On Frederick Nebel, plus who was the best Black Mask-era writer after Hammett and Chandler?

Read Frederick Nebel's Black Mask stories, and you're apt to notice two things: 1) How good Nebel was, and 2) How far short he fell of Dashiell Hammett, his friend and Black Mask predecessor.

On the one hand, Nebel's prose is not always, pace an admiring introduction, "as fresh today as it was in the 1930s."  It can't be, not filled as it is with "clipped, "chided," or even "gritted"  rather than "said."  That method of jazzing up prose wears decidedly less well today than when Black Maskers routinely indulged it.

On the other, the wit, the pace, the plotting, and some of the descriptions remain fresh. This little word picture, for instance, matches a clumsily archaic job title with a sardonic observation that would not be out of place in Hammett: "District Leader Skoog, nursing a bottle of Cointreau and trying to give the impression he had a refined taste."

Photos by your humble shooter, Peter Rozovsky

That's from "Ten Men From Chicago," one of Nebel's many stories that paired Capt. Steve MacBride and Kennedy of the Free Press (though Kennedy, an alcohol-sodden sounding board, conscience, and comic foil to MacBride in some of the stories, has little to do in this one). Another bit from the same 1930 story shows that Nebel could match the era's best when it came to observational wisecracks:

"Sergeant Otto Bettdecken sat at the desk in the central room eating a frankfurter-on-roll, A clock ticked on the wall behind him. Bettdecken was a large man, with fat rosy cheeks and heavy jowls that overlapped his tight standing uniform collar. From time to time he raised a bottle of home-brew from behind the desk, cast searching eyes around the large room, and took a generous swallow. After each swallow he sighed with that profound air of a man serenely at peace with the world and thankful for the small creature comforts which it bestows upon mankind—and especially police sergeants."

That would not have been out of place in Hammett's first story about the Continental Op, "Arson Plus."  That Hammett's story appeared seven years before Nebel's makes Hammett's accomplishment all the more impressive without, however, detracting from Nebel's.

Now, here's your question: Who is the best hard-boiled crime writer of the 1920s, '30s, and '40s other than Hammett and Raymond Chandler? And why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Kevin Starr, film noir, crime fiction, and (California) history

Kevin Starr's California will make my books-of-the-year list if I prepare one, and I can hardly wait to finish this one-volume history so I can start on his seven-volume version, each book of which has the word dream in its title.

Starr is a passionate, engaging writer and a great lover of California, which he served as state librarian. Yet he is fair-minded in dealing with the violence that has attended the on-going birth of this strange piece of the planet. He is the sort who can give history a good name.

He's also savvy enough to tie the state's raucous, dream-filled history to the crime writing that arose there. (It's no accident that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler lived in California and set some of their most celebrated work there.) Starr makes the connection during a discussion of a period perhaps surprisingly early: the 1870's and 1880s, when promoters touted California as an El Dorado of health. After citing examples of recovery from consumption and other complaints, Starr notes that:

"Many. however, lost their struggle for health and succumbed, and this drama of hope and defeat conferred upon Southern California a certain interplay of healthfulness and morbidity that in various forms, including the hard-boiled detective story and film noir, would persist into the mid-twentieth century."

Elsewhere California history is filled with colorful episodes and characters: the San Francisco Vigilance Committee of 1856. The settlement during California's American period of land claims dating from its Spanish and Mexican eras ("That meant that lawyers got rich.") Great engineering feats, but also environmental depredations. (Starr mentions Chinatown in a discussion of the mammoth problems that attended getting water to San Francisco and Los Angeles.) And that's just a few decades.   Some of California's prospectors and health seekers were doomed disappointment, but crime writers looking for material struck it rich.

What can match California as a location for crime stories, and why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

My Bouchercon 2013 panels: Noir, hard-boiled, fantasy, and reality

My noir and hard-boiled panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., next month will also be a reality and fantasy panel, fantasy meaning nostalgia, pulp, and other forms of retreat from the everyday.

