Rereading portions of the Sir Henry Merrivale series recently made me realize again how humor in the mystery has deteriorated since the days of Carr-Dickson, Craig Rice, and Alan Green. Nowadays the closest we come to humor is the first-person narrator emulating a stand-up comedian with wisecracks. Spenser, Claire Malloy, and Kinky Friedman are examples.
In the Merrivale series almost every book had a slapstick sequence that was the mystery equivalent of the Marx Brothers. Take the riot Sir Henry causes on the New York subways inA Graveyard to Let(1949).
The humor in the series is not entirely visual — e.g., the delicious confusion between the words “kleptomania” and “nymphomania” in Fatal Descent. Sure, John Rhode is listed as co-author of that 1939 book, but does anyone really think Rhode could have written those lines, even if his life depended on it?
In the same book, the unimaginative Inspector Hornbeam says regarding a corpse discovered in a double-locked “room” (a sealed elevator car within a sealed elevator shaft): “There’s a flaw somewhere. There’s got to be. Otherwise the thing’s impossible. And it’s impossible for a thing to be impossible.”
Pure Carr.
— From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 13, No. 1, Winter 1991.
JUBAL. Columbia, 1956. Glenn Ford, Ernest Borgnine, Rod Steiger, Valerie French, Felicia Farr, Basil Ruysdael, Noah Beery Jr., Charles Bronson, Jack Elam. Director: Delmer Daves.
Segueing to Classical Tragedy, there is Jubal, from a novel by Paul Wellman, based loosely on Othello. I liked the way director Delmer (The Hanging Tree, Destination Tokyo,Dark Passage) Daves managed to view all the characters in this moody melodrama of passion and murder with a certain amount of sympathy, even Valerie French’s trampy temptress and Rod Steiger’s bitchy cowboy.
Glenn Ford’s acting in this is uncannily similar to James Dean; he shifts shyly from people, smiles uncomfortably and tries to sound like he’s joking when be reveals his feelings, and even rubs his face in James Dean style. I’m probably the only moviegoer in the Free World who would get this impression, but I still think it’s a fine performance in a great western.
SEARCH. NBC, 1972-73; Leslie Stevens Productions in association with Warner Brothers. Creator and Executive Producer: Leslie Stevens. Cast: Hugh O’Brian as Hugh Lockwood, Burgess Meredith as V.C.R. Cameron.
Little changed from the pilot TV Movie PROBE, which I reviewed here earlier on this blog. Inspired by the success of NAME OF THE GAME (a series Leslie Stevens produced and Tony Franciosa co-starred), SEARCH featured three agents. This post is about Hugh Lockwood. Future posts will examine the worlds of Nick Bianco (Tony Franciosa) and C.R. Grover (Doug McClure). Head of Probe Control V.C.R. Cameron (Burgess Meredith) was the only character to appear in all 23 episodes.
Hugh O’Brian played Hugh Lockwood, Probe One, the top agent of World Securities Corporation. Lockwood was a TV James Bond, cool, witty, irresistible to all women, a former astronaut with a planetary size ego. Assisting Lockwood was Probe Control, a group of computer techs of various specialties monitoring the actions and needs of the field agent. This made Probe Control the ultimate legman.
Probe Control was and remains my favorite part of SEARCH. The technology and the humans that ran it made this series different from any other TV detective show at the time. Leslie Stevens (OUTER LIMITS, GEMINI MAN, BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY) had created a good premise, the hero with technology as a sidekick.
V.C.R. Cameron was in charge of Probe Control and answered to the World Securities Corporation Board of Directors lead by Dr. Barnett (played by Ford Rainey or Keith Andes). We learn more about V.C.R (or V.C.) in an episode with Doug McClure so I will take a deeper look at the character during the post about the Grover episodes.
However, the Lockwood episodes offered Cameron’s sole contribution to comedy relief. Once Lockwood solved a case with the girl of the week he usually followed James Bond’s example and ran off to enjoy some quality time with her, while Cameron would frustratingly attempt to stop him.
