Mon 5 Oct 2015
Mike Nevins on GRAHAM GREENE, ERLE STANLY GARDNER and GEORGES SIMENON.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Columns[4] Comments
by Francis M. Nevins
It’s hard to imagine two writers with less in common than Graham Greene and Erle Stanley Gardner, but we know that Greene was an enthusiastic reader of the Perry Mason novels, and in one of my columns several years ago I quoted from a letter about Mason which Greene sent to fellow Gardnerian Evelyn Waugh. Recently I discovered that Mason even figures in one of Greene’s novels. The Honorary Consul (1973) is set in northern Argentina and among its principal characters are Dr. Eduardo Plarr, a physician in sympathy with the revolutionary movement in that country, and León Rivas, a former priest turned guerrilla leader. On page 36 of the novel we find the following:
Is that really how Mason comes across in Spanish, as lawyer to the Left and friend to those who have no friend? Quien sabe?
Maybe readers of Gardner in Spanish translation confuse Mason’s fierce loyalty to clients with something ideological. The murderee in The Case of the Screaming Woman (1957) is a doctor who ran an illegal service connecting wealthy women desperate for a child and girls about to give birth out of wedlock.
Mason discovers that the doctor kept a secret notebook that can prove large numbers of children are illegitimate and adopted. Out of Mason’s sight, the woman who stole the book from the dead man’s office gives it to Della Street, who later asks Mason whether it’s ethical for her to have it.
Mason: “Hell, no!… That notebook is stolen property, Della. If I take it into my possession, I become an accessory after the fact. [But] I haven’t the faintest intention of letting that property get to the police.â€
Della: “And if I should have that book, where would it leave you professionally?
Mason: “Behind the eight ball if I knew you had it.â€
Then he says: “Ethics are rules of conduct that are made to preserve the dignity and the integrity of the profession. I’m inclined to conform to the spirit of the rules of ethics rather than the letter.â€
Della: “But what about the courts?â€
Mason: “They’ll conform to the letter rather than the spirit. If the police ever find out that [the notebook] came under my control, [Hamilton Burger the DA will] throw the Penal Code at me.â€
Della: “And then what will you do?â€
Mason: “Then I’ll truthfully say that I don’t know where the book is… I’m not going to throw heaven knows how many children to the wolves….â€
Della: “And you’re willing to risk your reputation and your liberty to keep that from happening?â€
Mason: “You’re darned right I am. I’m a lawyer….â€
Anti-establishment passages of this sort were to come to a screeching halt once Mason in the form of Raymond Burr became a star of prime time TV but they may help to explain how in Spanish he might have been mistaken for a revolutionary with a law degree.
Screaming Woman happened to be published between two of the finest Mason novels of Gardner’s middle period, The Case of the Lucky Loser and The Case of the Foot-Loose Doll, and is certainly not in the same league with those gems.
At least two key characters never come onstage even for a moment, the more important of the pair isn’t even mentioned until very late in the day, and the dying message clue is one of the feeblest I’ve ever encountered. But it moves like a bullet train and remains well worth reading almost 60 years ago.
By a coincidence worthy of Harry Stephen Keeler, Gardner’s is one of two novels I’ve read recently in which crucial characters are kept offstage. The other is Georges Simenon’s Félicie est là , which was written in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of France, first published in French two years later and still under the occupation, and translated into English as Maigret and the Toy Village (1979).
After a one-legged old man is shot to death in the bedroom of his house in a small residential development being built in the countryside, Maigret visits the scene and is driven to distraction by the dead man’s impossible housekeeper. Here, unlike in Screaming Woman, it’s the murderer himself whom we never get to see or hear, and in fact his name isn’t even mentioned until page 116 of the 139-page American version.
Does it matter? I’m not sure. When someone as nutty as Keeler throws in characters who are no more than names, we couldn’t care less, especially when they have names like Hoot Ivanjack, Hamerson Hogg and the three Threebrothers brothers. When someone like Gardner does it, there’s a problem. Simenon seems to me to fall somewhere between these extremes.
Having read a fair number of the novels Simenon wrote during the war, I’ve concluded that he entered into a “contract with France†to say nothing about the Nazi occupation and backdate everything to the Thirties without explicitly saying so — at least not often. We find one exception to this rule in the first paragraph of Toy Village:
This tells us pretty clearly that the events he’s describing took place years earlier. Simenon’s relation to the two German occupations he experienced, the first in Belgium during his adolescence, the second in France at a time when he’d become one of the best-known European novelists, is explored in depth by biographers like Pierre Assouline and Patrick Marnham.
October 5th, 2015 at 8:56 pm
Greene also wrote glowing of Edgar Wallace. He appreciated speed and storytelling. He was also a Rider Haggard fan.
Mason may not be a revolutionary but he is a classic New Deal type in the early novels — more Frank Capra than Fidel Castro though.
