Ron Goulart died this morning, the day after his 89th birthday. As I understand it, he’d been in an assisted living facility for the last month or so. Although he’d been in poor health and we hadn’t gotten together in several years, I’m happy to say that he was a friend of mine.
Back in the 1970s through the early 90s (I’m guessing) I used to meet him every month or so at the local comic book show, where we discovered early on that we had a lot of interests in common: mysteries, science fiction, comic books and above all, pulp magazines.
It was, in fact, his book The Hardboiled Dicks, a collection of stories from the detective pulps, that changed my life around, and for the better. What’s more I know I’m not the only one. Many other collectors of those old magazine have told me the very same thing.
I’ve taken the list below from Wikipedia, and it’s not complete, but it’s a huge part of what I’ll remember him by. But the funny thing is most what I remember him by right now is the day I helped him use a metal hanger to help him get into his car he’d locked himself out of.
Goodbye, Ron. I miss you.
Non-fiction
The Hardboiled Dicks: An Anthology and Study of Pulp Detective Fiction (1967)
Assault on Childhood (1970)
Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines (1972)
The Adventurous Decade: Comic Strips In the Thirties (Crown Publishers, 1975) ISBN 9780870002526
Comic Book Culture: An Illustrated History (1980)
The Dime Detectives (1982)
The Great Comic Book Artists (St. Martin’s Press, 1986) ISBN 978-0312345570
Focus on Jack Cole (1986)
Ron Goulart’s Great History of Comic Books: the Definitive Illustrated History from the 1890s to the 1980s (Contemporary Books, 1986) ISBN 978-0809250455
(editor) The Encyclopedia of American Comics: From 1897 to the Present (Facts on File, 1991) ISBN 978-0816018529
The Comic Book Reader’s Companion: an A-Z Guide to Everyone’s Favorite Art Form (Harper Perennial, 1993) ISBN 9780062731173
Masked Marvels and Jungle Queens: Great Comic Book Covers of the ’40s (1993)
The Funnies: 100 Years of American Comic Strips (Adams Media Corp, 1995) ISBN 9781558505391
Comic Book Encyclopedia: The Ultimate Guide to Characters, Graphic Novels, Writers, and Artists in the Comic Book Universe (Harper Collins, 2004) ISBN 978-0060538163
Good Girl Art (2006)
Good Girl Art Around the World (2008)
Alex Raymond: An Artistic Journey: Adventure, Intrigue, and Romance (2016
Non-series novels
Clockwork Pirates (1971)
Ghost Breaker (1971)
Wildsmith (1972)
The Tin Angel (1973)
The Hellhound Project (1975)
When the Waker Sleeps (1975)
The Enormous Hourglass (1976)
The Emperor of the Last Days (1977)
Nemo (1977)
Challengers of the Unknown (1977)
The Island of Dr Moreau (1977) (writing as Joseph Silva)
Capricorn One (1978)
Cowboy Heaven (1979)
Holocaust for Hire (1979) (writing as Joseph Silva)
Skyrocket Steele (1980)
The Robot in the Closet (1981)
The Tremendous Adventures of Bernie Wine (1981)
Upside Downside (1981)
The Great British Detective (1982)
Hellquad (1984)
Suicide, Inc. (1985)
A Graveyard of My Own (1985)
The Tijuana Bible (1989)
Even the Butler Was Poor (1990)
Now He Thinks He’s Dead (1992)
Murder on the Aisle (1996)
Novel series
Flash Gordon (Alex Raymond’s original story)
The Lion Men of Mongo (1974)(‘adapted by’ Con Steffanson)
The Space Circus (1974)(‘adapted by’ Con Steffanson)
The Plague of Sound (1974)(‘adapted by’ Con Steffanson)
The Time Trap of Ming XIII (1974)(‘adapted by’ Con Steffanson)
The Witch Queen of Mongo (1974)(‘adapted by’ Carson Bingham)
The War of the Cybernauts (1975)(‘adapted by’ Carson Bingham)
The Phantom (writing as Frank S Shawn)
The Golden Circle (1973)
The Hydra Monster (1973)