70s TV was run by the star. Hugh O’Brian and others objected to the important role Probe Control played in the pilot TV Movie. So the role of advance technology was reduced and the potential of the characters that made up Probe Control was basically wasted, but imagine this series done today in the era of large casts such as CSI and NCIS.
The computer and the PI had been introduced before with CBS’ MANNIX and the audience rejected the machine. It was 1972. Roger Moore had not yet become James Bond, and there was still a fear that machines would replace man. So not surprisingly Lockwood began to drift away from gadget happy James Bond and closer to Mannix and the other TV detectives of the era.
Lockwood got knocked out almost as often as he got the girl. Usually, Probe Control would helplessly watch as Lockwood was unconscious and in serious danger. Yet, some such as Hugh O’Brian thought Probe Control made the hero too powerful. The discussion about SEARCH begins around the 7:23 mark.
Sadly, instead of increasing the power of the villains and giving the episodes the Bond villain it needed, it reduced the very part of the series that made it different, Probe Control.
EPISODE INDEX:
Produced by Robert H. Justman. Probe Control Cast: (recurring) Ron Castro as Carlos, Ginny Golden as Keach, Byron Chung as Kuroda, Albert Popwell as Griffin, Amy Farrell as Murdock, Tony DeCosta as Ramos, and Cheryl Stoppelmoor (Cheryl Ladd) as Amy Love.
One note about the series titles, they appeared on screen as:
Search:
Episode Title
“The Murrow Disappearance†(9/13/72) Written by Leslie Stevens Directed by Russ Mayberry Guest Cast: Capucine, Maurice Evans and David White Recurring Cast: Ford Rainey as Dr. Barnett, Angel Tompkins as Gloria Harding. *** Probe is hired to find a missing government agent who has access to top secrets. Lockwood begins his search at a private club outside Washington DC where the missing man was a member.
I enjoyed the interaction between Lockwood and Probe Control. This episode was heavy with gadgets and batter between Lockwood and sidekick Probe Control.
What I remember most from the series was the relationship between Gloria Harding and macho Lockwood. Yet despite how memorable the character of Gloria Harding was, this and “The Gold Machine†were the only series episodes Angel Tompkins appeared.
“Moonrock†(10/4/72) Written by Leslie Stevens Directed by William Wiard Guest Cast: Jo Ann Pflug, Ann Prentis, and George Pan Recurring Cast: Ford Rainey as Dr. Barnett *** While under Probe’s protection, a moon rock is stolen. Not just any moon rock but one of pure carbon (raw diamond).
This episode with its over the top macguffin needed an equally over the top villain. Instead too much time was devoted to the chase and not enough time establishing the villain. The episode was worth watching just for the delightful stylish scenes where Lockwood charters a 747 with full crew so he and the gratuitous girl of the week can continue to chase the killer who now has the rock.
“The Bullet†(11/1/72) Written by Judy Burns Directed by William Wiard Guest Cast: Ina Balin, Malachi Throne and Alan Bergman *** Lockwood is sent in to help a scientist, who had invented a poison bullet, defect to our side.
The story makes for an above average spy drama until it all falls apart in the last act. Once Lockwood is shot with a poison bullet the action turns stupid, highlighted by a near death Lockwood making it through four miles of an Eastern Europe city with the state police chasing him, so he can get to the unguarded section of “The Wall.†MISSION IMPOSSIBLE fans laughed at the naive simplicity.
“The Adonis Files†(11/15/72) Written by Jack Turley Directed by Joseph Pevney Guest Cast: Bill Bixby, Deanna Lund Matheson, and Victoria George *** Private secretary to a famous celebrity is kidnapped for $5 million. A secretive private foundation that hopes to make the celebrity an US Senator hires Probe to act as go-between.
Average 70s action episode but with a better than average twist at the end.
“Flight To Nowhere” (11/22/72) Written by Brad Radnitz Directed by Paul Stanley Guest Cast: Linda Cristal, Anna Cameron, and Don Dubbins *** When a search for a missing cargo plane flown by an old friend of Lockwood fails to find the pilot, Lockwood demands Probe continue the search.
