Bouchercon 2016, the books: "This is a job for the meat wagon, Ed," a look at Frank Kane

Two members of my council of experts on vintage paperbacks at Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans said Frank Kane tended to repeat passages whole from book to book. I haven't read enough Kane to judge his book-to-book repetition, but his 1951 novel Bullet Proof, another of the vintage paperbacks I bought at Mystery Mike's table in the book room, contains loads of repetition all by itself. The protagonist or his friends and adversaries "scowled" on Pages 72, 83, 87, 91, 103, 108, 111, 140, 154, and 176, for example.

Characters groan on pages 86, 95, 108, 136, and 155, and when they're doing neither, they moan and grunt a lot. And that was before I started counting, around Page 72. It's a fair bet that P.I. Johnny Liddell; his gangster adversaries (several of whom Kane describes as "silky"); the cops with whom he scraps but ultimately grows to enjoy mutual respect; his feisty, beautiful reporter love interest; his curvaceous red-headed secretary; the oleaginous district attorney;  the victim; and others scowled more frequently than even I was able to detect.

Kane also  chooses an odd locution when his characters ask questions and repeats it throughout the novel: "`Where are you going?' Liddell wanted to know."  From book to book, from page to page, Kane apparently practiced extreme economy of thought; why come up with new words when old ones will do?  But you know what? Kane was fresh where it mattered. Squabbles between police and private investigators are one of the hoariest staples of P.I. novels, but Kane adds a vicious, funny swipe from a medical examiner aimed at the querulous cop over an autopsy table:

"Inspector Herlihy slammed his hat down on the table, ran his fingers through the thick mane of his hair. `How the hell can you tell it's a thirty-two until you get the damn bullet out?' he roared.

 "The medical examiner dropped his topcoat on the couch, took off his jacket, started to started to roll up his sleeves. `I can't, if you're going to get technical about it, inspector. Not any more than you can tell when you find a hole under your sink whether it was made by a mouse or an elephant.'"

And that's one reason Frank Kane is so much fun to read. (Read my discussion of Kane's novel Liz and why Kane was a better writer than Stieg Larsson.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Bouchercon 2016, Part V: What do rachitic newts like? Plus even more pictures

Saint Louis Cathedral, New Orleans.
Photos by Peter Rozovsky

Here's another vintage paperback I bought at Bouchercon based on the say-so of one of my cabinet of vintage-paperback advisers, this time Rick Ollerman. The book is Date With Death, by Leslie Ford, Page One contains a passage one is not likely to read every day, not even in hard-boiled crime writing:

Lawrence Block

"Agatha was beautiful, but Agatha was a snob. Agatha laughed, but Agatha had the sense of humor of a rachitic newt."

Ato Onatade shocked by Jay Stringer

Craig Robertson

Martyn Waites

I can't imagine what sort of sense of humor a rachitic newt would have, but I like the passage.

Nanci Kalanta (Mountain Jane Laurel), Ali Karim

Steve Cavanaugh and his fellow night creatures

Russel McLean

Jeffrey Siger, Barry Lancet

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Rabe on (It's a crazy feeling)

I'm about to begin reading Time Enough to Die, which Donald Westlake called the only good novel of the six books by Peter Rabe that featured a tough guy and political fixer named Daniel Port. (Westlake regarded Rabe as a formative influence on his own crime writing. He just didn't like the Port books much.) In the meantime, here's a post from back when I first read Rabe.

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

 I'm a book and a half into my career as a Peter Rabe reader, and I've reached two tentative conclusions: 1) Rabe was an heir to early Dashiell Hammett, and 2) He worked psychology into his novels a hell of a lot better than Ross Macdonald did.

Rabe had a master’s and a doctorate in psychology. He incorporated psychology in his crime novels with an expert’s knowledge and an author’s restraint. Macdonald, on the other hand, at least in The Galton Case, was more like a yammering cultist on the subject.

The Hammett connection is more pertinent, though, to a discussion of Rabe’s The Box and Kill the Boss Goodbye. (I’m told that only one or two of Rabe’s novels appeared with a title he suggested. The Box is one of them. I would bet a dozen Montreal bagels that Kill the Boss Goodbye is not.) Each novel reminded me a bit of Hammett’s portrayals of men doing their jobs. More particularly, each portrays with cool detachment, deadly power struggles at the head of a criminal or quasi-criminal enterprise, in the manner of Red Harvest. But they read more like Patricia Highsmith's The Tremor of Forgery, no surprise given that both that book and The Box are set in North Africa.