The Mystery of the Sea Horse (1973)
The Veiled Lady (1973)
The Swamp Rats (1974)
The Goggle-Eyed Pirates (1974)
The Man from Atlantis (1974) (as Kenneth Robeson)
Red Moon (1974) (as Kenneth Robeson)
The Purple Zombie (1974) (as Kenneth Robeson)
Dr. Time (1974) (as Kenneth Robeson)
The Nightwitch Devil (1974) (as Kenneth Robeson)
Black Chariots (1974) (as Kenneth Robeson)
The Cartoon Crimes (1974) (as Kenneth Robeson)
The Death Machine (1975) (as Kenneth Robeson)
The Blood Countess (1975) (as Kenneth Robeson)
The Glass Man (1975) (as Kenneth Robeson)
The Iron Skull (1975) (as Kenneth Robeson)
Demon Island (1975) (as Kenneth Robeson)
Barnum System
The Fire-Eater (1970)
Clockwork Pirates (1971)
Shaggy Planet (1973)
Spacehawk, Inc. (1974)
The Wicked Cyborg (1978)
Dr. Scofflaw (1979)
Barnum System – Jack Summer
Death Cell (1971)
Plunder (1972)
A Whiff of Madness (1976)
Galaxy Jane (1986)
Barnum System – Ben Jolson
The Sword Swallower (1968)
Flux (1974)
Barnum System – Star Hawks
Empire 99 (1980)
The Cyborg King (1981)
Barnum System – The Exchameleon
Daredevils, LTD. (1987)
Starpirate’s Brain (1987)
Everybody Comes to Cosmo’s (1988)
Jack Conger
A Talent for the Invisible (1973)
The Panchronicon Plot (1977)
Hello, Lemuria, Hello (1979)
Odd Jobs, Inc.
Calling Dr. Patchwork (1978)
Hail Hibbler (1980)
Big Bang (1982)
Brainz, Inc. (1985)
Fragmented America
After Things Fell Apart (1970)
Gadget Man (1971)
Hawkshaw (1972)
When the Waker Sleeps (1975)
Crackpot (1977)
Brinkman (1981)
Gypsy
Quest of the Gypsy (1976)
Eye of the Vulture (1977)
Marvel Novel Series (as Joseph Silva; with Len Wein and Marv Wolfman)
Incredible Hulk: Stalker from the Stars (1977)
Captain America: Holocaust for Hire (1979)
Harry Challenge
The Prisoner of Blackwood Castle (1984)
The Curse of the Obelisk (1987)
Groucho Marx
Groucho Marx, Master Detective (1998)
Groucho Marx, Private Eye (1999)
Elementary, My Dear Groucho (1999)
Groucho Marx and the Broadway Murders (2001)
Groucho Marx, Secret Agent (2002)
Groucho Marx, King of the Jungle (2005)
Short fiction
Collections
Broke Down Engine: And Other Troubles with Machines (1971)
The Chameleon Corps: And Other Shape Changers (1972)
What’s Become of Screwloose?: And Other Inquiries (1972)
Odd Job 101: And Other Future Crimes And Intrigues (1974)
Nutzenbolts: And More Troubles with Machines (1975)
Skyrocket Steele Conquers the Universe: And Other Media Tales (1990)
Adam and Eve On a Raft: Mystery Stories (Crippen & Landru, 2001)[11]
Stories
“Ella Speed”, Fantastic, April 1960
“Subject to Change” Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1960
Harry Challenge Series
The Secret of the Black Chateau – Espionage Magazine, February 1985
Monster of the Maze – Espionage Magazine, February 1986
The Phantom Highwayman – The Ultimate Halloween, edited by Marvin Kaye (2001)
The Woman in the Mist – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December, 2002
The Incredible Steam Man – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May, 2003
The Secret of the Scarab – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April, 2005
The Problem of the Missing Werewolf – H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror #4, (Spring / Summer 2007)
The Mystery of the Missing Automaton – Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #1, (Winter 2008)
The Mystery of the Flying Man – Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #2, (Spring 2009)
The Secret of the City of Gold – The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January / February 2012
The Somerset Wonder –
ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION February 1967. Cover by Kelly Freas. Editor: John W. Campbell. Overall rating: 3 stars.