In this corner, representing reality, Dana King's Grind Joint, with its utter lack of illusion about the supposed benefits of a casino for an economically ravaged Pennsylvania town. In that corner, Terrence McCauley's violent Prohibition-era novel Prohibition and Eric Beetner's post-apocalyptic cannibal/survivor tale Stripper Pole at the End of the World.  Somewhere between these extremes, showing affinities at times with one, at times with the other, are Mike Dennis and Jonathan Woods, who join King, McCauley, and Beetner on the panel.

McCauley harks back to Dashiell Hammett and Paul Cain (and to writers and movie makers who harked back to Hammett and Cain). While his book's themes of loyalty, doubt, and betrayal are confined to no one era, the cover of the novel, at upper left, quite accurately reflects the early- and mid-twentieth-century gats 'n' gloves mythos to which McCauley makes a modern-day contribution. He and Beetner are acutely aware of periods in American popular culture that preceded their own.

King, on the other hand, writes about a world where beaten-down cities are desperate for the next big thing, where governments happily throw cash at companies to relocate to (or remain in) their state, and a lot more money seems to circulate among corporations and politicians than among the relocated workers. For all King's affinities with Elmore Leonard, George V. Higgins or King's amico Charlie Stella, it's a world you can find lurking behind today's headlines.

Fantasy? Reality? Pulp? Bad juju? You'll find it all at Bouchercon ... and here, at Detectives Beyond Borders.

How about you, lovers of noir and hard-boiled? Is your favorite reading reality? Fantasy? Or some mix of both?

======== 

Eric Beetner, Mike Dennis, Dana King, Terrence McCauley, and Jonathan Woods will be part of the "Goodnight, My Angel: Hard-Boiled, Noir, and the Reader's Love Affair With Both" panel, with your humble blogkeeper as moderator, at Bouchercon 2013 on Friday, Sept. 20, at 10:20 a.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The real Horace, plus a question for readers

I had read nothing by Horace McCoy, best known as the author of the 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? until a friend send me a link to his story "The Mopper-Up." (Read "The Mopper-Up" free online.)

I'm a McCoy fan now, with They Shoot Horses, Don't They? and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye shooting to the top of my TBR pile.

A posting on the Rara-Avis discussion board says that "the Frost series notwithstanding, many regard a non-series story entitled "The Mopper-Up" to be McCoy's best BLACK MASK submission."  I like the story for its convincing description of an oil boom town; for its telescoping that town's history into a wonderfully short space (I wonder if Scott Phillips likes McCoy) ; for its no-nonsense hero who, despite being a Good Man, is given a strong hint of menace; for its knowing depiction of fear and uncertainty; and for lines like these:

"When he came back downstairs the lower floor was emptied. Employees had deserted Patton in his hour of need and he stood alone and captured by a taxi driver." 

Since a comment above mentions Black Mask, today's question for you, readers is: Who is your favorite 1920s, '30s, '40s, or '50s hard-boiled crime writer not named Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Fredric Brown: The short Wench Is Dead

I mentioned in Sunday's post about Dan J. Marlowe that I tend to read paperback original crime stories from the mid-twentieth century as artifacts of their time.

I read another one of those artifacts this week, Fredric Brown's story The Wench Is Dead, which, I have just learned from the link in this paragraph, Brown later expanded into a 1955 novel of the same name.

I call this one an artifact because its man-in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time plot seemed evocative of a time when the idea of being trapped (by middle-class morality, suburban conformity, or what have you) was a cultural current. Indeed, the protagonist is a young man of respectable background with a bachelor's degree in sociology who has fled Chicago for a few weeks of bohemian squalor before returning to a job in his father's investment business. (In the novel, apparently, he has hit the road to research his dissertation in sociology and plans to return to a teaching job in that field.)

