsters, and is sometimes guilty as charged. But a close reading of most of these stories shows us a clear darker side. His people often do terrible things to each other, and out of base motives."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Damon Runyon is hard-boiled more than somewhat

Contractions run rampant in my newspaper; we could use a man like Damon Runyon again.

But the writer whose stories of Prohibition-era Broadway inspired Guys and Dolls was more than just colorful nicknames and eccentric grammar, and even that grammar may have had a point.

I'm giving Runyon another try on account of a blonde doll who is putting her hands on her hips and giving me the eye and saying: "Big Pete! I am reading Damon Runyon's stories, and I am liking them, and I am very much wanting to know what you intend to do about this."

The story she suggested begins like this:

"One night I am standing in front of Mindy's restaurant on Broadway, thinking of practically nothing whatever, when all of a sudden I feel a very terrible pain in my left foot."

and ends— well, the ending, has the same off-beat grammar and syntax and rough good humor, but it's a whole lot darker. And that's why Runyon, at least some of him, still makes it as a crime writer today. But why take my word for it? You can read the story, "Sense of Humor," yourself.

And then you can take a look at a contemporary Irish crime writer's homage to Runyon.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

An Irish crime writer revitalizes Runyon

Two years ago the Rap Sheet marked Damon Runyon's birthday with a post that suggested many readers knew his name and many knew his work, but few knew both.

I'm not sure how many know Runyon's writing these days (as opposed to movie adaptations, such as Guys and Dolls), but I agree that many know his name and that the name is encrusted with nostalgia.

Garbhan Downey's 2005 collection of linked stories, Off Broadway, chips away at the crust. Its title is an acknowledged nod to Runyon on Broadway, and Downey's characters have colorful nicknames, gather in bars, and speak in the present tense, as Runyon's did.

So what makes these stories fresh? The contemporary settings: Derry, Boston, New York. Paramilitaries and methods of violence I'd read about in other Northern Ireland crime writing. Thus I smiled at the diction of

"(T)he hundred K he'll get from the Massachusetts Public Insurance Board to make up for the two holes in the back of his knees, which incidentally will be developing about now"

even as I cringed at the violence. And how can one not love a phrase like "it will be a cold day in hell before Bad Breath Bradley shows his head in here again to violate my chips and Tikka sauce"?

And now, your questions: Thanks to Garbhan Downey, I may pick up Runyon again to look for darkness beneath the over-the-top color. What newer writers have caused you to take a similar look back at an earlier author or genre? (I have one such pair in mind, and if you're good, I may tell you who it is.) Which writers or styles could use similar rescue from the mist of nostalgia?

(Read about Damon Runyon and sample his work here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008