JOE POYER “Pioneer Trip.†The completion of the first manned flight to Mars must be weighed against a man’s life. Interesting problem, but conventional ending. (3)
JACK WODHAMS “There Is a Crooked Man.†Short novel. We are rapidly approaching the point where science and engineering can easily enable the criminal mind to outwit the law, if the particular law does indeed exist. Law enforcement becomes a hilarious problem, as Thorne Smith becomes SF, not fantasy. Not Analog’s usual stuff. (4)
J. B. MITCHEL “The Returning.†Alien takes over experimental US rocket to return home. (2) [His only published SF story.]
MACK REYNOLDS “Amazon Planet.†Serial, part 3 of 3. Separate report forthcoming.
WINSTON P. SANDERS [POUL ANDERSON] “Elementary Mistake.†Crew sent to establish mattereaster [?] on a distant planet discovers they haven’t the necessary elements available. Too technical to make sense. (1)
A CANTERBURY TALE. Archer, UK, 1944. Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, Dennis Price, John Sweet, Esmond Knight, H.F. Maltry, and Eliot Makeham. Written & directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger.
I watched this twice, back to back, just to see if I’d missed something. When I was through, I told the leggy red-head next to me on the couch that I still wasn’t sure how A Canterbury Tale felt about itself.
“Do movies think about themselves?†she asked.
Well, every movie has an attitude, even if it’s just give-a-damn, and Canterbury’s attitude is mostly one of a cherished England, rich in heritage and humanity. But there’s also a disturbing sub-text that moves the film, like many another Powell/Pressberger work, from the realm of simple propaganda into the rare class of Weird Movies.
Made in the fifth year of a World War, confused, diffuse, and at times quite powerful, Canterbury concerns itself with conditions on England’s home front, bizarre crime, and the problems of three ordinary people caught up in it all.
Price and Sweet play Sergeants — British and American, respectively — and Sim is a Land Girl detailed to work for local JP Thomas Colpepper (Eric Portman) in a village just outside Canterbury. But as the sergeants escort her from the train station to the town hall (It’s night and the village is under Blackout orders.) a shadowy figure darts out of the darkness and… and…. and…..
Pours glue on the lady’s head. Yeah. Well, I told you there was bizarre crime here. Someone’s been making rather a habit of this sort of thing (Wait till you hear the motive!) picking on young ladies out after dark with soldiers, and Ms Sim is only the latest victim.
But not a passive one. She and the sergeants pursue the miscreant into the Town Hall, where the local police (“The Glue Man’s at it again!â€) search the building and, in a moment worthy of Caligari, discover only Colpepper, the all-powerful JP, seated magisterially in his inner sanctum.
Of course the locals refuse to believe that a man of Colpepper’s stature could possibly be the Glue Man, so it falls to our intrepid trio to uncover evidence of his guilt and take it to the authorities in Canterbury.
The ensuing story moves far too slowly, with way too many digressions, but the amateur sleuths carry it along by dint of their sheer charm and inefficiency. And they get their act together just in time for a tense and surprising confrontation in a railway carriage compartment on a train bound for Canterbury.
And then they reach Canterbury, and all my notions about this movie got blown to pieces.
It’s a powerful and moving finale, and one that left me considerably upset. Perhaps I shouldn’t look at it from a contemporary perspective, but to my mind pouring glue on ladies’ hair and running off into the night are acts of misogyny and cowardice. I’ll just say A Canterbury Tale doesn’t share my point of view, and leave it at that.