October 5th, 2015 at 11:04 pm
I’ve noticed that Simenon has very little to say about the German occupations that he suffered under, not in his Maigret novels and not in his psychological crime novels. I remember a couple novels that refer to military occupation like THE STAIN ON THE SNOW but that’s all out of 200 short novels.
His biographers have pointed out that he came close to being considered a collaborator, which might have gotten him a jail term. He seemed to get along fairly well with the German occupation forces. When he left for America in 1945, it may have been, in part, to get away from such accusations. Of course it all came to nothing and Simenon several years later was welcomed back to Europe by crowds who loved his novels.
October 6th, 2015 at 3:35 am
In the movies, Warren William played Mason as a bit of a con man, playing fast-and-loose with the cops and the law. I’d suggest that Gardner’s Mason is somewhere between this and Raymond Burr’s staid portrayal.
October 6th, 2015 at 4:42 pm
Simenon, it turned out was protecting a Jewish mistress in his household as did Maurice Chevalier and Picasso who also skirted collaborationist charges. Whether that is the real reason they stayed no one knows, but it was enough to protect them after the war.
Jean de la Hire, creator of the pulp hero the Nyctalope, not only stayed in France, but had his creation work with the Vichy government condemning his work to obscurity for sixty years though his last work appeared in 1956.
Post war France was a complex place politically. While there were clear cut heroes like Yves Montand, Andre Malraux, Jean Gabin, spy novelist Jean Bruce (OSS 117) and even confirmed anti Nazi’s like Sartre, there were also cases like Jean Genet. The immediate anger at the very end of the war soon developed into a sort of national shame and amnesia that effected both those active in the Resistance and those who collaborated, nor did it help that during the occupation the French left and right treated each other almost as violently and viciously as they did the Vichy government and the German occupiers.
The attitude of the occupation Maigret novels is not untrue of much of what was written and produced after the war where far fewer books and films dealt with the Resistance as a theme than might be expected. Even Malraux, a clear cut hero, wrote very little about his experience as a POW, his escape, and his later heroics. It was almost as if it was bad taste to refer to it.
There seems to have been a national disgrace at having been defeated and betrayed in the first place that led to virtually ignoring those years of the occupation. Serious films about the era don’t pop up much until the seventies.
P.G. Wodehouse came close to treason in staying in wartime France, but his outspoken anti Nazi wife seemed to help him. Dornford Yates was another Englishman who refused to leave his French home. Both seemed to be considered cranks by the French and the Germans and eccentrics by the British. The French were not the only ones with troubled relations to the wartime period.
Early Perry Mason is well within the tradition of the populist American defender of the underdog, a clever, often folksy, hero who outwits corrupt officials, usually of the local government. His methods often involve skirting established rules and laws in favor of justice and he is more than a bit of a trickster. It is the image of everyone from Daniel Webster to Lincoln (Lincoln’s most famous case involves a bit of business straight out of Gardner), from Teddy R to frankly FDR and Mason follows in such footsteps. Gardner’s great innovation is that Mason is not a folksy country lawyer or a Patrician regular guy, but a smart sophisticated urban figure.
Because Perry’s clients are always innocent then whatever he does in their name is a free pass and the early Mason skirts along some sharp practices indeed. My favorite may be when he buys a hotel so he can legally move the number of a room and thus confound the police investigation of a murder site briefly. It’s a bit more complex than I describe, but it only just misses obstruction of justice and interfering in a police investigation.
That attitude to the law is also common to what I think of as the Sam Spade school of the hardboiled private detective where private eyes, usually third person eyes at that, like Spade, Bill Crane, Kurt Steel’s Hank Heyer, Cleve Adams Rex McBride, and notably Michael Shayne, suborn evidence, dissemble to authorities, blackmail, extort, and otherwise stomp all over ethics and law in the name of either their clients or protecting themselves. Perry Mason early on is clearly of that hardboiled school of fiction and like them equally fast with his fists when need be.
The difference between Mason and the popular mob lawyer of film like William Powell’s LAWYER MAN or Zachary Scott’s FLAXY MARTIN or even Robert Taylor in PARTY GIRL, is that Perry’s clients are innocent individuals and he does what he does not for money or power but for justice. He has a lot in common with Superman and Batman from the same period as well as a populist New Deal man of the people superman.
I doubt that most of what Mason did would stand up in court, but Gardner himself pulled some pretty fast ones in courtrooms by his own account and seems to have gotten away with them whether his clients were innocent or not.
While Perry did reform after television — though not so much in season one and two —
in his early incarnation he was very much in the tradition of the lawyer as hired gun or knight errant slaying dragons by whatever means possible. I found it comforting that Perry Mason and Richard Boone’s gun for hire Paladin were both on CBS since the two shared a good deal in my mind and seemed to suit each other.