(A post on the Violent World of Parker Web site discusses Donald Westlake and an essay he wrote about Rabe. Read Westlake on Rabe in the Westlake nonfiction volume The Getaway Car. Read more about Rabe at Mystery File and Stark House Press.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Rick Ollerman captures the spirit of paperback originals without copying it

Shallow Secrets, a novel by Rick Ollerman published in 2014, captures the feeling of paperback original crime novels published 50 or more years earlier without, however, resorting to showy nostalgia.

How does it accomplish this? On the one hand, its narrative is more leisurely than, say, Harry Whittington's. On the other, Ollerman uses the Whittingtonian technique of giving his protagonist, a cop named named James Robinson, a recurring physical ailment to which he can resort when he needs an ultra-econmical description of the character's physical and mental state.

On the one hand, the old device of using newspaper headlines and stories to mark significant events in the novel; on the other, the recent dates of those headlines and stories: 1989 and after.  And the novel's narrative arc, about which I'll say no more in order to avoid spoilers, reminded me of one that occasionally turns up in paperback originals of the Gold Medal era.

If you like Whittingon or Dan J. Marlowe or Charles Williams, you might like Shallow Secrets. Ollerman likes them, too, I'd bet, but without aping or idolatry.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Uneasy Street, or what P.I. fiction did after Chandler and Hammett

How do writers of P.I. stories confront the Olympian presences of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and when did they start doing it?

Here's a bit from Uneasy Street (1948), Wade Miller's second Max Thursday novel:

"(S)he sounded like a wandering-husband case, probably young, leggy, dissatisfied. And his mind roved curiously. ...

"When he could see her more plainly, Thursday wondered why he had expected her to be young. She was anything but that— a small frail woman, delicately wrinkled, with hair the moonlight couldn’t whiten."

That's one way to confront an imposing model, to challenge it straight on, then to slyly undercut it. It's a brilliant strategy, and it can work if one has the confidence and chops to pull if off, and Miller (pen name for the writing team of Robert Wade and Bill Miller) did. (Wade and Miller were also Whit Masterson, under which name they wrote the novel that Orson Welles adapted as Touch of Evil. So odds are that even if you don't know their names, you've had some contact with Wade and Miller's work.)

Uneasy Street has something of Chandler's yearning romanticism with a tinge of Hammett's witty detachment, the latter possibly because Miller wrote the book in the third person. It's witty without cracking wise, serious without getting maudlin, the way some of Chandler's successors in the 1960s did. It's in the tradition of both great progenitors of hard-boiled crime without being greatly reminiscent of each.  And it's a good place to look if you wonder where private-eye fiction went after Hammett and Chandler.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Charles Williams' Man on the Run: Unpacking a lesser book by a great paperback-original crime writer

Man on the Run (1958) is the weakest of the nine novels I've read recently by that excellent writer of paperback originals, Charles Williams, but those weaknesses stimulated some thought about what we mean by weak writing, what makes some books worse than others, and possible explanations for why those books fall short.

First of all, Man on the Run is a pretty good book; it just suffers by comparison with Williams' Nothing in Her Way (1953), A Touch of Death (1954), or his classic comedy Uncle Sagamore and His Girls (1959). I'd give those books five stars each, and maybe three to Man on the Run, with The Hot Spot (1953),  Aground, (1961), The Concrete Flamingo (1958), The Big Bite (1956), and The Diamond Bikini (1956) somewhere in between.

So, what makes Man on the Run weaker than the rest? For one thing, an occasional tendency to talkiness. For another, repetition of mildly odd phrases, including "intensely silent" and "sobbing for breath."  That this repetition occurs with greater frequency toward the end of the book suggests to me that Williams may not have had his heart in it.

I noticed this especially because Williams' work (and also Peter Rabe's) had previously stood out for me precisely because it avoided such repetition. That's part of why I considered Williams a more polished writer, if not necessarily a better one, than Harry Whittington, Gil Brewer, and Day Keene.

The plot of Man on the Run also stands out. Williams was at his best writing about duped, infatuated, deluded men, but this book, as one might guess from its title, is instead about a fugitive. It was also published in 1958, and that's where things get interesting: 1958 was also the year of 77 Sunset Strip, a republication of three novellas by Roy Huggins, one of which I would bet the take of my next heist was the germ of the idea that Huggins later turned into The Fugitive. Men on the run were in the air in 1958.