A final note: this was to all intents and purposes the only film appearance of John Sweet, an amateur actor chosen for his total freshness in the part of the American Sergeant. It was a good choice.
RICHARD STARK – The Black Ice Score. Parker #11. Gold Medal #D1949; paperback original, 1968. Cover by Robert McGinnis. Berkley, paperback, 1973; Avon, paperback, 1985. University of Chicago Press, trade paperback, 2010.
Professional thief non-pereil Parker is caught up in a three-way tangle in The Black Ice Score. The head of a small African country is trying to escape from that country with a good portion of that country’s treasury before he is caught and hanged from the nearest tree, and in that regard he has sent the funds ahead encapsulated in a fortune in diamonds. Faction two wants the diamonds to help maintain the country’s legal government, while faction three wants the jewels to help overthrow the country’s legal government.
Then there is a scavenger trying to horn in on his own, hoping to enrich himself with some of the leftover spoils. Parker is persuaded to work with faction number two, hiring himself out as advisor only regarding as to how the well-guarded jewels may be stolen from faction number one.
This is a heist novel, in other words.
There is, unfortunately, to my mind, little here that deviates from most heist novels. There is the planning, the carrying out of the plan, dealing with what goes wrong with the planning – no plan in a heist novel ever goes off according to plan – and the tidying up at the end.
Mitigating against the fact that the framework of the overall story line is almost completely etched in stone, is that Stark (aka Donald Westlake) was very nearly the most hard-boiled writers of his era, and Parker is very nearly most hard-boiled of characters. Not a word is wasted throughout the story, including in any of the dialogue.
A steady diet of Richard Stark stories is not for me, but as spaced out timewise as I read them, they always go down extremely well.
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. – Saving the Queen. Blackford Oakes #1. Doubleday, hardcover, 1976. Warner, paperback, 1977. Avon, paperback, 1981. Cumberland House, softcover, 2005.
It is almost impossible to write about William F. Buckley and not mention politics, one of the leading Conservative voices of the Twentieth Century, political commentator, gadfly, and droll defender of his point of view. He was closely identified with Conservatism, founding two of it’s most important voices, the magazine National Review and the series Firing Line, but I would argue he found his true gift as a writer of fiction, droll, witty, fanciful, and playful fiction that took advantage of his sophistication and famous vocabulary.
It can be argued today that his novels, both those about Blackford Oakes and the more mainstream ones, are more relevant than any of his political stances or achievements to the modern world, his brand of Conservatism largely dead and forgotten by all but a few, certainly no longer the mainstream voice of the movement it once was.
For my tastes the highlight of his gift lay in his series of delightful spy novels featuring handsome Patrician Ivy League spy master Blackford “Blackie†Oakes, whose adventures filled eleven volumes, following the adventures of the CIA agent from 1950 until 1987 and Blackie’s final confrontation with British traitor Kim Philby (Last Call for Blackford Oakes).
Granted it can be pointed out that the Oakes novels play fast and loose with history rewriting many of the most embarassing failures of the CIA as secret triumphs, thanks to Blackie’s untold version, but taken as the fun they are intended as rather than history it’s cheeky entertainment watching Buckley try to re cast the reality of Sputnik (Who’s On First?), the Hungarian Revolution (The Story of Henri Tod), Cuba (High Jinx), or Kim Philby (Last Call for Blackford Oakes), which he does with unflagging tongue in cheek humor while an endless parade of Presidents, spy masters, and diplomatic figures out of history glide through Buckley’s re=imagining of the Cold War, Allen Dulles, Dean Acheson, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, the Kennedy’s, and Ronald Reagan among them.
That he personally knew most of those figures and had himself served in the CIA informs the books with something like the spirit of the far less political Ian Fleming, the British spy novelist he resembles in terms of storytelling gifts and audacity far more than a more sober Le Carre or cynical Deighton. For their obvious differences the Oakes books are very much the true American answer to Fleming and Bond.
