Reviewed by DAVID L. VINEYARD:         


RICHARD HALLAS You Play the Black

RICHARD HALLAS – You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up. Robert H. McBride, hardcover, 1938. Paperback reprint: Dell #510, 1951. Gregg Press, hardcover, Black Lizard Paperback, pb, 1986.

   And it was California. We were on a sort of mountainside, and down below us was a valley where you could see the palm trees in a long row, and orange ranches and houses — all looking pretty as a fiddler’s floozie and smelling twice as good.

   There is a type of novel that can only be called a peculiar classic, and by any standard this noirish Hollywood novel fits that category. Even more so when you know the pseudonymous Richard Hallas was better known by his real name, expatriate Englishman and member of the Hollywood Raj, Eric Knight.

   Knight also wrote the classic novella “Lassie Come Home,” which spawned a long line of movies, television series, comics, and countless other media, and the inspirational wartime bestseller This Above All, which became a classic film with Henry Fonda, Joan Fontaine, and Thomas Mitchell.

   But you wouldn’t know that from You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up (the title a reference to the roulette wheel — in this case an electronic one in a gambling joint — and the fickle nature of fate), a nightmarish tale that echoes both the American hard-boiled voice, Cornell Woolrich’s dark tales of obsession and implacable fate, and the Hollywood novel as it was developing when this was written in 1938.

RICHARD HALLAS You Play the Black

    I went down to the tracks and waited there in the dark and when the 3:20 westbound freight came through I hopped it. I got up on top of a boxcar and lay there, looking back. You could see the glow of the smelters, maybe fifteen miles.

   The narrator is Dick Dempsey, just dumped by his wife Lois with whom he ran a diner. He’s landed on a west bound freight and his next stop is Los Angeles — which in this book may as well be the Twilight Zone.

    I kept thinking that the goofier the plan the more quickly people fall for it in California.

   And Dick can be forgiven if he feels that way because the Los Angeles he lands in is eccentric to say the least, from a sexually dubious film director named Quentin Genter; to a pair of psychopathic floozies; Sheila a nice girl, who still isn’t entirely sane (he meets her at 2 am on an empty pier where she has just taken a nude swim and is in no hurry to get dressed); and as fine a collection of crooked cops, grifters, tarts, and Hollywood staples as you can imagine in any single novel. Plus three murders, one robbery, a suicide, multiple love affairs (mostly illicit), a murder trial, and shots at everything from Upton Sinclair’s gubernatorial campaign to Aimee Semple McPherson.

    It was Patsy in her white robes and gold sandals … she was standing stock still with her arms stretched out and her hands turned up, and with her head looking up in the air, like she was Christ on the cross.

RICHARD HALLAS You Play the Black

   As you might expect in this kind of tale, Dick ends up on death row waiting for death after breaking a few laws and getting framed for the one he is innocent of, but the ending still manages to be unexpected as Dick gets a reprieve from that fate to meet another and has a sort of epiphany as he escapes the California asylum.

    I think it was true what Genter once said: that the minute you crossed into California you went crazy. And I think the minute you cross the mountains coming back, you change again… I remember him saying that some lands were father to a man; and some were mother to him, and loved him; and some were a wife, and had to be loved; but California was just a whore who dropped her pants to the first man who came along with a watering-pot.

   Critical reception of You Play the Black and the Red Come Up was mixed, with some critics feeling Knight was slumming, aping the then new hard-boiled voice, but this a remarkably sustained effort, and the disparate elements compare well with Edward Anderson’s Thieves Like Us, Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses Don’t They, or James M. Cain’s novels, not to mention Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust, Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, and Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister.

RICHARD HALLAS You Play the Black

   Dick Dempsey’s voice is done in perfect pitch and never fails to be real and convincing, his journey, complete to its hallucinogenic end, the genuine thing, a true hard-boiled Hollywood novel of its period, and a genuine peculiar classic as well.

   This is a hard one to find. The Gregg Press reprint with a fine introduction by David Feinberg is likely your best bet. Best of all, like a fly in amber, the book captures a slightly distorted but none the less true picture of Los Angeles in 1938 when movies were king and California still the golden land at the end of the dark and dusty Depression road.

    … I thought about all the things they’d said abut Genter after he was dead, but it didn’t matter; because he knew more than they did. Anyhow, he was the only man in California with sense enough to know he was crazy.

   Nathaniel West couldn’t — and didn’t — say it better.