I called this the MANNIX episode. When Cameron refuses to take the case, Lockwood loses it and screams at Cameron that he is becoming like the machines. Our hero races off on his own to find his friend. For no reason, someone tries to kill him. Probe joins in but used sparely. As a viewer who likes the characters at Probe Control more than Lockwood, I found little to like about this episode other than Anna Cameron, who played the girl of the week.
“The Gold Machine†(12/20/73) Written by Leslie Stevens Directed by Russ Mayberry Guest Cast: Marian McCargo, Kurt Kasznar, and Mark Lenard Recurring Cast: Angel Tompkins as Gloria Harding *** Lockwood needs to find a lost gold mine. Gloria has managed to be in the right place at the right time to be Lockwood’s girl of the week.
The search for the gold mine is entertaining and more important than it sounds, but it was the relationship between Lockwood and Gloria that made this episode fun to watch. While Gloria is less than thrilled with the dangers of being around a field agent, she does enjoy the typical Lockwood’s romantic escape with the girl of the week after the case is solved.
“Suffer My Child†(3/8/73) Written by Norman Hudis. Directed by Russ Mayberry Guest Cast: Mel Ferrer, Dianne Hull, and Dabney Coleman *** A young daughter of one of Wall Street’s most powerful men is kidnapped.
This episode is a good action mystery with plenty of suspects to supply a twist or three. Probe Control and the computers are more heavily involved than usual. Lockwood’s dislike for computers is expressed more here, even after the computer saved his life, that ungrateful human.
After fifteen episodes were filmed, Leslie Stevens and Robert H. Justman (STAR TREK, ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN) were replaced. Executive story consultant Anthony Spinner (DAN AUGUST, CANNON) took over as showrunner and producer. The change was visually noticeable. Since O’Brian did only one episode in the Spinner’s period, I’ll wait to examine these changes in my next post that will look at the Tony Franciosa episodes.
Produced by Anthony Spinner. Probe Control Cast: Tom Hallick as Harris and Pamela Jones as Miss James.
“Countdown To Panic†(2/7/73) Written by Judy Burns Directed by Jerry Jameson Guest Cast: Ed Nelson, Anne Francis, and Howard Duff. Recurring Cast: Keith Andes as Dr. Barnett *** A scientific experiment conducted by World Securities for the US Navy goes wrong. One of the victims with a fatal contagious virus escapes. Lockwood is assigned to find the man, an old friend from his days in the astronaut program.
The episode itself was entertaining for 70s action drama with an overused plot, but humorless and more like an episode from the Quinn Martin factory than the escapism fun of the Stevens’ episodes.
VAL McDERMID – The Grave Tattoo. St. Martin’s/Minotaur Books, hardcover, February 2007; reprint paperback, April 2008.
I was fond of McDermid’s early work, but after I became disenchanted with the Tony Hill serial killer series, I’ve not been a Faithful Reader of her books. The Grave Tattoo is a stand-alone novel in which Jane Gresham, a Wordsworth scholar, finds clues to a lost manuscript by the Romantic poet that appears to be a poetic version of Fletcher Christian’s story, recounted by him to the poet.
While Jane’s interest is that of the researcher who senses she’s on the trail of a career-making subject, the interest of others is distinctly mercenary, and they quickly show themselves to have few (if any scruples) in how they get the manuscript. A series of murders begins to narrow the possible sources for the recovery of the document, with Jane a prime suspect.
This is a competent literary mystery that I found initially difficult to get into but that eventually picked up enough momentum to keep me reading. I thought the pages from Fletcher Christian’s diary were engaging and had more narrative drive than the rather ponderous main plot line. This is a book that requires a patient reader.
Note: For Geoff Bradley’s recent comments on Val McDermid’s A Place of Execution (both book and TV adaptation), go here.