Saving the Queen opens in the wake of Watergate with the very real Rockefeller Commission looking more closely into the past activities of the CIA and Blackie Oakes due to testify. Over dinner with his friend Anthony Trust, a recurring character in the series, Blackie muses on just how much truth he dare tell the Committee about his first major assignment. To take the Fifth Amendment would mean the end of his career in the CIA.
There was no comment. Harman, for one, knew nothing about the first assignment. Anthony knew more than he let on, but he didn’t know it all, by any means. And it would greatly have surprised Singer Callaway to discover that not even he, who had been intimately involved in the operation, knew exactly how far the young man had got in, in the course of saving the Queen.
It is the Post War era and a young Blackford Oakes has been sent to London ostensibly to study the Post War British economy, and for Oakes a painful it’s a reminder of youthful encounter with the British Public School system that left him cynical and bitter. Much of the first third of the book is taken up with his being readied for the mission, briefed, and with flashbacks to his childhood experience.
If there is a flaw in the book, it is these flashbacks to Oakes’ humiliation in the British Public School system. I can’t help thinking Harry Flashman would of given him the Tom Brown treatment and James Bond, who got kicked out of Eton, would have laughed in his face. I’m not sure Charles Dickens is really the best model for spy fiction.
Of course there is more to his mission than that. CIA suspects the Russians have high level agents in the United Kingdom maybe even at Buckingham Palace in the court of the beautiful new Queen Caroline I.
Saving the Queen is the most playful of the Oakes series with Buckley more relaxed here where he isn’t trying to rewrite actual history. In later books Blackie will find his conscience tested by his profession (Stained Glass) and his neck in much tighter nooses (The Story of Henri Tod), but here the adventure is spiced with just a hint of spy spoofery dressed up with Buckley’s considerable wit.
His friendly enemy Economist John Kenneth Gailbraith was only partially ribbing him when he noted that in fiction Buckley had found his true place.
Oakes and the beautiful English Queen, more Grace Kelly than Elizabeth, are physically attracted as Blackie begins to sort out the question of the possible Soviet agent at the heart of British royalty, and get his own back a bit over his unpleasant childhood experiences, all coming to a head in a duel at 10,000 feet between a Hunter-Hawker piloted by the Soviet agent and Blackie in an F86 Sabre.
For all the spirit of Ian Fleming, Buckley is far less hedonistic than his British forerunner. Blackie can be a bit of a prude and it is hard at times to believe in him. Unlike Bond he has a steady girl friend he is usually faithful too and something of a life as an engineer. You can’t imagine him letting down his hair in Romany encampment or a Japanese bath like Bond or enjoying the sexy sound of his car’s exhaust, much less Bond’s exploits with women. Even when Blackie gets his hands dirty there is a sense hand sanitizer is nearby. Blackie is very much a paragon of Yale and Patrician birth, not an “elegant thug†like Bond kicked out of Eton for an unspecified scandal with a serving girl.
Buckley has removed the Sex and Sadism from the Bond formula, retained the Snobbery, and added Wit and the sting of the political gadfly to create his own formula, Snobbery, Re Written History, and Satire.
But he is charming company to spend an evening with delving in the backrooms and shadowy corners of the Cold War, imagining oneself an armchair insider in the back corridors of power, and when a relieved Blackie escapes testifying before Congress only to walk away whistling “God Save the Queen,†I think many of you will agree the trip was worth taking, and with varying results he managed to keep it up for eleven more books, with his best after this one probably Who’s On First?.
MacKINLEY KANTOR “Gun Crazy.†Short story. First published in The Saturday Evening Post, February 3, 1940. Collected in Author’s Choice (Coward McCann, 1944). Reprinted in Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy & Otto Penzler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). Film: United Artists, 1950, with Peggy Cummins & John Dall; directed by Joseph H. Lewis.
Every fan of film noir, even if they’ve haven’t managed to see the movie based on this short story by Pulitzer Prize winning novelist MacKinley Kantor, is certainly well aware of it. Not many films of its genre have, after all, been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. The short story itself? Not so many have even heard of it.
