Mon 18 Mar 2019
Pulp PI Stories I’m Reading, Selected by David Vineyard: CLEVE F. ADAMS “Flowers for Violet.”
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[8] Comments
CLEVE F. ADAMS “Flowers for Violet.” Violet McDade #6. Novelette. Published in Clues Detective Stories, May 1936. Cover by Norman Saunders. Never reprinted. Included in Hard-Boiled Dames, edited by Bernard Drew (St. Martin’s Press, 1986). See Comment #1.
With the exception of some tough newspaper women working alongside the likes of Daffy Dill or a female op helping Cardigan, there weren’t a lot of female driven series in the hard-boiled pulps so, like Theodore A. Tinsley’s Carrie Cashin, Violet McDade is a bit different than the usual pulp fare.
I really don’t know if Violet came before or after Erle Stanley Gardner’s Bertha Cool, but she certainly owes more to Bertha than Rex Stout’s tough smart and attractive Dol Bonner. Violet is fat, rude, and tough as nails, and as “Flowers for Violet†opens she is being rude and pushy in a nice night club called the Green Kitten, where she is trying to dredge up clients for her and her chief operative, Nevada Alvarado, a slim, attractive girl who is getting sore feet dancing with all the stiffs Violet steers toward her.
When Violet spies Assistant D. A. Stephen Wright in the Green Kitten, she smells trouble. Mike Donelli, who runs the club runs illegal gambling upstairs and has a backer in state Senator Hymes, and D.,A. Alvin Foss is no fan of either. Violet smells trouble and maybe money, and she is seldom wrong about either. Donelli is married to Rose, who does a routine clad “mostly in brilliantsâ€, and Violet chides Mike for staying in the rackets.
“No, you ape, I don’t. I think she’s an empty headed little tramp. I think she was a sap for marrying a guy like you. But,†… Violet’s greenish little eyes got a far away looks that somehow always brought a lump to my throat … “but Rose’s mother was damn white to me back when she was on top and I was the fat lady in the same circus. I … I kind of owe Rose something for that.â€
And with that, you know the stage is set for fists and bullets to fly as Violet and Nevada find Rose on their doorstep still clad in “mostly brilliants†and the news Mike Donelli just shot someone and is gunning for Rose and then their apartment gets fire bombed.
True to the breed, Violet plays fast and loose with the law letting the fire department think she and Nevada (sometimes called Mex — political correctness was not one of Adams’ strengths) are trapped in the rubble while they get a head start on the case as she and Nevada and Violet’s little chauffeur Sweeny go gunning for Mike Donelli with a protesting Rose in tow.
District Attorney Foss has been shot, and it adds up that Donelli probably did it, but nothing is ever that straight up in these things. A Violet and Nevada bull into the case, things and people prove to be more complicated than they expect, especially when Violet’s favorite cop, Lt. Belarski gets his skull clipped by a bullet and Sweeny ends up in jail.
The detective work is pretty good, although it is less in the classic tradition than the hard-boiled one where every violent encounter leads to another step toward the truth, which involves high level shenanigans, political corruption and ambition, and not so honest fall guys.
The Violet McDade stories are fun, a bit out of the screwball school as Adams’ Rex McBride stories also were: violent, fast moving, and reminiscent of what many of us started reading hard-boiled pulp fiction for in the first place.
Adams was in the second rank of the classic hard-boiled school, and that isn’t a shot at his often entertaining tales, just a recognition that he perhaps didn’t work as hard at originality as he might have, and for all his word savagery, he just missed the first rank. That “elephant in the aquarium†is no “tarantula on a piece of angel food cake.â€
But second rank in that particular school wasn’t a bit shabby, and if you are looking for a fat lady to sing this particular aria, you could do worse than to accompany Adams and Violet McDade.
The Violet McDade series —
Page Violet McDade! (nv) Clues Detective Stories Jan 1935
Shrinking Violet (nv) Clues Detective Stories Jul 1935
Mexican Bargain (ss) Clues Detective Stories Aug 1935
Framing the Picture (nv) Clues Detective Stories Nov 1935
Vision of Violet (nv) Clues Detective Stories Feb 1936
Flowers for Violet (nv) Clues Detective Stories May 1936
The Voice (nv) Clues Detective Stories Sep 1936
Compromising Violet (nv) Clues Detective Stories Oct 1936
Important Money (nv) Clues Detective Stories Dec 1936
Violet to Orchid (nv) Clues Detective Stories Feb 1937
Murder City (nv) Clues Detective Stories Apr 1937
The Black Door (ss) Clues Detective Stories Sep 1937
Bloody Bullets (nv) Clues Detective Stories Nov 1937
March 18th, 2019 at 8:03 am
This is another, typically lively and interesting review from David!