The story seems artifact-like in the telling because its characters' grubby lifestyle (the protagonist is a wino scraping by on dishwasher's wages barely sufficient to keep him in Muscatel) is a dirty story told in an oddly clean, decorous manner. There is none of of the gritty despair David Goodis brought to stories whose characters led similar lives.

One artifactish aspect of the story serves it well. Brown must have been one of the earlier writers to begin shucking off the era's bars to descriptions of sex (or maybe paperback originals in general were ahead of their time in that respect). In any case, our introduction to the protagonist's girlfriend Billie is beautifully matter of fact about how she earns her living:

"`Jeez, only ten? Oh well, I had seven hours. Guy came here when Mike closed at two but he didn't stay long.'" 

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Musil, (Joseph) Roth, and Hammett

David Whish-Wilson got me reading Joseph Roth, and from there it was a short leap to Robert Musil.

The Man Without Qualities (1930-1942) is not a crime novel, but bits of it will interest crime readers (and I haven't even got to Moosbrugger yet):

"THIS man who had returned home could not remember any time in his life that had not been animated by his determination to become a man of importance; it was as though Ulrich had been born with this wish. It is true that such an urge may be a sign of vanity and stupidity; it is no less true, however, that it is a very fine and proper desire, without which there would probably not be many men of importance.

The only snag was that he did not know either how one became such a man or what a man of importance was. In his schooldays he had taken Napoleon for one; this was partly out of youth’s natural admiration for criminality..."

These aren't bad, either:

"It is a fundamental characteristic of civilisation that man most profoundly mistrusts those living outside his own milieu..."

and

"For some time now such a social idée fixe has been a kind of super-American city where everyone rushes about, or stands still, with a stop-watch in his hand."

and

"Like all big cities, it consisted of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs..."

I noticed, too, that Roth and Musil, those acute witnesses to the traumatic birth of modern Europe, make their astonished remarks about the noisy vitality of American cities in precisely the years (1922-1930) when Dashiell Hammett was perfecting hard-boiled crime fiction, an urban-based genre if there ever was one.

*

The Man Without Qualities was on the reading list of a course I took in college on the twentieth-century European novel. How any 18-, 19-, or 20-year old, much less one as callow and stupid as I was at the time, can be expected to appreciate such a book is beyond me. I think Musil was the one author the class never got around to reading. At least I might have been able to appreciate its outrageousness and jokes, as I did for The Confessions of Zeno and Journey to the End of the Night.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

What I'm about to read on my sort-of vacation

I'm off to Boston tomorrow accompanied by Ciaran Carson, Cú Chulainn, Thomas Pynchon and, in case I get too cheerful, Dead Man Upright, part of Melville House's new editions of Derek Raymond's Factory novels.

I'll read Pynchon's Inherent Vice curious about why he chose the hard-boiled-detective form to tell a story set in the psychedelic 1960s and, according to a cover blurb, about the end of an era. (Reviewers call the novel noir, but I assume that most people who call a crime story noir really mean hard-boiled. If I'm wrong in this case, I'll say so.)

There's no such doubt about Derek Raymond. He's noir, and I've heard tell that next to Dead Man Upright, his previous bleak, funny, touching Factory novels are light entertainment.

Here's some of what I've written about Raymond:

"He was a latter-day Hammett, I thought when I read Derek Raymond's I Was Dora Suarez. He was a new Chandler, I thought when I read the opening chapters of  The Devil's Home on Leave.

"With one novel-plus of Raymond under my belt, I say he's a bit of both. His nameless detective-sergeant protagonist is as dedicated to his job as was Sam Spade or the Continental Op, and he yearns like Philip Marlowe, only there's not a trace of nostalgia about him. He's as hard and as heart-breaking as the best of the dark crime writers who followed him and who invoke his name as reverently as they do Hammett's and Chandler's."