My tentative conclusion: Whether urged by a publisher or agent, or whether on his own initiative, Williams wrote Man on the Run to satisfy a perceived market demand for fugitive stories and, in so doing, painted himself into a corner where he was less accomplished and less comfortable (hence the repetition).

To be sure, the suspense is well written, and Man on the Run contains elements of Williams' more customary infatuated-man tales. It also has one of the odder endings in noir fiction and, if that end seems a bit contrived, Williams had laid careful groundwork for it throughout the book. Even here, he remained an admirable plotter.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The hunted man in American crime writing, plus some questions for readers

Saturday's post about Gil Brewer's novel The Three-Way Split prompted some thoughts about the hunted-man motif in American crime writing of the 1950s.

The Fugitive was on television from 1963 through 1967, for example, but the idea belongs to the previous decade. The series' creator, Roy Huggins, had written a virtual prototype for The Fugitive as one of three novellas published in 1958 under the title 77 Sunset Strip.

In the 1950s, Gil Brewer wrote novels about men trapped and on the run. So did Charles Williams, Day Keene, and Harry Whittington, and those are just the authors I've been reading recently.

Here are the names of magazines where the stories collected in Brewer's Redheads Die Quickly first appeared: Manhunt.The Pursuit Detective Story Magazine. Hunted Detective Story Magazine. Accused Detective Story Magazine. Trapped Detective Story Magazine.

I had previously heard of none except the celebrated Manhunt, and I have no idea if they were issued by one publisher or several, or of who started the craze. But something about the hunted man captured the fancy of the American public in a big-way for a few years there. Why? If you're up on your crime-fiction and American cultural history, who started the rage for such stories, and who were its leading publishers?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Noir, while you stand on one foot

I've found the quintessential noir sentence. It's from Gil Brewer's 1960 novel, The Three-Way Split, and it goes like this:

"For the first time, I felt a sense of real fear."

The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The Concrete Flamingo, a.k.a. All the Way, by Charles Williams

Nothing in Her Way remains the best of the five Charles Williams novels I've read in recent weeks, but each of the other four has impressed me. A Touch of Death, especially, is almost as good as Nothing ... . The Diamond Bikini wins points because it's not just a comedy, but one that manages not to condescend to its rural setting.

The Concrete Flamingo (1958), also published as All the Way, is not rural, and it's no comedy. But, like The Diamond Bikini, it demonstrates the author's versatility and sheer professionalism.

In bare outline, The Concrete Flamingo sounds like many mid-century paperback original novels: Down-on-his-luck but handsome man falls for woman who involves him in a plan to kill, steal, or both, and violent or tragic complications ensue.

The intricate plot works itself out nicely and with high suspense. No surprise there; Williams has to have been one of the better plotters who has ever written crime fiction. What impressed me most, though, was the plot's unexpected resolution. To avoid spoilers, I'll say no more. But I admire Williams for taking the chance that he did.

 *****

The Concrete Flamingo does, indeed, include a concrete flamingo, but All the Way is a more suitable title. I don't know why or when the title was changed, but it's hard not to suspect the publisher of trying to capitalize on Ross Macdonald's popularity. The Concrete Flamingo sounds as if it should be a Macdonald title. (The cover of the edition included here is unusually faithful to the novel's plot, though I don't recall that any of the book's cars were green. )

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Gil Brewer: Squalid, but funny

Some things that surprised me about Gil Brewer's 1961 novel A Taste of Sin:

1) The protagonist drinks too much, but his drinks are absinthe and Pernod. 

2) The morbid (and mordant) humor, as in the ending of the first chapter: 

"In my mind there was the sound of broken glass."  

and its segue into the beginning of the second: 

"I got in the Volks and sat there. 

"Well, a sane woman could be a bore." 

3) The virtuosic sarcasm of some of the best of that humor, as this observation about the cop who questions the protagonist: 

"He was very bright. He sighed brightly."

 4) That no one could write squalid, desperate sex like Gil Brewer could. Lots of books of the time tried, and their scenes often read like something out of a sex version of Reefer Madness. Not Brewer's

© Peter Rozovsky 2015 

Five shots

While I gather some thoughts on the apparent difference of temperament and style among the paperback original writers whose work I've been reading (Peter Rabe, Gil Brewer, Day Keene, Harry Whittington, Charles Williams), here are some more of my recent noir shots along with one at least as blanc as it is noir.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Wake Up to Murder, Peter Rabe, sticking it to Florida, and a question for readers

If Day Keene's Wake Up to Murder had appeared this century rather than in the middle of the last one, someone would have turned protagonist Jim Charters quest to remember where he picked up the mysterious $10,000 into an interactive video game.