I think “Flowers for Violet†is reprinted in the anthology “Hard-Boiled Dames” (1986) edited by Bernard Drew. It’s a good collection of woman-character pulp tales.
This is definitely before Gardner’s wonderful Bertha Cool debuted in 1939.
March 18th, 2019 at 10:02 am
Thanks for the reprint info, Mike. I’ve added it to the review.
March 18th, 2019 at 1:47 pm
As a big fan of Cleve F. Adams, who’s read everything by him I can get my hands on (some more than once), it’s always puzzled me that we don’t see collections of his stories. It’s past due. He’s one of the greats.
March 18th, 2019 at 8:29 pm
Thanks for the nice review. Violet is one of my all time favorite pulp characters by one of my favorite authors. I think that Steve Haffner is going to reprint some Cleve Adams stories soon, as I know he’s been buying issues with his stories,but I’m not sure which ones. I’ll have to ask him at Windy City next month.
March 18th, 2019 at 9:25 pm
stephen Mertz,
Like Jonathan Latimer, Adams was perhaps too honest about the language and people he wrote about meaning by the sixties there was just too much to clean up in his stories (“What this country needs is an American Gestapo,” being one of Rex McBride’s quips though admittedly McBride is presented as a bit of an ass at times — Adams tended to present his hard-boiled characters with the kind of opinions they likely expressed in the real world, no tarnished knights in Adams stories, which meant later generations of editors may have found him just too brutally honest about how actual private eyes of a certain class talked).
Then too Adams was none too scrupulous about borrowing plots from Chandler and Hammett — something he was apparently pretty open about — (he rewrote RED HARVEST at least twice) however original his dialogue and action was.
For a period in there I think he just wasn’t considered worth the effort, though I agree about the real gusto and drive his stories and novels have. Latimer, a much bigger name, suffered the same fate though some of the books did get reprinted here and there.
It’s high time he gets his due, for one I would like to see all the Rex McBride books in print as well as some of the non series titles. He really doesn’t get his due as one of the top writers in the field, and I suspect some of it was his language was just too honest about who his characters were and the kind of opinions they expressed, a bit more realism than editors were ready for.
Then too a lot of good hard-boiled writers were ‘lost’ or virtually forgotten like Kurt Steel, Robert Reeves, Gardner’s non Mason and Lam stories, Whitfield, Ballard, Nebel, and others.
To this day I don’t think there has been a paperback edition of SLEEPER’S EAST as an example. Adams probably did better longer in paperback than many of his contemporaries, but like many of the pulp writers didn’t survive the coming of Spillane and his imitators, and wasn’t in the class of the Chandler school in a literary sense. Good as some of his books in the post pulp era were they were still more the old pulp voice than the new paperback one.
March 19th, 2019 at 11:43 am
After posting comment #2, I spent most of yesterday traveling from CA back home to CT, and I didn’t notice until now that I’d neglected to add a list of all of the Violet McDade stories to David’s review.
I’ve just done so. Better late than never!
Note that all of the stories appeared in CLUES DETECTIVE STORIES, which was a Street & Smith publication. In terms of publishing the complete set of stories, I don’t believe that Matt Moring of Altus Press has any rights to S&S pulps. Tony Tollin is still doing a great job putting out The Shadow and Doc Savages novels, but I don’t think he has much interest in story collections.
So maybe it’s up to Steve Haffner, as Paul suggests. He does good work on the books he puts out, and I’d like to see him do it.
March 19th, 2019 at 1:14 pm
Sabotage by Adams is available at Altus Press. The site offers such a large selection it needs a search button for people such as me who do not have the time to go through all the pages.
March 19th, 2019 at 4:41 pm
Thanks, Michael. I didn’t know about this one at all. Altus Press publishes books about ten times faster than I can read them!
PS. SABOTAGE was first published as a six-part serial in DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY.