More on Ross Thomas, plus a visit to Regrub King

I think "Regrub King" is a fine name for a restaurant, don't
you? (All photos by Peter Rozovsky, your humble blog keeper.)
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Friday's Ross Thomas post wound up being mostly about George V. Higgins, so here are some things I liked about Missionary Stew, the 1983 Thomas novel that sparked the post:

• "An hour later, Draper Haere's secretary called Citron and told him she was, to use her participle, `messengering' him out $ 2,000 in cash." The scorn embodied in those inverted commas is delicious. How many crime writers today would use participle in a novel? How many people know what a participle is? What would Ross Thomas have done in a culture that thinks texting is a word?

• "Instead of one, there were two of them. There was the tall skinny one in the cheap suit, and the other one, not quite so tall, wearing the banker blue suit and looking as if somebody had just run over his dog."
• Two recurring tag lines, which I won't repeat here, that are all the funnier because the characters who hear them are never in on the joke.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Why George V. Higgins but not Ross Thomas?

Crime writers and readers revere George V. Higgins for The Friends of Eddie Coyle, but we don’t talk much about Ross Thomas these days. This puzzles me, since Thomas was better than Higgins at some of the things Higgins is celebrated for: gritty looks at men at work, including criminals, and razor-sharp dialogue cleverly contrived to convey character and create the illusion that this is how people really speak.

 I base these remarks on Thomas' Missionary Stew, which appeared in 1983, thirteen years after The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and that's where the caveat comes in. Though an experienced novelist by the time ... Eddie Coyle appeared, could Thomas have been influenced by the younger writer, the way the similarly older, more experienced Elmore Leonard was?

I ask because the three previous Thomas novels I had read (Cast a Yellow Shadow, The Seersucker Whipsaw, and The Fools in Town Are on Our Side) either predate The Friends of Eddie Coyle or appeared the same year, and I don't remember those books bringing Higgins or Leonard to mind.

Though I don't get the esteem in which Higgins was held, I have no desire to knock him. But I would like to see a revival of interest in Thomas, and not just because he wrote with such wit about politics.

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A wise commenter on my skeptical 2009 post about Eddie Coyle wrote: "I think it's comparatively rare for pioneering texts to stand up in the long term." Maybe Higgins is an example of that pioneer phenomenon, surpassed by his followers. I should like the guy, because I enjoy authors who look up to him and whose works is often compared to his: Bill James, Garbhan Downey, Dana King, Charlie Stella.

I'd hate to think that readers and critics might be scared off by Thomas because he wrote about politics. Don't be; he makes his subject real and funny/
© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Ross Thomas on politics and other absurd subjects

In honor of the day's events, I'm bringing back two posts I made way back at the beginning of the campaign season about Ross Thomas, a great political satirist, humorist, and Edgar Award-winning crime writer.

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Thumbs up to Ross Thomas' The Seersucker Whipsaw for its title, its subject, and its humor.

The political strategists at the Pen & Pencil Club here in Philadelphia are almost as bad as the cigar smokers and the lawyers, but Thomas' operatives, plotting a campaign for the first election in the newly independent fictional African nation of Albertia, make the profession sound like delightful fun without being more cynical than thou:

"I'm going to call him Chief," Shartelle said firmly. "It’s the first time I’ve ever worked for anybody who was a real chief and I’m not going to pass up the opportunity to address him by his rightful title.”

The book is also full of amusing social observations about its time (it appeared in 1967):

“English lit—right?”

“Wrong. Letters.”

“Letters?”

“As close to a classical education as Minnesota got that year. It was an experiment. A little Latin, and less Greek. It was to produce the well-rounded man. I think they abandoned it in favor of something called communications shortly after I was graduated.”

How good a writer was Thomas? He won two Edgar Awards, but I'm two-thirds of the way through the novel, no crime has been committed, and the book still works as highly entertaining political comedy.

With an American presidential election campaign on, the book will make especially entertaining reading. (Of course, there's almost always an American presidential campaign on.)

***

Speaking of American presidential campaigns, did I mention that, in a burst of serendipity Thomas could hardly have envisioned when he wrote the novel forty-five years ago, one of its characters is the Ile of Obahma? © Peter Rozovsky 2011

It's a strange land, where normal rules don't apply, where shifting tribal loyalties make life dangerous for the unwary, where even the most careful and idealistic visitors may soon get sucked into the intrigue and become indistinguishable from those whom they had previously affected to deplore.

It's Washington, D.C., and it's the setting for Ross Thomas's 1967 international thriller Cast a Yellow Shadow. Less overtly a satire of politics than the two Thomas novels I'd read previously (The Seersucker Whipsaw and The Fools in Town Are on Our Side), the book is nonetheless full of snippets of dialogue and nuggets of description evocative of their place and time in politics:

“The call came while I was trying to persuade a lameduck Congressman to settle his tab before he burned his American Express card. The tab was $18.35 and the Congressman was drunk and had already made a pyre of the cards he held from Carte Blanche, Standard Oil, and the Diner’s Club. He had used a lot of matches as he sat there at the bar drinking Scotch and burning the cards in an ashtray. `Two votes a precinct,' he said for the dozenth time. `Just two lousy votes a precinct.' “`When they make you an ambassador, you’ll need all the credit you can get,' I said as Karl handed me the phone.”

and

“He had watched it evolve from a virtually unexplored territory into a private preserve of the British South Africa Company, then into a colony, and finally into a self-governing country. Now he claimed it was independent, but Britain said it wasn’t and that its declaration of independence was tantamount to treason. Because of the chromium, the U.S. had made only gruff warnings about not recognizing the declaration.”

and

“It sounds like a typical American intelligence plot,” he said. “Only 2,032 things could go wrong—and probably will.”