2) Gil Brewer knew what to say to hot-weather chauvinists who lord it over the friends in the Northeastern United States in wintertime. Here's Lew Brookbank,protagonist of Wild to Possess:

"He took a short quick one. snapping off the neck. and turned to stare at the wall of Florida jungle growth beyond the road shoulder. 

"Florida, he thought. Why can't I get away from it?  Shove it--every last flat, wet, stinking acre."

3) I was not crazy about the first Peter Rabe novel I tried to read, but The Box is different, a slightly darker, slightly funnier version of that familiar theme of non-natives stranded in North Africa with nothing to do but wait ... Highsmith, Casablanca, Camus ... Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia apparently exercised considerable influence over makers of crime novels and movies in the middle of the last century, even before the wars that ended French colonial rule there. Why, readers, was this the case?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The Titles That Screamed, or how did paperback originals get their names?

The last eight novels I've read are A Night for Screaming, A Ticket to Hell, Any Woman He Wanted, The Body Beautiful, Brute in Brass, Nothing in Her Way, The Diamond Bikini, and A Touch of Death, in the last of which a character wakes up screaming.

Aside from making me a confirmed fan of Harry Whittington, Charles Williams, and Bill S. Ballinger, the books got me wondering how paperback originals got their titles. Of the eight novels above, five and maybe six have generic titles. As evocative as those titles are, they could easily have been swapped among the books without any loss of effect, or something just as chill-inducing substituted for any one of them. (The two exceptions, with titles that either get directly and specifically at the novel's core or else highlight a recurrent and unusual motif, are Williams' Nothing in Her Way and The Diamond Bikini.)

Today one thinks of a title as personal to the author (or publisher) and specific to the book. Back then, it seems, things were more generic. One could easily imagine a Whittington or a Williams beginning with a title, and writing a book to match. (It may be significant that a number of paperback originals appeared under more than one title. Williams' A Touch of Death, for instance, was also published as Mix Yourself a Redhead, which refers to a minor incident in the book, but which would have made a much better title for one of Richard S. Prather's Shell Scott novels. Could the title have been an attempt to capitalize on Prather's popularity?)

So, readers, especially those familiar with paperback originals and their history, How did these books get their titles? Did their authors take titles as seriously as we take titles today?  Did publishers assign the titles? And which came first, the title or the book?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Charles Williams' Diamond Bikini and a question about versatility

I chose that cover of Charles Williams' The Diamond Bikini (1956) to illustrate this post because a blurb from the man who created Shell Scott is no small deal.

I'm not sure The Diamond Bikini is as good as Williams' Nothing In Her Way (1953), which I read last week, or A Touch of Death (1954), which I'm reading now. But in its way, it offers even more persuasive evidence of Williams' talent. That's because Williams shows in this book that he could write things funny, rather than just write funny things. That is, the characters can say and do funny things without appearing to know they are doing so.  My one complaint about this cover, in fact, is that it's more farcical and yuck-it-up than the story that follows.  The novel, in fact, is more Huckleberry Finn than Hee Haw.  Here's one entertaining example, spoken by the book's seven-year-old narrator in the first chapter"

"I still had my baloney sandwich in my pocket because we’d just got to the track when the Pinkertons drafted Pop and I remembered it was wrapped in a sheet of yesterday’s racing form. I hauled it out and took a bite of the baloney while I showed ’em,

"‘Now, here,’ I says, pointing to it with my finger. ‘Look at this. Barnyard Gate (M) 105* ch.g.3, by Barnaby—Gates Ajar, by Frangi-Pangi. Dec. 5, TrP, 6f, 1:13 sy, 17, 111* 11 15, 13, 89, Str’gf’l’wG AlwM, Wo’b’g’n 119, C’r’l’ss H’s’y 112, Tr’c’le M’ff’n 114. You see? And now take a look at this workout. Fly 2 Aqu ½ft: 48 3/5 bg. A morning-glory and a dog, and if you ever put ten cents on his nose even in a two thousand claimer you got rocks in your head. He’s a front runner and a choker and even Arcaro couldn’t rate him off the pace and he always dies at the eighth pole.’

