Tue 3 Nov 2009
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: CLEVE F. ADAMS – Shady Lady.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Authors , Reviews[7] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins:
CLEVE F. ADAMS – Shady Lady. Ace Double D-115, paperback original, 1955. [Paired back-to-back with One Got Away, by Harry Whittington.]
Adams is one of mystery fiction’s shadow figures. Born in 1895, he began selling to pulp mystery magazines in the mid-1930s, broke into hardcover novels at the end of the decade, and wrote most of his novels in a burst of creativity (and of recycling earlier pulp tales) during World War II. In these respects, his career paralleled that of Raymond Chandler.
But unlike Chandler, Adams is today largely forgotten, even though he forged his own distinctive image of the private detective.
The Adams eye is a sort of prose incarnation of Humphrey Bogart that predates Bogey’s movie detectives, but with more stress on the brutality and cynicism and less on the sentimental heart. He has a capacity for long, brooding silences, sudden ribald laughter, mad fury, and aloof arrogance. His features are wolfish and satanic and he often slaps women around during his maniacal fits of rage.
He’s a racist, a fascist, and a hypocrite, but a tender ballad brings tears to his eyes. In one word, he’s an oaf, deliberately drawn by Adams so as to pull the rug out from under Chandler’s romantic image of the PI as a contemporary knight.
Most of Adams’s novels depend on a stock company of recurring characters, mannerisms, scenes, plot elements, even tag lines of description and dialogue. He was an expert at borrowing story lines from Dashiell Hammett, rewriting Red Harvest three times and The Glass Key twice.
But even when he coasted on the most familiar gambits in hard-boiled literature, he showed a genius for juggling diverse groups of shady characters, each with his or her own greedy objective.
Right after Christmas 1949, Adams died of a heart attack. His pulp writer buddies Robert Leslie Bellem and W.T. Ballard helped out his widow by finishing his last novel. One version, entitled “Too Fair to Die,” appeared in the March 1951 issue of Two Complete Detective Books magazine, and four years later Ace Books published a more polished draft as the paperback original Shady Lady.
It turned out to be the finest work of Adams’s career.
Like many of his earlier novels, among the best of which are Sabotage (1940), Decoy (1941), and Up Jumped the Devil (1943), Shady Lady stars a shamus named Rex McBride.
In this adventure he trails a missing embezzler’s girlfriend from Los Angeles to the mining metropolis of Copper Hill, Montana, arriving just in time to become involved in a vicious gubernatorial primary, a love affair with two sisters, and a string of murders.
The plot is plagued with loose ends like many Adams efforts, but the book is so overflowingly rich in character sketches and powerful understated scenes that one is compelled to believe either that Bellem and Ballard contributed huge amounts to the manuscript or that, had he lived longer, Adams might have developed into a talent of near-Chandleresque dimensions. The electoral contest provides a marvelous setting for Adams’s ghoulish cynicism about American politics.
In his seminal essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler argued that the PI novel requires a knightly hero to redeem the corrupt milieu. Adams disagreed violently, and in his world the protagonist is not a hero and no less corrupt than anyone else, just tougher and luckier. Repulsive the Adams eye may be, but he’s frighteningly hard to forget.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright ? 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I’ve read pretty much all of Adams work that was collected between book covers and some that hasn’t. Enjoyed it all as a counterpoint to the Chandler knight. Modern critics have slapped the terms racist and fascist onto Adams, and not entirely without reason, but overall I’d say he’s gotten a bad rap. His detectives McBride and Bill Rye (from the books written as John Spain) were bad boys, but not quite as bad as political correctness has painted them.
I seem to recall that Bellem finished another Adams manuscript – published as No Wings On A Cop, and collaborated with Adams on The Vice Czar Murders under the name Franklin Charles. And way, way in the back of my memory is an early Harlequin book that one or both may have been involved in. Danged if I can remember what it was.
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Evan
The way I heard it, Bellem expanded NO WINGS ON A COP from a pulp story that Adams had done much earlier, and you’re right about the Franklin Charles book as being a straight-forward collaboration by the two of them — until and unless someone comes along and tells us both better.
NO WINGS ON A COP was later reprinted by Harlequin, back before they went to romance fiction only — so maybe that’s what you’re thinking of?