The story follows its main protagonist, Nelson Tare, from the time he and his family move into the small town of Elm City. He was very young at the time, still talking baby talk. When the narrator of the story, about the same age as Nelly at the time, asks him if he wants to play, his answer is “Dot any duns?â€
Translation: “Have you got any guns?â€
The young kid is obsessed with guns, all through life. The story veers from the movie — or maybe that should be the other way around — in that in the movie both he and his female partner in robbing banks and other crimes (sharpshooting Antoinette McReady, aka Ruth Riley in the story) are the primary focus of the film, while in MacKinley Kantor’s version, her role is restricted to just over a couple of pages.
DICK BARTON: SPECIAL AGENT. Southern TV, UK, 1979. Tony Vogel (Dick Barton), Anthony Heaton (Snowey White), James Cosmo (Jock Anderson). Creator/screenwriter: Norman Collins. Other screenwriters: Julian Bond, Clive Exton.
Back when radio was the most significant medium for home entertainment, fifteen million people would listen nightly to Dick Barton: Special Agent, an action adventure serial replete with cliff-hangers and derring-do, on the Light Programme. It followed the adventures of former commando Captain Richard Barton and his two friends ‘Snowy’ White and ‘Jock’ Anderson as they repelled the plans of various criminal masterminds and somehow escaped the perilous traps that were repeatedly set for them.
The radio serial ran between 1946 and 1951, usually at 6.45 pm, for fifteen minutes apiece. 711 episodes were made, all written by Geoffrey Webb and Edward J. Mason, and each adhering to the thirteen rules of conduct which decreed that Dick could not use bad language, drink alcohol or use a knife to harm. Apart from the hero’s name and the adventure it evokes, the serial is best remembered for its theme tune, “The Devil’s Gallop,” a rousing and rambunctious slice of genius by composer Charles Williams which makes one want to dash about the room and press against the wall as though hiding from fiendish saboteurs.
The nanny state killed the show off after five years in the belief that it was damaging to the dear young children. By this time, however, the show was a nationwide phenomenon, spawning a behind-the-scenes book, another volume of short stories and three films from Hammer Studios (at the time, best known for making thrillers, not horrors). The BBC then replaced it with a rustic drama named The Archers, the theme tune of which must have made every red-blooded adventurer used to Barton’s buccaneering wish for another war.
The late 1970s saw a minor revival for Dick and his friends. A somewhat sparsely written but nonetheless enjoyable book, novelising three of the radio serials, was published in 1977. That same year, filming took place on a televised series of new adventures. Made by Southern Television, a small ITV company, each episode lasted ten minutes (excluding commercials) and shown on Saturdays and Sundays from January to April 1979.
The 32 episodes starred Tony Vogel as Barton, Anthony Heaton as ‘Snowy’ and James Cosmo as ‘Jock’ and comprised four adventures, each lasting between six and ten parts each. Typically for its time, the serial was shot on video, a format which can make the most expensive television look cheap. Such an impression, in this instance, would be accurate as there were apparently several budgetary issues which undermined the production of the programme.
This is mostly apparent in the sometimes dodgy direction work, though it can only be imagined that the director was doing his best with the little he had. The location work – usually one of the most costly features of scripted television – is plentiful and the acting is more or less solid throughout. As you would expect from such a short serial, the whole thing runs like the clappers, and the scripts – many by Clive Exton, who would later bring Poirot and Jeeves & Wooster to television – wisely play it straight throughout. There is, of course, the odd bit of wince-inducing dialogue, but all such things can be waved away as attempts at period authenticity.
The first adventure sees an old bird named Sir Richard Marley call on Barton when his daughter Virginia and son Rex go missing. They have been kidnapped by the dastardly foreigner Melganik, who plans on substituting tobacco with reefer and thus turning the whole of Britain into “drug fiendsâ€. The story lasts ten parts, co-stars future Strictly Come Dancing contestant Fiona Fullerton and memorably includes the old walls-closing-in-with-spikes routine.
