Fletcher Flora, or Why American P.I. fiction from the 1950s is like Late Roman art

American P.I.  fiction
from the late 1950s.

American P.I. fiction from the late 1950s—and I know you'll agree with me on this—is like Late Antique art. Each grew out of a tradition that established enduring standards of perfection (Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in one case, Classical Greek and Roman art in the other). The weight of each tradition, part of the past yet still exerting powerful influence in the present, drove some of its inheritors into self-consciousness and bizarre exaggeration as they tried to create something new while at the same time remaining faithful to what had gone before.

Late Antique art

Fletcher Flora's 1958 novel Leave Her to Hell is as self-conscious as all get-out. Here are just a few examples from the first three chapters:

"The door was opened by a maid with a face like half a walnut . You may think it’s impossible for a face to look like half a walnut, and I suppose it is, if you want to be literal. But half a walnut is, nevertheless, all I can think of as a comparison when I think of the face of this maid."

 *

"Nine times out of ten, when someone tries to describe a woman who is fairly tall and has a slim and pliant and beautiful body, he will say that she is willowy, and that’s what I say. I say that Faith Salem was willowy."

*

"I woke up at seven in the morning, which is a nasty habit of mine that endures through indiscretions and hangovers and intermittent periods of irregular living."

In the last two examples, especially, Flora has his hard-boiled P.I. narrator/protagonist question standard scenes of P.I. fiction (the description of the beautiful female client, the narrator/protagonist's description of himself) even as he lives those scenes. I'll save the rest for a dissertation, but for now, suffice it to say that a novel that questions itself and its conventions on every page (so far) is a compelling but hardly restful experience.. Here's the novel's opening:

"A woman wanted to see me about a job. Her name, she said, was Faith Salem. She lived, she said, in a certain apartment in a certain apartment building ... "

Now, let's go see what the rest of the book is like. In the meantime, what crime writers, novels, or stories have reminded you of a period or a genre from another art form?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Milton K. Ozaki, plus a few more night shots

My street, tinkered with so it looks contemporaneous with the
paperback originals I've been reading from the 1950s and '60s.
(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Milton K. Ozaki is the only crime writer I know of who was also a reporter, a hair dresser, and, according to at least one source, a tax lawyer, as well.  A private note from a prominent student of American crime fiction recently called Ozaki "possibly the most bizarre writer of the '50s pulps."

Ozaki's entertaining 1954 novel Dressed to Kill got me thinking more than I have before about the role formula played in what readers and publishers expected — and circumstances demanded — of writers in the paperback original and pulp eras, from the 1930s through the 1960s.   

The Lit Brothers Building, Philadelphia.

Ozaki, for example, seems to have been particularly fascinated by grapes, making of them a stock device to which he could turn when in need of a vivid or odd metaphor, as in:

"The bright yellow of the Caddy made it stand out like a banana in a bowl of grapes."

or

"His pale eyes, excited by the anticipated kill, had the translucent quality of seedless grapes, yet seemed more shiny, as if oiled by hate."

From my newspaper's office
looking across Market Street,
Philadelphia.

Have you ever compared anyone's eyes to a seedless grape? Neither have I.  Ozaki probably hit on phrases and situations readers liked, and made a game of seeing how far he could stretch the metaphors without snapping them entirely. My preliminary assessment, based on just the one novel, is that Ozaki sits somewhere between the hyperventilating extravagance of Robert Leslie Bellem and the calmer atmospherics of, say, Helen Nielsen.

Bill Crider notes the extravagance and the occasional repetition in Ozaki's work, which I'm guessing are results of having to turn out so much work so fast. At the same time, I especially like this observation of Crider's, which fills me with respect for talented writers who worked under difficult conditions:

"You can almost see the improvement happening in Ozaki’s steady progression up the ladder of paperback publishers. He started at the bottom with Phantom and Handi-Books, moved to Graphic, then to Ace, and finally to Gold Medal."

And now I'm off to learn more about the pulps and hacks who wrote for them. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014