From all accounts, Ernest Hemingway wrote To Have and Have Not (Scribner’s, 1937) in fits and starts, cobbling it together from two earlier short stories while mucking about in the Spanish Civil War. And frankly, it reads a bit sloppy and disjointed, with shifting time frames, clashing narrative modes, and here and there the terse, fascinating prose that made Hemingway a name. Reading it through, with its sudden jumps in time, location, narration and focus, one wonders if the legendary author was pointing the way for writers like Ken Kesey and Carlos Fuentes or just being lazy.
The first part deals with Harry Morgan, a charter boat skipper operating around Key West and Cuba who gets stiffed by a Mr. Johnson and helped out by Eddie, an alcoholic buddy (an important character in future incarnations of the book, but this is his only appearance here) when he’s forced to take on an illegal load of Chinese immigrants — a job that ends in gunplay and murder. This is pretty good stuff, violent and fast-moving, with Hemingway writing in the style of W.R. Burnett, with maybe a touch of James Hadley Chase.
Then we make a jump and it’s some time later, months or a year maybe, and Harry is now apparently smuggling full time and trying to make it home with a shot-up arm and a dying mate. This part is tough too, but Hemingway now spends time with a wealthy, officious politician who sees a chance to get some publicity by “capturing†Harry, who couldn’t put up much fight. Thus we get the first conflict between the “haves†and “have nots†— along with an infusion of social commentary into what had been just a tough crime novel.
Which sets the scene for part three: Harry is up against it now; his boat’s been confiscated and he has to get it back to do a job for some dangerous customers — so dangerous that murder and double-cross are taken for granted, and the crooked lawyer who sets up the deal (a violent bank robbery in Key West followed by escape to Cuba) is the first to go. In a tough, suspenseful scene that anticipates Key Largo, Harry shoots it out with his passengers and then …
And then Hemingway spends the last third of the book detailing the tribulations of a bunch of rich folks, with occasional contrasting scenes for Harry’s wife Marie. No kidding. What had been a tough crime novel on the order of Red Harvest is suddenly supposed to be Meaningful Social Drama. The idea, I suppose is to ennoble Harry Morgan and his people by showing us how effete and shallow their “betters†are, but it doesn’t come off.
Maybe I like David Goodis so much because when he writes a crime novel with a low-class working stiff or drunken stumblebum as the hero, that guy, be he ne’er so vile, is simply The Hero and ipso facto a man who gets our respect; he don’t gotta be Christ on the Cross too. When Hemingway turns Harry Morgan into the martyred representative of the Working Class, he loses me.
To Have and Have Not was filmed three times, and the first version (Warners, 1944) starred Humphrey Bogart, introduced Lauren Bacall, and was punctiliously faithful — to the title. Aside from that, it’s kind of jarring to see bits and pieces of Hemingway’s novel popping up here and there in what is essentially a Howard Hawks movie that seems to have little relationship to anything Papa wrote.
The story (written by Jules Furthman and William Faulkner) is moved up to 1940 and south to Martinique, which was at that time (like Casablanca) technically French but heavily influenced by the Third Reich. Naturally then, the would-be illegal immigrants become Free French resistance fighters, the officious politician becomes nasty Vichy cops, and Harry and his wife have now just met and call each other “Steve†and “Slim.â€
In this version of the story, Mr. Johnson doesn’t get away with stiffing Harry (this is Bogart, after all) but gets inconveniently killed in a shoot-out (one of those scenes from the book that somehow make their way into the film). Eddie, the drunk in the opening of the story is here played by Walter Brennan, and he sticks around for the whole movie. He’s rather good, too. So is Hoagy Carmichael as a friendly pianist and Marcel Dalio (also from Casablanca) as a protective hotel owner — a character who would later reappear in another Hawks film, Rio Bravo.
In fact, this film is much more Hawks than Hemingway, but it’s Howard Hawks at his best, which is saying quite a lot. Not much action, but what there is comes across nicely. The characters (including Lauren Bacall in her film debut) are skillfully developed, and the whole thing has that easy, improvised look that only comes from hard work and genius — and produces a classic.
