Sat 15 Apr 2023
A Mystery Review by Tony Baer: LEE HERRINGTON – Carry My Coffin Slowly.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[12] Comments
LEE HERRINGTON – Carry My Coffin Slowly. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1951. Dell #641, paperback, date?
Barney Moffat is an investigator out of the DA’s office. A mother comes to see him. A mother of a dead young man. A dead, drunk young man, body mangled in a crashed-up Packard, a young woman’s corpse crumpled in his lap.
Barney just got the crash photos. And he doesn’t know what to tell the lady. In our only glimpse into Barney’s head, we hear his stream of consciousness: “Your son. Your son had a bellyful of gin and he’s behind the wheel dead and the girl is dead there under the dash and your son had the wheel in his hands and it’s like a gun and you have to shoot it and there’s a loud noise and people coming running and there’s blood and tears and even the boys on the accident squad still gag in their throats when it happens…….â€
The balance of the book is that rarest of detective novel forms: third-person objective. Like The Maltese Falcon and Interface. That is to say that you don’t get in anyone’s head. All that you see is limited to the action within the four corners of the frame. And it must be so as one of the bad guys is masquerading as a good guy. But you yourself, dear reader, aren’t sure who it is until the end.
It turns out that there are two sets of accident photos. One set as described above. Involving nobody that matters. Another set is incriminating to all the people in town that matter: the DA, the cops, the upper crust and their pocket politicos (whose positions hang in the balance). And blackmail starts to happen. And violent death. Lots and lots of death.
It’s a tightly told procedural, doggedly investigated by the hardboiled, wise-cracking Moffat. It’s everything you want in a hardboiled detective story. Thanks again to James Sandoe, who pretty much never steers me wrong.
According to Jim Doherty, there was one prior Barney Moffat story in Black Mask, but this was the author’s only novel, the author passing on from this world the year following publication.
April 15th, 2023 at 3:14 pm
I’m having problems with WordPress, the software that operates this blog, especially when it comes to inserting links. Here are two that Tony provided which I’ll have to include here.
First is one to James Sandoe’s personal list of best Hard-Voiled Fiction:
https://thrillingdetective.com/2021/06/22/the-hard-boiled-dick/
The second is to an article that Jim Doherty wrote about several fictional D.A. assistants in mystery fiction, including Barney Moffat:
https://mysteryreaders.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/DohertyAddendum.pdf
April 15th, 2023 at 3:35 pm
Lee Herrington dedicated the novel to his wife Zale, who herself wrote hardboiled detective stories under the pseudonym Alan Farley. https://thrillingdetective.com/2020/11/12/mike-trye/. Fictionmags also lists a story by Lee Herrington: Who’ll Carry My Coffin?, (nv) Dime Detective Magazine October 1948. Perhaps that was an earlier draft of the novel reviewed here.
April 15th, 2023 at 4:43 pm
I saw and wondered about that, too. By my count Herrington had 13 stories for the detective pulps, for DIME DETECTIVE, BLACK MASK and the like. There are times when I wish I hadn’t sold off all my pulps, and this is one of the.
April 15th, 2023 at 7:10 pm
Third Person Objective is difficult to bring off but when it works it is ideal for the mystery form, though to be fair Hammett cheats a little in FALCON because Spade says out loud everything he might be thinking and he’s such a smooth operator everyone assumes he is lying even though he explains exactly what he will actually do at every turn.
April 15th, 2023 at 8:18 pm
David,
I wonder if what you say about Spade was true for you the first time you read the book/saw the film. I myself cannot remember what I was thinking. However a negative review of the novel posted recently by paperback warrior implies that they found spade too obscure and not at all straightforward. http://www.paperbackwarrior.com/2023/02/the-maltese-falcon.html?m=1
April 15th, 2023 at 8:43 pm
I’d love to hear your reaction to that review, David. It really set off a huge volley of opposing opinion.
April 16th, 2023 at 1:08 am
I was probably on my second reading of FALCON (about 18) when I consciously realized the import of the Flitcraft story Spade tells Brigid and that he tells everyone exactly what he is going to do, cops, crooks, Brigid, never lying or misleading and everyone in the novel assumes he is playing games and being obscure.
I think the only little white lie he tells comes at the end when he tells Brigid a little more money might have made a difference to give her the impression she might ever have stood a chance or that he is human enough to let something like sex and love get in the way of his professionalism.