"They stopped me then, and there was hell to pay. They just wouldn’t believe I was reading it. I told ’em it was all right there, as plain as the nose on their face, that Barnyard Gate was a three-year-old chestnut gelding and had never won a race, and that he was by Barnaby out of Gates Ajar, by Frangi-Pangi, and that the last time he’d run he’d gone off at about 17-to-1 in a six-furlong Maiden Allowance at Tropical Park on December 5th with George Stringfellow up and carrying 111 pounds with the apprentice allowance claimed. The track was sloppy and the winner’s time was 1 minute and 13 seconds, and Barnyard Gate led at the start, at the half, and going into the stretch, and then had folded and come in eighth by nine lengths, and that the first three horses had been Woebegone, Careless Hussy, and Treacle Muffin. I told ’em they was the ones didn’t know how to read, and they said, ‘Well, I never!’

"That did it. They said a boy that the only thing he could read was the racing form was a disgrace to the American way of life and they was going to court and have me taken away from Pop and put in a Home. I didn’t like it, of course, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it and I just had to wait for Pop to get out of the draft.".

The Diamond Bikini shows Williams could write comedy, just as Nothing in Her Way showed he could write a beautifully convoluted con-artist story. What's especially impressive is that neither is typical of Williams' more frequent stories of a down-at-the-heels man who tries to better his lot, but only gets himself in ever deeper trouble. And that versatility suggests to me that, by God, Williams could write.  Who else is that versatile? Who among your favorite crime writers excelled at more than one kind of crime story?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

End of story, or what ever happened to plot? (With questions for readers)

It's no secret that plot has less cachet than character, setting, and atmosphere in harder-boiled crime writing, and probably at the cozier end of the spectrum as well.

Why is this? Why are character especially, but also atmosphere, considered more literarily prestigious than a brilliantly crafted plot?  When was the last time you read critical praise for a hard-boiled novel's plot? (I haven't read Gone Girl, but that's the only recent example that comes to mind. Well, that and anything by the brilliant Alan Glynn. But I suspect that even Glynn's thrilling chillers are likelier to find their way into book discussions for their larger themes of paranoia and government and corporate control than for the mechanisms by which Glynn tells his stories.)  Can you recall the plot of any Stieg Larsson novels? Probably not, but you sure as hell do know who and what Lisbeth Salander is.  Character is for serious writers. Plot? Why, that's something for trashy airport best sellers.

I don't mean that hard-boiled and noir novels have bad plots, but commentators (and, I'm guessing, readers and even authors) regard plot, if they think about it all, as a serviceable armature on which to hang ideas about men or women or the city or despair or economic deprivation or greed or violence or heroism or depravity, or just to give their characters something to do.  I've read two brilliantly plotted hard-boiled crime novels recently, one published in 1953, the other in 1961, and the third novel in my new holy trinity of crime fiction plotting appeared in 1959. (The books are, in order, Nothing in Her Way, by Charles Williams; Any Woman He Wanted, by Harry Whittington; and The Galton Case, by Ross MacDonald, whose story is so brilliantly worked out that one can almost overlook Macdonald's wince-making amateur Freudianism and badly dated jabs at suburbs.) In none of the books is plot a mere mechanism to activate the characters. Plot reveals character and is inseparable from it. The books reveal the shallowness of expressions like plot-driven and character-driven.

Those novels appeared more than 50 years ago, and here are your questions: Were the 1950s and early 1960s a high point for plot in hard-boiled writing? If so, when did plot lose its prestige, and why? What are the more brilliantly plotted crime novels you have read?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Donald Hamilton, Line of Fire

I'm in that happy after-vacation state where I have recovered both from post-travel disorientation and from the giddy panic over which book to read from among the many I bought or otherwise acquired at Bouchercon and after.

This year's first post-Bouchercon reading, Donald Hamilton's 1955 novel Line of Fire, is an adventure story, a love story, a mob story, a political story, a revenge tale, and a buddy story at the same time, with a fair amount of dry, dry wit.

I'm still a novice when it comes to mid-twentieth-century paperback originals, but I'm guessing there may have been a school of writers back then who wrote crime/adventure stories narrated in a deadpan style without, however, going over the edge into comic crime. Hamilton did so in Line of Fire, and Richard Powell did it in Say It With Bullets, republished a few years ago by Hard Case Crime.

Line of Fire is a beautiful piece of storytelling, its central conflicts laid out early, but their origins revealed only gradually. Another writer may have foamed and salivated over those origins and turned the protagonist, a gunsmith named Paul Nyquist, into a bloodthirsty killer. Hamilton makes of Nyquist a amiable, if serious sort who shoots only when he has to, and not always for reasons the reader might expect.