But I guess someone at Warners noticed that they’d bought this whole book and never filmed it, so in 1950 Director Michael Curtiz and writer Ranald McDougal came up with The Breaking Point, a noirish exercise with John Garfield as Harry Morgan, Phyllis Thaxter as his wife (now named Lucy!) and Patricia Neal as a gold-digger/femme fatale apparently added to throw a little glamour into the mix. Eddie is gone, replaced by Juano Hernandez as a dependable wing man, and the porcine Mr. Johnson is now Mr. Hannagan, played by Ralph Dumke.
The action is moved to Southern California, but otherwise this stays a bit closer to Hemingway and even includes the bent lawyer from the book, incarnated here by Wallace Ford looking agreeably slimy. There’s a tense race track robbery (not in the book of course) and an even more tense shoot-out on the boat as Garfield tries to thwart his would-be killers.
Unfortunately, the story spends a bit too much time with Phyllis Thaxter worrying about looking dowdy, Patricia Neal worrying about staying glamorous, and Garfield just worrying over bills and the odds against him. To Have and Have Not was a working class story, but The Breaking Point can’t decide whether to be a working class film or a caper movie in the mold of The Killers and this ultimately does it in.
Nothing daunted, Seven Arts/United Artists picked up the story again in 1958 and produced The Gun Runners, directed by Don Siegel and starring Audie Murphy as an unlikely Harry Morgan — now named Sam Martin(!) Eddie is back, this time played for seedy pathos by Everett Sloane of all people, and Patricia Owens (who that same year was the fretful wife of The Fly) is Audie’s wife Lucy.
The action is moved back to Key West and Cuba, and Mr. Johnson is now called Mr. Peterson, played with slippery relish by an actor named John Harding, who had a long career but seldom broke out of bit parts. Too bad, because he’s an all-too-brief delight here, cheerfully ruining a man out of sheer self-indulgence.
There’s a Mr. Hanagan in this version too, and he’s Eddie Albert, surprisingly nasty as the eponymous dealer in firearms who uses Audie to double-cross some very nasty customers. Albert is everything a movie bad-guy should be: smiling, generous, easy to get along with, and never losing that look behind his eye that says you mean about as much to him as a bug on his windshield, and you should expect to live about as long.
This is a pretty good movie. Siegel handles the action with his usual aplomb, Daniel Mainwaring’s script strays pretty far from Hemingway but moves things along neatly, and the playing is mostly well above average, particularly Patricia Owens, who manages to get across a very earthy lust for her husband. It’s nothing that’ll make you forget Bacall and Bogart, but it’s there and you can feel it.
My only problem with the movie is Audie Murphy at the heart of it. Like many real-life heroes (Wayne Morris comes to mind) Murphy could never convey genuine toughness on the screen, and this is a part that calls for it.
Too bad he has such a pivotal part in a film that would have been a lot better without him.
WILLARD RICH – Brain-Waves and Death. Charles Scribner’s Sons, hardcover, 1940.
Don’t be misled by the title, which sounds like some-thing Phoenix or Arcadia would have published. According to Hubin, this is the only novel by Rich, a pseudonym, and that’s a pity, for it’s a good one.
One of those not too bright blackmailers has not only let himself be known to his victims but is spending the weekend with some of them. He also volunteers to undergo a brain-wave test in the early days of electroencephalography. When the blackmailer’s brain is presumably fried, Inspector Noonan is called in from Boston to investigate. It’s a complicated case, but Noonan gets it all straightened out. Unfortunately, he then has to start all over again.
Nothing much happens after the murder except for Noonan’s interrogations of the suspects, a well-assorted and interesting group of scientists, scientific pretenders, and a few hangers-on. Noonan’s personality and humor and the odd characters are more than sufficient, though, to keep a reader’s interest.
Hubin says this novel is set in Boston, but it actually takes place in the country. Fair play is present — I think. My brain tends to become more numb than usual when timetables are involved. Still, this did not detract from my enjoyment of the novel, nor did the package of Chesterfields turning into Lucky Strikes.