The second adventure, in eight parts, starts a little too similarly as a young girl – this time an old acquaintance of Jock’s – is in danger when her scientist father is kidnapped by the evil Muller. The third serial ties in neatly with the first two and involves a disappearing house, while the last adventure sees the team encounter a couple of menacing, Kray-like gangsters.
The series is available on DVD and can sometimes be seen nightly on Talking Pictures TV – which is how I saw it. Tony Vogel is outstanding in the part of Barton. He takes it all seriously, remains believable in the period, and can even be tough when he wants to be. The whole thing is basically a children’s show, of course, but it was always going to be and is none the worse for it.
The only downside is the brevity of the episodes: it may have made more of an impact had it been shown in half-hour instalments, like Doctor Who. As it was, for whatever reason, the show was not a success and was quickly forgotten. The production company itself folded within a couple of years.
Dick Barton did not return again until the late ‘90s and then only on stage in live theatre (perhaps inevitably, as he had already featured in every other medium). With only four cast members, the nine plays were comedy-musicals which parodied the brand, boasted innuendo and were mostly staged at Croydon’s now-closed Warehouse Theatre.
The last we have so far heard from Dick and his friends is, funnily enough, due to the TV version. The series produced four novelizations and one of them, The Mystery of the Missing Formula, was released in 2010 on CD and read by a thoroughly game Toby Stephens.
After all these years, I don’t think anyone is quite sure just why a British private detective is walking around calling himself a special agent, but I certainly hope he makes another come-back at some point. Cue music!
JAMES CRUMLEY – The Last Good Kiss. S. W. Sughrue #1. Random House, hardcover, 1978. Pocket, paperback, 1980. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, paperback, 1988.
Since the death of Ross Macdonald and on the basis of just three novels, James Crumley has become the foremost living writer of private-eye fiction. Carrying on the Macdonald tradition in which the PI is no longer macho but a man sensitive to human needs, tom by inner pain, and slow to use force, Crumley has moved the genre into the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era.
His principal setting is not the big city as in Hammett and Chandler, nor the affluent suburbs as in Macdonald, but the wilderness and bleak magnificence of western Montana. His prevailing mood is a wacked out empathy with dopers, dropouts, losers, and loonies, the human wreckage of the institutionalized butchery we call the “real world.” Nobility resides in the land, in wild animals, and in a handful of outcasts-psychotic Viet vets; Indians, hippies; rumdums; and love-seekers-who can’t cope with life.
Crumley’s detective characters have one foot in either camp. Milo Dragovitch, the protagonist of The Wrong Case(1975) and Dancing Bear (1983), is a cocaine addict and boozer, the child of two suicides, a compulsive womanizer like his wealthy Hemingwayesque father; a man literally marking time until he will tum fifty-two and inherit the family fortune, which his pioneer ancestors legally stole from the Indians.
Sughrue from The Last Good Kisshas a background as a Nam war criminal and an army spy on domestic dissidents and he’s drinking himself to death by inches. Yet these are two of the purest figures in the history of detective fiction, and the most reverent toward the earth and its creatures.
Crumley has minimal interest in plot and even less in explanations, but he’s so uncannily skillful with character, language, relationship, and incident that he can afford to throw structure overboard. His books are an accumulation of small, crazy encounters, full of confusion and muddle, disorder and despair, graphic violence and sweetly casual sex, coke snorting and alcohol guzzling, mountain snowscapes and roadside bars.
When he does have to plot, he· tends to borrow from Raymond Chandler. In The Wrong Case, Milo Dragovitch becomes obsessed by a young woman from Iowa who hires him to find her missing brother, a situation clearly taken from Chandler’s Little Sister (1949). The Last Good Kiss, perhaps the best of Crumley’s novels, traps Sughrue among the tormented members of the family of a hugely successful writer, somewhat as Philip Marlowe was trapped in Chandler’s masterpiece The Long Goodbye (1954).