The novel is driven to an unusual extent by the revelations alluded to above, so I'll shut up on the subject of plot, for fear of introducing spoilers. The novel's low-key wit that manages always to remain hard-boiled as jell.  is easier to discuss, and there's plenty of it. Here are some examples:

"There were a couple of jerks in the outer office. There were always a couple of jerks in the outer office."

"It was a good face except for the mouth ... under other circumstances I suppose I'd have had no complaints about the mouth, either.  The weakness it betrayed--the slight, moist fullness to the lower lip that any man would recognize--was not, I was aware, considered a handicap in the circles in which she moved. It was all in the point of view."

This, as Nyquist enumerated the types one is likely to find at a hunting lodge: "There'll be the get-away-form-it-all boys who simply want to commune with nature for a couple of weeks each year--I don't know why this always involved leaving the razor at home."

"Being surprised at Marge is always a waste of time"

Read Bill Crider's review of Line of Fire. Read John Fraser's "Writer at Work: Donald Hamilton" at http://www.jottings.ca/john/thriller_writ1.html and a shorter piece at http://www.jottings.ca/john/thriller_quik1.html#DonaldHamilton

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

My Bouchercon panels: Charles Kelly and Dan J. Marlowe

Chapter 14 of Charles Kelly's Dan J. Marlowe biography reminded me that I attained my majority in a degenerate age:

"On March 23, 1976 ... Marlowe told a friend in a letter, `Gold Medal has just cancelled flat my Operation series.' Fawcett Gold Medal editor Joseph Elder had informed Marlowe, `Basically this kind of story is not working at all in today’s market. The mystery/ suspense novel as a paperback category is failing left and right, and very few of the category heroes are surviving.'” 

I was in my mid-teens then, which meant that by the time I was ready to start exploring crime fiction in a serious way, even reprints of those old paperback originals were going out of print, and the originals were often available only under plastic wrap, complete with brittle pages and high prices. (I have no figures to back me up, but I suspect that one benefit of electronic publishing is increased availability of books that had appeared as paperback originals. Gold Medal's decision to drop Marlowe, by the way, happened during CBS' takeover of Fawcett, which ran Gold Medal. No doubt CBS would have told worried readers that it was refocusing its crime offerings to better serve our customers. Always to better serve our customers.)

Kelly's book is called Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe, and it's refreshingly free of lurid details, considering that Marlowe was a professional gambler, an amnesiac, a rambler, and a spanking fetishist who also befriended and collaborated with a bank robber who had made the EBI's Ten Most Wanted list. That Marlowe was also a Rotarian, a small-town Republican councilman, a hardworking businessman, a thoroughgoing professional, and a man who met setbacks with industry and equanimity are salutary reminders that real life is often more interesting and less sensational than the publicity machine (with our enthusiastic complicity) would have us believe.

Above all, Kelly knows that the writing is the thing, and he lards his book with excerpts from and summaries and discussions of Marlowe's work. And quite a body of work it is. The protagonist of the great The Name of the Game Is Death is scarier than Richard Stark's Parker, what Parker might have been had Stark chosen to get inside his (Parker's) head.

If you like Parker (I wrote in a previous Marlowe post), you might like Marlowe. If you like Stephen King's "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," you might like Marlowe. If you like revenge stories and you want to see how a master wrote them, you might like Marlowe. If you like man-on-the-run stories, you might like Marlowe. If you like your sex scenes with a bit of an edge, you might like Marlowe. (Read a sample of Kelly on Marlowe from Allan Guthrie's Noir Originals.)

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

Charles Kelly will discuss Dan J. Marlowe as part of a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014. The panel is called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras," and it happens at 3 p.m, Friday, Nov. 14. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

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

Breakout!

A recent discussion of Horace McCoy's 1948 novel Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye blurbs the novel thus:

"Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is narrated by Ralph Cotter, a hardened convict who’s serving time, and when we meet  him, he’s just about to break out of jail with fellow prisoner Toko."

I took special note because I'm reading Charles Runyon's 1963 novel Color Him Dead, which begins with a prologue from the point of view of Drew Simmons, a hardened convict who's serving time and who, when we meet him, is just about to break out of jail.

Prison breaks have long been a staple of crime fiction and film. Did something about postwar America inspire fantasies of breaking out and away?

(Read an interview with Charles Runyon. And browse a Web site devoted to Gold Medal Books, publisher of Color Him Dead and countless now-classic paperback originals.)

 © Peter Rozovsky 2012

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