Here are some notes about Ross Thomas and a Thomas bibliography. While you browse them, ponder these questions: What is your favorite Washington crime novel? Your favorite political crime novel?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

What's your favorite Washington and/or political crime novel?

It's a strange land, where normal rules don't apply, where shifting tribal loyalties make life dangerous for the unwary, where even the most careful and idealistic visitors may soon get sucked into the intrigue and become indistinguishable from those whom they had previously affected to deplore.

It's Washington, D.C., and it's the setting for Ross Thomas's 1967 international thriller Cast a Yellow Shadow. Less overtly a satire of politics than the two Thomas novels I'd read previously (The Seersucker Whipsaw and The Fools in Town Are on Our Side), the book is nonetheless full of snippets of dialogue and nuggets of description evocative of their place and time in politics:

“The call came while I was trying to persuade a lameduck Congressman to settle his tab before he burned his American Express card. The tab was $18.35 and the Congressman was drunk and had already made a pyre of the cards he held from Carte Blanche, Standard Oil, and the Diner’s Club. He had used a lot of matches as he sat there at the bar drinking Scotch and burning the cards in an ashtray. `Two votes a precinct,' he said for the dozenth time. `Just two lousy votes a precinct.' “`When they make you an ambassador, you’ll need all the credit you can get,' I said as Karl handed me the phone.”

and

“They liked to mention that Hennings Van Zandt was eighty-two years old and that he had been one of the first whites to be born in the country that he served as Prime Minister. He had watched it evolve from a virtually unexplored territory into a private preserve of the British South Africa Company, then into a colony, and finally into a self-governing country. Now he claimed it was independent, but Britain said it wasn’t and that its declaration of independence was tantamount to treason. Because of the chromium, the U.S. had made only gruff warnings about not recognizing the declaration.”

and

“It sounds like a typical American intelligence plot,” he said. “Only 2,032 things could go wrong—and probably will.”

Here are some notes about Ross Thomas and a Thomas bibliography. While you browse them, ponder these questions: What is your favorite Washington crime novel? Your favorite political crime novel?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Politics and crime

In honor of this week's first vote in the long American presidential election season, some quick remarks about two crime novels shot through with American politics.

It's a bit scary to think that Bill Clinton loved Ross Thomas' writing, as Tony Hiss reports in his introduction to The Fools in Town are on Our Side, Thomas' 1970 novel of political manipulation. The book's central plot line is the deliberate corruption of an American city in order to facilitate its political takeover. Allies are surrendered up for humiliation and ruin in order to lull the opposition into complacency

Why is this scary? Because Clinton, whatever one thinks of his policies, was widely admired and detested for being such a superb politician. How much did he learn from Thomas? How much of a kindred spirit did he recognize in Thomas' fixers and PR men?

*

The Comedy is Finished, due out next month from Hard Case Crime, is Donald Westlake's last novel.  The story is that Westlake wrote the book decades ago but decided against publishing it in the 1980s for fear that readers would think it too similar to Martin Scorcese's 1983 movie The King of Comedy. Westlake apparently gave Max Allan Collins a manuscript of the book, and Collins passed it on to Hard Case, so the world gets one more novel from the prolific Westlake, who died Dec. 31, 2008.

Westlake's comedian is Koo Davis, a star of radio, television, and stage shows who made his name on USO tours during the Korean War and continues into the Vietnam era, filled all the while with questions about the world and how it's changing around him.

The format allows Westlake much room for amused observations about American entertainment of the 1950s from the perspective of the late 1970s. Unsurprisingly for a book set in the '70s, a kidnapping figures prominently. Davis' question-and-answer sessions with his kidnappers yield some unexpectedly moving introspection on his part and, I suspect, on Westlake's as well.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Tony Hiss on Ross Thomas

I bought this 2003 edition of Ross Thomas' 1971 novel The Fools in Town Are on Our Side because of Tony Hiss' introduction.

I already had an older edition of the book lying around, but Hiss shed light on some of what I liked so much about Thomas' The Seersucker Whipsaw. Take it away, Tony:

"(S)o many new bad things have happened since 1995 that the Cold War years Thomas chronicled so brilliantly and mockingly have started to seem far tamer than they were. As `orphans of the Cold War'—Thomas’s own phrase, in an interview he gave during the last year of his life—his books have been slipping out of print, even though, as Thomas was quick to point out, `fraud and double-dealing for political or personal advantage are age-old themes that will not become extinct.' 

"... a biting, bracing wind blow(s) through Thomas’s books, sometimes at gale force, sometimes only stirring at the curtains, a kind of healing bleakness. ... The underlying tonic in Thomas’s books—his lesson plan for transcending the intolerable—isn’t pushed forward, and many readers may find themselves content in simply taking pleasure from his immense storytelling gifts, which dazzle all the more because they are so seemingly tossed-off."

And now, on to the book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011