Thu 21 Jul 2022
A PI Mystery Review by Tony Baer: BART SPICER – Black Sheep, Run.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[16] Comments
BART SPICER – Black Sheep, Run. Carney Wilde #4. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1951. Bantam #1049, paperback, 1952.
Carney Wilde is one of the top private eyes in Philadelphia. He just opened his brand new office that he can’t afford and a cop he knows busts in on the office-warming party and urgently needs to talk to him.
The police superintendent committed suicide a week back, but he left a note confessing to graft and naming names. New Jersey gamblers had been paying off cops to look the other way when shuttle services shipped Philadelphians to and fro from Jersey to enjoy an evening of debauchery. The list included the name of a mutual friend, the most honorable homicide detective on the force. The cop hires Carney Wilde to clear his name.
Wilde heads to Jersey to try to figure out the payoff structure. He ends up getting tailed by another P.I. hired by a reform group of mugwumps aiming to clean up corruption in the City of Brotherly Love. But before Wilde knows it, he’s been framed for the murder of the mugwumps’ P.I., and now the law is after him too. Now Wilde not only has to vindicate the cop, but vindicate himself whilst uncovering the deep dark twisted conspiracy behind the framing of the innocent by the grifters themselves. Who’s behind the conspiracy? And why are the mugwumps so embedded in the swamp?
Hopefully I’m not giving too much away by saying that the story’s a bit reminiscent of One Lonely Night and The Manchurian Candidate.
Carney Wilde is a believable, likeable, very human detective, with all the frailties and passions of an everyday guy. He’s no hero. He’s just trying his best. Which is generally good enough.
I enjoyed the book, as I did the only other in the series I’ve tried (The Long Green). I think he deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Ross Macdonald and Thomas Dewey and William Campbell Gault. Which is to say that, to apply Somerset Maugham’s self-denigrating quote: “in the very top rank of the second rate.”
The Carney Wilde series —
The Dark Light. Dodd 1949.
Blues for the Prince. Dodd 1950.
The Golden Door. Dodd 1951.
Black Sheep, Run. Dodd 1951.
The Long Green. Dodd 1952.
The Taming of Carney Wilde. Dodd 1954.
Exit, Running. Dodd 1959.
July 21st, 2022 at 8:06 pm
An interesting side light to the Carney Wilde books is that he is a fully successful hardboiled eye who is not particularly downtrodden or limited to the mean streets. By the time the series ends he’s running a successful agency with security contracts and operating as a well to do businessman, and his success grows as the series goes on.
He still handles himself in the mean streets, but he is hardly the nickel and dime operation of some of his contemporaries.
There were other successful eyes than Wilde; Spade, Shayne, Hammer, Hank Heyer, Timothy Dane, Rex McBride, Chet Drumm, Shell Scott to name a few, but most of them were no where near as nice a guy as Wilde comes across as.
July 22nd, 2022 at 7:43 am
Tony,
Nice review of a good author, but do you really believe that ROSS MACDONALD is a “second rate writer”?? That line should start the comments
page flowing! I’m an old timer who thinks MacDonald is one of the “Big Three” (Hammett/Chandler/MacDonald)
July 22nd, 2022 at 8:42 am
Paul,
If somerset Maugham is second rate, there’s no shame in it. I love Ross macdonald and I get a lot of comfort from his work. That said, there’s some truth to westlake’s comment about macdonald having the best carbon paper in the world. He seems to have developed an idee fixe following his own daughter’s disappearance that became every book following doomsters/Galton case. It’s a good book. But they all kind of blur together for me. Cf Hammett who created a number of unique realms and characters from Sam spade, Ned Beaumont and the continental op to gutman and the thin man—and in a writing style that never felt like a slumming intellectual.
I feel like Cain (maybe both Paul & James) and Hammett and chandler (and frankly even Spillane who I don’t seem to like very much) tread new ground, opening new terrains, bursting paradigms. Maybe Jim Thompson too.
Macdonald is just an excellent practitioner of chandler’s art. Like Howard Browne but more consistent and prolific. To me, excellent practitioners and prose stylists get in the second tier; True artists create new realms previously unseen.
July 22nd, 2022 at 9:11 am
Well…by that measure, Tony, Spillane was basically Carroll John Daly with less terror of sex and a (very) slightly less cartoonish prose style.
While Gault also is snubbed thus…as a man who wrote brilliant sports fiction before turning most of his efforts to crime fiction. While Chandler was Hammett redone in purple. Your boundaries are your own, but the starkness of them will indeed get you no lack of argument.
July 22nd, 2022 at 9:41 am
Todd,
I give you that Daly is pretty frigging important. His incompetent prose is all that keeps him from 1st tier in my book. Chandler as Hammett with purple prose? Ugh. I adore chandler’s prose and I wouldn’t change a thing. Yeah the metaphors are outlandish—but they’re hilarious. And chandlers knight errant marlowe is nothing like the hedonistic Sam spade. To me chandler paved new ground for a whole school to follow.
July 22nd, 2022 at 10:28 am
Hence, de gustibus. There are a number of us who prefer Hammett…and can see “Macdonald”‘s rather too similar novels as still getting across a more believable sorrow than do those of Chandler. While still enjoying mot of Chandler’s work.