In Dancing Bear, which pits Milo Dragovitch against a multinational corporation dumping toxic waste into the groundwater, the detective interviews a rich old client in a plant-filled solarium just like Marlowe in the first chapter of Chandler’s Big Sleep (1939).
None of these borrowings matter in the least, for Chandler’s tribute to Dashiell Hammett is no less true of Crumley: He writes scenes so that they seem never to have been written before. What one remembers from The Last Good Kissis the alcoholic bulldog and the emotionally flayed women and the loneliness and guilt. What is most lasting in Dancing Bear is the moment when Milo Dragovitch finds a time bomb in his car on a wilderness road and tosses it out at the last second into a stream and weeps for the exploded fish that died for him, and dozens of other moments just as powerful.
Bibliographic Note: As good as this book is, there were only two followup novels with Sugrue, those being The Mexican Tree Duck (Mysterious Press 1993) and Bordersnakes (Dennis McMillan 1996). The latter is a crossover with Milo Milodragovitch, who was in two solo adventures.
FREDRIC BROWN. “Murder Set to Music.†Novella. First published in The Saint Detective Magazine, January 1957, as “Murder to Music.” Reprinted in The Saint Mystery Library #3, paperback original, 1959, edited by Leslie Charteris.
Two jazz musicians have been friends and played in the same bands since it seems forever. Not even the fact that one married the girl that both were in love with has affected that friendship. Now that they’re partners in a car dealership, and their days on the road are behind them, they only occasionally think of those days.
Not until the leader of one of the bands comes to town with his new group is either one of them tempted to take their instruments out of their cases. Ralph, the unmarried one, tells the story from there, pretty much starting when Danny, the married one, opens the door to his apartment and is slugged in the face by a short stocky man wearing a mask.
There is a long stretch of the story in which nothing much seems to be happening. The story is lengthy, over 50 pages long in its paperback version, but Fred Brown was such a good writer, the reader is pulled along in the flow of the tale he tells. And you just know that a Fred Brown story is going to have a Fred Brown ending. Or does it? Is the lack of a Fred Brown ending the Fred Brown ending?? I’ll never tell.
E. H. CLEMENTS – Cherry Harvest. Alister Woodhead #2. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1943. Messner, US, hardcover, 1944.
Take a girls’ school in the heart of.the English countryside and place them in high summer during the last war. Add a well observed selection of children and visiting parents, and three mysterious guests — vague Mr. Carey, quiet Miss Hartland and chatty Mr. Brent. One of them is a spy, and it is the author’s long enduring detective Alister Woodhead whose job it is to find out which one.
The book is not notable for its pace and action (though there is a murder) and its attraction lies in the author’s ability to evoke the English countryside. Those of you who like the idea of a quiet stroll down a country lane to an unknown destination will enjoy it.
– Reprinted from The Poison Pen, Volume 3, Number 5 (October 1980).
The Alister Woodhead series —
Let Him Die. Hodder 1939
Cherry Harvest. Hodder 1943
Berry Green. Hodder 1945
Weathercock. Hodder 1949
Chair-Lift. Hodder 1955
Discord in the Air. Hodder 1955
The Other Island. Hodder 1956
Back in Daylight. Hodder 1957
Uncommon Cold. Hodder 1958
High Tension. Hodder 1959
Honey for the Marshal. Hodder 1960
A Note of Enchantment. Hodder 1961
Let or Hindrance. Hale 1963
Further Bio-Bibliographical Notes: Her initials perhaps helped disguise the fact that the author was female: her full name was Eileen Helen Clements Hunter (1905-1993). Besides the Woodhead series she has five standalone mysteries in Hubin. Only three of her books have been published in the US.
Added Later: I have found one other review of this title online, that on J. F. Norris’s “Pretty Sinister” blog. John goes into a lot more detail and even provides a photo image of the cover. John, I hope you don’t mind my appropriating it for Bob’s review.