— Steve
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:38 pm
I never thought critics were labeling Adams a racist or fascist so much as pointing out his Rex McBride was. Not that I think that is a fair attack. Adams is careful to point out McBride is a child of his background who grew up poor and ignorant and pulled himself up by his bootstraps. His rich girlfriend frequently chides him for his lack of class and vulgarity — which he defends in at least one book by talking about his childhood.
I think Adams was trying to show what a more or less real private eye might be like, a reaction against both Marlowe and Hammett’s Spade — in that way he always reminded me of Brett Halliday’s fast talking, money grabbing, rule bending Michael Shayne crossed with Race Williams and Norbert Davis Max Latin. And of course since he wrote in the third person it provided a contrast to the Chandler school, removing us from that moral voice of Marlowe’s. Oddly the private eye voice that Adams most reminds me of is Peter Cheyney’s Slim Callaghan, Johnny Vallon, and Terence O’Day.
But in action McBride shines. He isn’t exactly smart, but he is tough and capable and doesn’t give up and the books move like a runaway freight train. For my money they are by far the best of Adams works, though most critics praise the John J. Shannon book Private Eye.
I’m not sure I think Adams would ever have come near Chandler or Hammett, I see no sign of that, and his tendency to borrow large chunks of other writers plots would have been a problem eventually, but he was attempting to present a more realistic look at a private eye and at their best the books have the kind of pleasure you get from a really good Hollywood pi film — anything from one of the better Nolan Michael Shayne’s to The Dark Corner. Adams gets some credit from critics for simply not being another Chandler follower.
Did Adams contribute to the Bellem and Ballard efforts on the pulp adventures of Jim Anthony Super Detective (the guy in the blue shorts, red cape, boots and nothing else)saga? I can’t remember, but the timeline would be about right.
November 4th, 2009 at 7:57 am
M.V. Heberden’s Paul Kilgerrin (written as Charles Leonard) is another tough pi in the McBride tradition. He’s smarter than McBride, but just as ruthless — virtual murder not being out of his line when he is battling saboteurs and fifth columnists.
There was a movement for these tougher less sentimental eyes that included Michael Shayne, McBride, Kilgerrin, Peter Cheyney’s Slim Callaghan, and Kurt Steel’s Hank Heyer. Jonathan Latimer took it to its logical conclusion with his Karl Craven in Solomon’s Vineyard, but it wasn’t until Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer that they really had their day.
I’m not sure anyone meant it as a reaction against Chandler and Marlowe, so much as just something different.
November 4th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Regarding the Adams-Bellem connection: In the 1970’s, I was in communication with Vera Adams, the widow of Cleve F. Adams. In 1978, she wrote to me, “One time when Cleve was extremely busy he paid Bob (Bellem) to remodel one of his books. Bob also did work on THE VICE CZAR MURDERS. As to actual collaboration in which they sat down and wrote a book together never occurred.”
The first book Mrs. Adams is referring to his CONTRABAND, published posthumously by Knopf. This is a stringing together of several novelettes that first appeared in the 1930’s in the pulp, DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY. The book is dedicated to Bellem and his wife. VICE CZAR was an early pulp novella by Adams that Bellem was paid to expand to book length. After Adams died, Bellem and WT Ballard, who were collaborators, stepped in to help Mrs. Adams through a difficult time by expanding and selling as books the pulp stories that became NO WINGS ON A COP and SHADY LADY.
I love Adams. His plots invariably fall apart in the last chapter but until then everything about them works perfectly. SABOTAGE, AND SUDDEN DEATH and UP JUMPED THE DEVIL are my favorite McBrides, and the two Bill Rye books are also first rate.
November 4th, 2009 at 7:56 pm
Thanks, Steve. I don’t think we can ever get closer to the facts behind what happened to get those books written and published than this.
The last Adams book I read was THE CROOKING FINGER, one of the Rex McBride books, and I don’t think anyone’s mentioned it before now. Very enjoyable, as I recall, but that was well over ten years ago. Maybe longer.
Which makes it well past time to put Cleve Adams back in my reading pile — not to mention some of those other tough PI’s that David mentioned!
— Steve
January 18th, 2023 at 1:51 pm
[…] and by whom. In the comments following Mike Nevins’ 1001 Midnights review of the book, posted here, Steve Mertz told of some correspondence he had with Mrs. Adams in the 1970s. in which she told him […]