And here's some of what you'll find about Derek Raymond on the Melville House Web site.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

"As inarticulate as the feeling of a Newfoundlander for rum"

Here's a bit from Murder Over Dorval (1952) by David Montrose, second in Véhicule Press' Ricochet series of vintage Canadian hard-boiled reprints:

"You take these great, over-engined, chrome-bedizened American monstrosities of cars … they now have gears that change themselves. To someone who likes to drive a car, that’s about as sensible as a machine for making babies would be to anyone who likes to manufacture them naturally.

“My Riley is different. My Riley takes a delicate hand on the gear lever, like a good jockey's grip on a racehorse’s reins. And the results are about the same. About the time I’m going fifty, when I’m just ready to shift into high, I can look in the rear-view mirror and the American cars that got away from the stop light the same time I did are a blur in the distance."

The Riley was a British car, yet the prose here would not be out of place in a U.S. paperback original. A blend of British and American. That's one good way to think about Canada, at least in the middle of the last century.

***

For a uniquely Canadian touch, here's how protagonist Russell Teed loves the car he has just described for you:

“ … I’d tell you how much I love it if I could, but the feeling of a car-lover for his machine is as inarticulate as the feeling of a Newfoundlander for rum: you just have to sense it.”

***

Here's my post on The Crime on Cote des Neiges, the first of the David Montrose reprints from Véhicule.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Hard-boiled Canada: The Crime on Cote des Neiges

David Montrose's 1951 novel The Crime on Cote des Neiges, first in a series of vintage Canadian hard-boiled reprints from Montreal's Véhicule Press, would fit comfortably into Hard Case Crime's list alongside books by Richard Powell, David Dodge, and Mickey Spillane (though without Spillane's frothing jingoism).

At the same time, small differences in language and larger ones in sensibility make it a treat for native Montrealers like me and, perhaps, an interesting study for readers from exotic places like Europe, Australia and the U.S. A sofa is a chesterfield in Montrose's world, as it was in my childhood. Characters flee not to the hills, the mountains or the shore, but "up North," to the Laurentian mountains. A woman trying to discern if a house is occupied will call out not "Anybody home?" but "Who's home?"

Other differences are more noticeable. Our hero, Russell Teed, encounters beautiful, mysterious women, as would any wisecracking American P.I., only Montrose's descriptions are racier than their American counterparts.

And how about this, from Teed's client:

"In days like these, when the government has taken over most social responsibility, wealth doesn't carry social obligation any more. It's wicked to be wealthy, in the eyes of the majority, and young rich people too often act as though they were trying to live up to that reputation."

The wealthy client is a staple of American hard-boiled writing, but would an American crime writer use words like "social responsibility"? Would an American crime character talk of "social obligation"?

***

You likely smiled when you read the phrase "vintage Canadian hard-boiled" in this post's first paragraph. But think: Prohibition was a staple of American crime and crime fiction in the 1920s and '30s, and any number of U.S. crime novels and stories refer to cross-border booze-running from Canada. Who wrote about the Canadian side of the trade and the open cities that developed from it? One answer: Montrose.

***

My Montreal compatriot and age-group cohort John McFetridge offers some thoughts on Montrose's interesting use of Montreal weather.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Rhyme and punishment

What was the deal with poets in mid-twentieth-century American hard-boiled writing?

First this, from Dashiell Hammett's story "Too Many Have Lived" (1932):

"`I'd want to talk to her,' Spade said. `Who is this Eli Haven?'

"`He's a bad egg. He doesn't do anything. Writes poetry or something.'"

Thirteen years later, Brett Halliday the author, Murder Is My Business the book, Mike Shayne the detective:

"She won't be married — unless Towne has changed a lot. That's the job I did for him. There was a chap named Lance Bayliss. A poet, Lucy, and a poet is lower than dirt to a two-fisted, self-made financier like Jefferson Towne."

So, just to be on the safe side, if you're a character in a hard-boiled book, try not to be a poet. Or at least get a real job, and write on the side.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010