Wed 12 May 2021
Dan Stumpf Reviews Two GOLD MEDAL Paperbacks, Louisiana Style (DAY KEENE and CHARLES WILLIAMS).
Posted by Steve under Reviews[7] Comments
Two GOLD MEDAL Originals dealing
with sex and violence down Lou’siana way.
REVIEWED BY DAN STUMPF:
â— DAY KEENE – Notorious. Gold Medal #372, paperback original, 1954.
â— CHARLES WILLIAMS – Hill Girl. Gold Medal #141, paperback original, 1951.
In Notorious, Carny boss Ed Ferron finds his show mysteriously shunned by the locals in Bay Bayou on opening day. He’s just coming off two rain-out stands, and a bloomer here will send him into bankruptcy. Keene fills in Ed’s background at this point. He’s an ex-con, having done three years hard labor for killing a man he found in bed with his wife — only to discover at his trial that the unlucky deceased was just one in a long and continuing line of infidelities.
This has made him leery of cops and women, but when he sees young Marva Miller — returning home after two years in the Big City and a failed career as a nightclub singer — being molested by the station master at the depot, he wades in, decks the masher and offers the lady a ride into town, where they’re both inexplicably harassed by the locals. A trip to Marva’s ol’ homestead finds her drunkard dad recently murdered, money missing, and someone taking shots at them. They call the police, and in another unpleasant surprise, find themselves accused of the murder.
The story that unfolds is a bit predictable, including the inevitable death of a would-be informer (“Meet me at Nine, and bring money with you. What I know will blow this case wide open!â€) and a crucial plot twist strained my credulity a bit too far, but Keene keeps a fast pace, builds tension, and his evocation of carnies and small-town folk (Variously termed Gilhoolies, Puddle-Jumpers, and Thistle-Chins) is vivid if not always quite…..
Well what’s the word I’m looking for?
What it comes down to is a tendency of some writers to paint small towns as inherently corrupt, like smaller versions of Chicago, where Day Keene (born Gunard Hjertstedt) grew up in the 1920s. My own experience of small towns, while not extensive, leads me to believe that corruption is harder to get away with in a place where everyone knows your business. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that individuals are like any other commodity: valued more highly where there’s fewer around.
This folksy attitude comes across colorfully in Charles Williams’ Hill Girl, which starts with Bob Crane returning to his rural home town after two years in college football and a failed career as a boxer. When Bob’s father died, he left his considerable assets to Bob’s brother Lee, but Bob’s grandfather left him the modest farm where he spent his boyhood summers, and he has a yen to get back to it.
One doesn’t think of Gold Medals as bucolic, but there’s no other description for the feel of getting back to the soil Bob enjoys (and Williams evokes.) He gets along with his nearest neighbor, Sam Harley, contracts with a decent couple to help out on shares, and generally refreshes his soul as he works the land.
The fly in the ointment, and the crux of the plot, is Bob’s brother Lee, wild, hard-drinking and married but nursing a letch for Sam Harley’s daughter Angelina. Bob sees enough of the relationship to nourish a grudge against the girl, who treats him with heart-felt indifference, but when things boil over and Sam Harley comes gunnin’ after Lee, Bob steps in and tells Sam he was the one Sam saw runnin’ away with his pants down.
Williams injects a telling note of understanding here. Sam knows Bob is lying, but the lie will save face for all concerned, so he accepts it. All things considered, a live husband is better than a dead philanderer and facing a murder rap.
So now the story centers on the uneasy relationship between shotgun-wedded Bob and Angelina, and here Williams crafts a nicely readable balance between their finer feelings and the fighting, drinking, and other Manly Stuff essential to any paperback original. And having resolved this, he neatly turns the plot back to Lee, and his passion for his brother’s wife.
I don’t want to give anything away, so I’ll just say that the situation develops with considerable excitement, and includes a magnificent scene that captures the edgy tension of a drunk with a loaded gun.
No one did this sort of thing better than Gold Medal in those days, and I mourn the passing of this fast, brilliant writing wrapped in gaudy covers at the drugstores of my childhood.
May 12th, 2021 at 9:54 pm
I’ve seen plenty of corrupt small towns, but most of them don’t fit the hard boiled RED HARVEST mode favored by noir, it’s just they aren’t ANDY GRIFFITH or Frank Capra either. Usually it is less corruption per se than an unwillingness to challenge the status quo and an incestuous narrowness, certainly in the South, Midwest, West, and Southwest where I have experience.
I think the difference between how I view them and Dan’s view is I have always been an outsider in the small towns I’ve lived in, an oil brat when I was younger, reminded by locals I wasn’t “one of them,” no matter how long I lived there. You can live in some small towns thirty years and still not be from there in the eyes of locals.
Keene too is writing from the point of view of the carny, and there is a distrust and history of bad behavior there in small towns on both sides. I grew up in a circus town and yet welcoming as they were to circus people who wintered there they did not extend the same welcome to carnies.
Keene and Williams of course are far different writers despite their similar milieu. Keene, for all his skills, wrote too fast, often too shallowly, and clearly at time only for money. That he wrote as well as he did is a tribute to native talent, but he never reached the levels Williams did and even when he excels there is still a hint he fell a little short of what a more careful writer could do.
I admire his work and professionalism, but Keene at his best and Williams at his are distinctly different levels.
May 12th, 2021 at 10:14 pm
I think corruption in small towns exists (in fiction, at least) when one man rules it, sometimes in a benevolent fashion, or with the willingness of the townspeople, who just want to live their lives in resignation or in as much peace as they can get.
May 12th, 2021 at 10:18 pm
I started HILL GIRL once, but never finished it. Just a little too bucolic for me, perhaps. I’ve enjoyed everything else by Williams I’ve read, and yes while I think Day Keene was good, Williams was better.
May 13th, 2021 at 6:23 pm
It’s more Peyton Place than Poisonville in most local small towns, hypocrisy compared to criminality, favoritism for certain families more than Boss Rule ala South Texas.
But my experience of small towns was colored by some places still in the shadow of the Depression twenty years later, with saloon still painted on the side of buildings, oil booms, resentful farmers, and city councils torn by greed and the status quo.
They weren’t Hammett, but they weren’t far off Chandler in LADY IN THE LAKE or the PHENIX CITY STORY.
Too my great grandfather was Constable in a small town and my grandfather Deputy Sheriff in another, I knew where bodies were buried.
May 15th, 2021 at 11:35 pm
Not sure if I divulged this before now but I am on record as the youngest pupil to be suspended from my elementary school system. I caused an uproar …secreting paperbacks like this …under the lid of my 3-ring binder. Oh, the shame. I’m still traumatized.
May 16th, 2021 at 4:11 am
You were a precocious kid then, Lazy. I didn’t catch up with the Gold Medal books until junior high. I used to haunt the local drugstore every day after school to see any new ones were out on the spinner racks. It was a good day when they were. Great memories!
June 1st, 2021 at 6:33 pm
I love those black wire metal book carousels.
Anyway I just realized (probably over two weeks later) that the ‘Charles Williams’ author in this dual Gold-Medal-author review is the same Charles Williams who (I am told) writes crackin’ good maritime thrillers. Special interest of mine.
I’ve been trying to find out more about him. This thread serves me very well! Now I have a much better idea as to his writing style. Thanks!