Other than his clear regret at disappointing Effie it is his only really human moment. For the rest of the book he is that cool blonde Satan Hammett describes on page one.
I read the book before seeing the Bogart movie so I came to it a little different than most modern readers. I’ve always seen Spade as flawed by what makes him such a good detective, and I truly believe Hammett saw him as much as a tragic figure as a hero, his opinion of his former profession low enough that I can’t imagine he saw the perfect private detective as something anyone would aspire to be.
Perfect as Bogart is in the role he can’t help but make Spade more sympathetic than he is in the book. Great as that ending is I can’t imagine Hammett’s Spade telling Tom that the bird is “the stuff that dreams are made of.”
The book is the book and the movie the movie, separate but equal in my heart, but Spade in the movie is only tangentially related to the hero of the book.
I’m not shocked at a modern reader not understanding what Hammett was doing with the book. Nuance and understanding seem to be increasingly difficult for modern readers who seem to want all the subtlety of a Nick Carter Nickel Library book and struggle with the idea entertainment might offer something more than distraction.
April 16th, 2023 at 12:31 pm
Well said, David. I don’t know what prompted the folks at Paperback Warrior to post their revoew of FALCON, but to their credit they didn’t back down.
One thought, though. You mentioned the Nick Carter Nickel Library. The people at PW would seem to me much more likely to read the Nick Carter Killmaster books than those old dime novels, but as sometimes the case, I could be wrong about that.
April 16th, 2023 at 1:35 pm
Steve,
You’re right that their focus has been on the Nick Carter Killmaster books—nothing prior. http://www.paperbackwarrior.com/search/label/Nick%20Carter?m=0
April 16th, 2023 at 7:09 pm
I couldn’t use the Killmaster books for my analogy because many of them have some nuance written by writers as diverse as Mike Avallone, Manning Stokes, Thomas Chastain, Bill Crider, Craig Nova, and others of equal skill. Even many of the Men’s Action series are more complex in drawing character than I think these readers want or expect.
I really do think, though they never read one in their life, their tastes are closer to Dime Novel and Penny Dreadful simplicity than the works we grew up with. I don’t imagine them getting Spillane or Ross Macdonald either.
Compared to some of the books they read and praise Steve Harrigan and Rocky Steele were sharply drawn three dimensional characters.
I won’t upset anyone’s applecart (well one in a little bit along) by naming names, but many of the series of bestselling books in the genre today are no more developed than the average dime novel in terms of character development and spell everything out in tiresome detail rather than let the reader discover the nature of the character through dialogue and action (Yes, there are exceptions, but I wonder what the age difference in readership is). They are all tell and little show.
The hero pulps of the Thirties and Forties are more subtle in their characterization, and to prove my point I give you a piece of tissue thin cardboard colored by garish strokes of the crayola who has no inner life, no human dimension, and no literary distinction whatsoever, Lee Child’s one-dimensional Jack Reacher (at least television gave him a face and charisma), a characterless mash up of Travis McGee and Mack Bolan, the literary equivalent of Peeps.
If their standard is Child and Reacher I would not expect them to understand or appreciate Hammett and Spade. I equally can’t imagine them appreciating Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, or Maugham’s ASHENDEN either.
Not their fault, we didn’t teach how to read beyond the word to the meaning and that is a learned skill and art. The same thing is true in movies where everything they consume is boiled down to primary colors. We failed, and it is going to be hard to try and recover in today’s market.
And you would be right to call me a little elitist here. I think books matter and there has been something important lost if modern readers can’t grasp what Hammett was doing just as if they couldn’t grasp Twain, Austen, Dickens, or Shakespeare.
It’s not like Hammett wrote GRAVITY’S RAINBOW or MOBY DICK, FALCON should not be a hard book to grasp as millions have over the decades. Don’t like it, I’m fine with that, don’t like it for something it does and you are too superficial to understand, there we have a problem.
April 18th, 2023 at 11:21 am
Herrington’s “Who’ll Carry My Coffin” involves a policeman mentoring a reformatory graduate who joins the police force but comes to be suspected as an ally of the usual corrupt city fixers. Luminist Archives has this October, 1948 issue: http://readitfree.org/PU/DD.htm
April 18th, 2023 at 12:39 pm
Bill,
Thanks for this! Sounds like a completely distinct story!