July 22nd, 2022 at 10:34 am
And thank for reviewing this Spicer…I haven’t read him yet. Still gathering all the William McGivern Philadelphia novels of similar vintage.
July 22nd, 2022 at 12:00 pm
And thanks for the pointer toward Spicer, whose work I don’t remember reading…I’m still gathering William McGivern’s Philadelphia novels of similar vintage.
July 22nd, 2022 at 1:03 pm
I agree with Paul. Ross Macdonald is not second rate and I consider him as part of the Big Three. I also don’t consider Somerset Maugham second rate, especially his excellent novelets about the Far East and South Seas. I recently reread his novellas for the third time in the last 50 or so years. I’ve also read the Lew Archer 18 novels three times.
July 22nd, 2022 at 1:24 pm
Walker,
Like Todd says, de gustibus. But if McDonald belongs in the first rank, I would argue that Bart Spicer and Thomas Dewey and William Campbell Gault and John D., among others, deserve esteem nearly equal to that of macdonald. Let’s not forget that the origin of ‘the big three’ quote was part of the ‘benign conspiracy’ of Millar’s writer friends: Welty, Golding and company. Those guys without the friends in high places deserve similar residence. https://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/nolan.html
Also, the quote about Maugham being second rate was from Maugham himself—an author whom I personally have not read.
July 22nd, 2022 at 2:31 pm
I like and have read many of the novels by Spicer, Dewey, Gault, and John D. but I don’t put them on the same level as Ross Macdonald.
Concerning Maugham, I really believe that he was referring to his full length novels when he said he was second rate. In fact I can agree with such a statement. However Maugham was a master of the novella and his long short stories dealing with the South Seas and Far East are first rate. In fact one of the great slick magazine editors, Ray Long, was paying Maugham a dollar a word back when such an amount in today’s money would be astronomical. Long encouraged Maugham to continue writing the often tragic and downbeat novellas of white men and women working in the tropics.
July 22nd, 2022 at 8:18 pm
I think this paragraph of Tony’s sums up my impression of Carney Wilde in the one book of his that I’ve happened to read, so far:
“Carney Wilde is a believable, likeable, very human detective, with all the frailties and passions of an everyday guy. He’s no hero. He’s just trying his best. Which is generally good enough.”
July 22nd, 2022 at 9:09 pm
While I rank Macdonald higher than second rank I am not enamored of the early books and I find the later ones repetitive and largely a blur, but there are some fine works in the middle that are valuable on their own and as models in the genre.
I never found him less than readable, but I do see flaws that I think keep him out of the Hammett and Chandler class. That said I think Hammett and Chandler are a class by themselves, probably Cain too, so the rank just beneath them can still be First Class in my book and yet not approach the originals.
Just parsing definitions here really.
I don’t think he ranks with Hammett, Chandler, or Cain, but he does invent his own school that has its own fine writers following him as much as Chandler or Hammett. That influence has seemed to wane, but whether that is temporary or will change with time we will have to wait to see.
I’m not sure Macdonald’s work holds up entirely. The metaphor and simile are often stretched to the point of bursting and painfully arch and over thought out with an academic quality Chandler avoids while I find Lew Archer tiring at times in Macdonald’s insistence in keeping him a faceless cypher.
Considering the importance of characters in the genre choosing to make yours faceless and characterless seems self-defeating. Only Macdonald’s real skills overcame that, but as time passes it seems to me awfully easy for more colorful characters to subsume Archer and Macdonald’s position.
I know it will stir controversy, but frankly as a novelist John D. MacDonald wrote rings around Macdonald. He is not as important in the hard boiled school, I would never claim he was, in fact a good case can be made he didn’t want to be and never considered himself to be. It is almost an apples and oranges comparison. The only real similarity is in the name.
Maugham it is generally agreed was perhaps a second class novelist and a first class short story writer. I’m not sure Maugham himself would disagree with that. It is hard to believe a second class writer would still be read as Maugham is and still adapted for the screen. If that is truly second class a lot of writers would happily aspire to it.
It is a bit ironic how completely William DeAndrea and others in the Macdonald camp failed in their attempt to undermine Chandler’s role in the genre in order to promote Macdonald (re-read some of his J’Accuse columns). Their attempts did prejudice me a bit against Macdonald’s work (unfairly), leaving a bad taste, and failed utterly. If anything, Chandler is more pre-eminent than ever. The attacks on him sounding like so many sour grapes.
Macdonald for now is still the third man in the trinity (if, as I do, you see Cain as primarily a crime writer), whether he can hold that place or not in the future I can’t pretend to predict. I do think Lew Archer is a problem in that continued role, and I wonder what future generations will make of Macdonald’s academic approach to the genre, but for myself I don’t question his place, just his ongoing influence when my generation is gone.
July 23rd, 2022 at 11:54 am
No post should have exactly 13 comments.
July 24th, 2022 at 3:14 pm
That’s OK, my general comment on the Spicer/McGivern consanguinity was repeated when the first one fell into a tesseract-hole, and one of them coulda been sacrificed (along with perhaps other of my comments). But interesting about D’Andrea…what, him go over the deep end? Heaven forfend, or Yeah, that sounds right.
July 24th, 2022 at 3:16 pm
Or William DeAndrea. I could spell his name correctly.