Richard S. Prather and Stephen Marlowe, or What are your favorite author team-ups and cross-overs?

As much as I love Richard S. Prather's extravagant descriptions of luxuriantly appointed women ("She'd just turned twenty one, but had obviously signaled for the turn a long time ago."), they can wear thin over the length of a novel. And the one book by Stephen Marlowe I had tried to read before last week gave me a headache with its political yammering.

But when Prather's Shell Scott and Marlowe's Chester Drum teamed up for Double in Trouble in 1959, the excess flew out the window, each author concentrated on what I presume he did best, and the contrast between the ebullient Scott and the somber Drum provides extra fun.  Marlowe's descriptions of women who catch Drum's eye seem touchingly chaste next to Prather's enthusiasm, for one. (The novel alternates chapters narrated by Scott and Drum. I assume Prather wrote the Scott chapters and Marlowe the Drums, but who knows? Maybe each took a stab at the other's style.)

I don't know Marlowe's style well enough to judge whether he altered it all for Double in Trouble. But one of Prather's descriptions leavens the joy with a bit of concern. The result is just beautiful, screwy but affecting and empathetic, and it may be my favorite description of them all:

"She was a big, healthy tomato with plenty of tomato juice in her, but somehow without all the usual seasonings."

Your turn now. What are your favorite crime-fiction collaborations, particularly if they involve both authors' characters teaming up? Why do you like them?

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

My Bouchercon 2014 panels: Max Allan Collins just wants to have fun

Max Allan Collins will discuss other writers during a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 next month, but his own work is worth reading as well. His three most recent Quarry novels, the latest in a series that began in the 1970s, suggest that Collins shared the savvy professionalism of the pulp and paperback-original writers who will be the panel's main subject.

The three books—Quarry in the Middle, Quarry's Ex, and The Wrong Quarry, each published by Hard Case Crime—begin with the hitman/entrepreneur protagonist, Quarry, embarking on a job. (Collins sets the books in the Reagan era and has just enough fun with the period's social, political, and, most of all, musical trappings to remind readers of the setting without getting in the story's way.)

Quarry became a hitman after military service in Vietnam, where he learned to kill; killed his boss after the boss cheated him; then created and exploited a niche in the murder market: He uses his boss' old files to track the contract killers long enough to figure out who their targets are, then goes to the targets and offers to kill the killers for a handsome fee—which he does in due course, about a third of the way through each book. And that's where the real fun starts, and Quarry is forced to turn detective and figure out who the bad guys really are.

This format lets Collins exploit any number of crime and adventure conventions. Quarry is a disillusioned Vietnam vet, though without the psychological baggage. He's a tough-guy ass-kicker with a bit of the wise-cracking self-awareness of the Saint. He's a mildly self-effacing babe magnet, with an amiable susceptibility to women, a Shell Scott with more sex and fewer extravagant anatomical similes. And, when compelled to figure out who's really who, and who wants what and why, he makes a more than credible detective.

Along the way, the books' (possible) crime-fiction references include Richard Stark's Parker: Quarry in the Middle has one character apprehensive that Quarry plans to rob a casino, a la The Handle. But Quarry laughs and reassures his nervous interlocutor that he, Quarry, is part of no plunder squad. (One of Collins' other series pays amusing tribute to crime and espionage classics in such titles as A Shroud for Aquarius and The Baby Blue Rip-Off.)

I don't know how the Quarry series has changed over the years, whether the earlier novels are more straightforward hitman tales than these later ones. Nor do I know whether those early books partake as freely of the crime-fiction smorgasbord. But Quarry in the Middle, Quarry's Ex, and The Wrong Quarry take a '50s-style tough guy, give him a '60-style back story, and set the results in the 1970s. Pastiche? Maybe, but by God, Collins pulls it off, and has lots of fun doing it.

==============

Max Allan Collins will be part of my Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras panel Friday, Nov. 14, 3 p.m. at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

"Saucer-eyed, skull-grinning, jut-jawed, false-breasted, fake-fannied..."

Mid-twentieth-century hard-boiled American crime fiction abounded in over-the-top physical descriptions of women, with extravagant curves decidedly in favor. Think of Richard S. Prather, author of the phenomenally bestselling Shell Scott private-investigator novels, from whose typewriter

"There was a lot of her already in the room before the rest of her got in."

is one of the tamer examples.

Gil Brewer's 1954 novel A Killer Is Loose, about a down-on-his-luck father-to-be who saves the wrong man's life, shares the predilection for tall, curvaceous women, but its descriptions of them are brief, matter-of-fact, and almost chastely decorous.

Instead, Brewer saves his verbal steam—enough of it to run several turbines, a manufacturing plant or two, and a small city—for the opposite physical type:

"She was one of those ash-blonde, bony, saucer-eyed, skull-grinning, jut-jawed, false-breasted, fake-fannied, angle-posing, empty-thighed in betweens they stamp out like tin slats for Venetian blinds in some bloodless, airless underground factory to supply that increasingly bewildering demand for sexless models such as she for certain women's fashion magazines, where they loll backward gaping and pinch nostriled in tight red and silver sashes, over an old freshly varnished beer barrel, holding long skinny umbrellas, point down in a sand dune. Sometimes you see them swooning pipe-lidded, paper-pale over a swirling Martini in a triple-sized cocktail glass with their long fleshless golden-tipped claws clamped buzzard-like around the stem. Give me curves, dimples, and swollen thighs, every time. I'm an easy man to please."

I'm not sure I like that invocation of buzzards (animal comparisons are often problematic), but the overall description contains much to enjoy and to provoke thought. For one thing, it goes beyond physical description to sketch the woman's character. (She's shrill, cruel at no risk to herself, and not a nice person.) For another, though I don't mean to suggest that such was Gil Brewer's intent, the description might strike a chord today, in a culture suffused with worry over obsessive desire by some women and girls for unhealthy skinniness and of occasional outbursts of anger toward a fashion industry that glorifies such a look. Gil Brewer would have had no trouble agreeing that real women have curves.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Into the '50s, with a stop in Japan first

I finished Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X last night, and I'm impressed by how Higashino built his story. The book offers not just rationality against emotion, but, among the characters governed by their rationality, mathematics against physics. The head investigator has not just a subordinate with whom he forms an amusing team, but a friend and semi-amateur sleuth who is the real force behind the investigation. All this forms a nice background for a tale of seething emotions and their consequences.

The clues all make sense at the end, and Higashino does a nice job planting details that let me flatter myself when I spotted their significance many pages later.

***

Speaking of emotions, they're spilling out all over the pages of my other recent reading, and not just of one book, either. I've stocked up on American paperback originals from the 1950s, as reissued by Wonder eBooks and Prologue Books, and all I can say is that all that liquor characters drank in the 1920s and '30s and '40s finally started to hit in the 1950s. If the '20s, '30s and '40s were the boozy party of American crime writing, the '50s were the morning after, with the hangover, the empty pockets, the strange bed, the gutter, the torn clothes, and the utter lack of prospects -- not that some American crime writing of the time wasn't pretty funny. Here are a few bits from some of the books I've been browsing trying to decide what to read next:

"She had been somewhere with someone, but she couldn’t quite remember the place or the person. As a matter of fact she had a feeling that she had been a number of places with a number of persons, but she couldn’t quite remember that for certain either."

Park Avenue Tramp, Fletcher Flora

"(I)t it was a small, sad, lovely face of fine structure in which sadness and loveliness would survive as a shadow of themselves after the erosions of gin and promiscuous love and nervous breakdowns."

ibid.

"She was tall, blackhaired, with creamy skin and what I thought of simply as `Mexican' eyes. Dark eyes, soft, big, shadowed eyes with both the question and the answer in them."

The Sleeper Caper, Richard S. Prather

Before you sneer at "Mexican eyes," think about the words that went before: "what I thought of simply as." Sure, Prather has his protagonist, Shell Scott, engage in what some might call ethnic stereotyping and objectification of women today, but by God, he's redeemed by his awareness of what he's doing and by Scott's enjoyment of this Elena's beauty. And who could resist the melodramatic appeal of a pair of eyes that contain not just answers but also questions? Damned efficient, I'd say.

"You never can tell what a big, tough Polish boy will do when he finds a nude blonde in his bathroom."

To Kiss, Or Kill, Day Keene

Goodnight!

© Peter Rozovsky 2012