Sun 2 Oct 2016
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review: ROBERT LESLIE BELLEM – Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Pulp Fiction , Reviews[6] Comments
by Bill Pronzini:
ROBERT LESLIE BELLEM – Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective. Bowling Green University Popular Press, softcover, 1983.
Anyone whose sense of humor leans toward the ribald, the outrageous, the utterly absurd is liable to find himself convulsed by the antics and colloquialisms of Dan Turner, Robert Leslie Bellem’s immortal “private skulk,” who fought, shot, wenched, and wisecracked his way to the solutions of hundreds of pulp-magazine cases from 1934 to 1950.
The list of Bellem admirers is long and distinguished and includes humorist S. J. Perelman, who in a New Yorker essay titled “Somewhere a Roscoe …” called Turner “the apotheosis of all private detectives” and said he was “out of Ma Barker by Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade.”
Although Bellem wrote a handful of novels, none features Dan Turner. Turner, in fact, appeared only in a few scattered anthologies until the publication of this collection of seven of his vintage cases from Hollywood Detective, Spicy Detective, Speed Detective, and Private Detective Stories.
All are set in Hollywood, most deal with the (highly romanticized and inaccurately portrayed) film community, and all are wild, woolly, quite terrible, and very funny. “Drunk, Disorderly and Dead,” for instance, contains such typical Bellem lines as “A hulking lug in chauffeur’s uniform … barged out of the limousine’s tonneau and planted his oversize brogan on my running board. He had an improvised handkerchief mask over the lower section of his pan and a blue-barreled automatic in his duke. He said: ‘Freeze, snoop, or I’ll perforate you like a canceled check.'”
And from “Dump the Jackpot”: “A thunderous bellow flashed from Dave Donaldson’s service .38, full at the propman’s elly-bay. Welch gasped like a leaky flue, hugged his punctured tripes, and slowly doubled over, fell flat on his smeller.”
This delightfully wacky collection also contains an introduction, headnotes, and a biographical sketch of Bellem by John Wooley.
Bellem’s novels, for the most part, are forgettable. The only exception is his first, Blue Murder (1938), which features a Dan Turner-like private eye named Duke Pizzatello and contains some of the same slangy, campy mangling of the English language.
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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.
October 3rd, 2016 at 12:01 am
The English language has seldom suffered such delightfully rabid assault at anyone’s hands. Bellem delighted in making it do handstands and turn inside out while consciously (or un — I was never sure which) turning the whole Private eye genre on its cauliflower ear.
Awful as the stories are, they are also delightfully wacky, frankly a perfect antidote whenever the genre gets too full of itself.
October 3rd, 2016 at 10:38 am
As Bill suggests, Bellem seemed to find his particular brand of wackiness difficult to carry over into novel format. But a rough count of stories under his name in the online Crime Fiction Index comes to nearly a staggering thousand of them, with almost an equal number under pen names: Walt Bruce, Ellery Watson Calder, Harley L. Court, Hugh McKnight, Jerome Severs Perry & Harcourt Weems.
I wonder if anyone would like to publish a complete collection of all of them?
October 3rd, 2016 at 3:36 pm
Some of Bellem’s stories have surprisingly good mystery plots.
He seems to have modeled his plotting technique on Ellery Queen.
And you can’t find a better role model than that!
And his storytelling at his best is lots of fun.
October 3rd, 2016 at 4:30 pm
I’m glad you said something about his actual plotting ability, Mike. Everyone talks about Bellem and Dan Turner and the amusing liberties he takes with the English language without saying much about the stories themselves.
I’ve read this collection that Bill Pronzini reviewed, and I thought I’d posted my own comments here on this blog, but I can’t find them, so evidently not. Either way, I read the stories quite a while ago, and they’ve unfortunately started to fade away from me.
Your mention of Ellery Queen as a possible role model caught my eye. You may be onto something there. Note that Ellery Watson Calder was one of Bellem’s more commonly used pen names.
October 6th, 2016 at 4:11 pm
And let’s not forget Bellem’s influence. The whole glib Hollywood PI w/babes business was a direct influence on Carter Brown, Richard S.Prather, etc. I always found it interesting that the last issue of “Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective” appeared on newsstands the same month as the first Gold Medal Shell Scott novel.
October 6th, 2016 at 6:28 pm
Now that’s a great passing of the baton analogy that had never occurred to me before.