— From The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 13, No. 1, Winter 1991.
Bibliographic Notes: Hubin’s most recent edition of Crime Fiction IV still says the novel takes place in Boston. Of the author, Al says: “[A] pseudonym of William Richards, (?-1940); Professor of Chemistry at Princeton.
The book itself is scarce. While there are currently seven offered for sale on ABE, the least a copy will cost you is $650.00. Says one dealer of the book:
“Brain-Waves and Death was published posthumously under the pseudonym “Willard Rich” a few weeks after its author, William T. Richards, took his own life. Richards worked for Alfred Lee Loomis and his novel was a thinly veiled account of a real-life laboratory located about 40 miles north of New York City nicknamed “Tuxedo Park.” This “secret palace of science” was founded and funded by Loomis, arguably one of the most significant and uncredited figures in the history of modern military science. Loomis, a world-class tinkerer in his own right, was a visionary who saw that technology would win the looming war-and indeed that an investment in “big science” would be the key to national strength in the future. Loomis went on to establish the MIT Rad Lab and later was instrumental in setting up the Manhattan Project. According to legend, Loomis had all copies of Richards’ roman-a- clef bought up and destroyed. Obviously he missed a few copies, but the book is uncommon , especially in jacket.”
ROY HUGGINS – Too Late for Tears. Pocket 602, 1st paperback printing, 1949. Hardcover: William Morrow, July 1947. Hardcover reprint: Detective Book Club, Oct 1947. Previously serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, April-May 1947. Movie version: United Artists, 1949; Roy Huggins, screenplay; with Lizabeth Scott, Dan Duryea, Don DeFore, Arthur Kennedy, Kristine Miller.
The first couple of paragraphs reminded me immediately of Raymond Chandler:
It was like almost any southern California night, a frostbitten moon high and withdrawn among a few reluctant stars, a cool salt breeze blowing in from the sea and sweetening through the odor of brush fires in the hills.
The open convertible rolled to a slow stop and the man stepped out and closed the door. The woman sat, not moving, staring out across the endless horizontal monotony of the Valley. He leaned over and asked if she had gone to sleep, the tone carrying the suggestion of banter, timidly, as if he were uncertain of its reception.
They are married, Alan and Jane Palmer, and they are soon quarreling, before fate steps in their way. Barreling down the hills with the headlights accidentally turned off, a car going the other way tosses a small bag into their car, changing both of their lives forever.
It’s full of money. Jane thinks they should keep it. Alan, who works for a bank, is much more cautious, but he is convinced by Jane to wait a week and see if anything appears in the newspapers about stolen money. Once he has checked the bag in a locker at the train station, however, events have been put into place that can not be reversed.
From page 16:
“What do you want to do with it, Alan?”
His face twisted. “I don’t know. I want it, I’d like to keep it, I could make it work for us for the rest of our lives… But it’s a rat race, Jane. A damned blind alley with a big barred gate at the end!”
“Darling, we can hide it, someplace where no one can connect us with it. And we won’t touch it until we know we can do it, until we know we are safe and we’ve worked out every tiny detail. If we can’t do it, we’ll just forget it! We could even let the police know where it was in some way, so it wouldn’t be wasted.”
His face was dark and his eyes were bright. She could feel the heat of him against her. It was a long time before he answered. “All right, Jane. God help us, but we’ll hold it for a while.”
She raised her shoulders and put her lips against his. They were hot and his breath was hot and she was lifted and caught up tightly. And there was something both understood in the same swift flight; that this was new, that there was something now they hadn’t had before, deeper, richer, drawing them close. And only Jane knew that it was compounded of need and isolation and fear.
From Chandler, then, to a slick combination of Cornell Woolrich and James M. Cain, with some variations on the theme by Roy Huggins himself. Other characters have roles to play. Alan’s sister Kathy has an apartment a few doors down; Danny Fuller, the small time hood for whom the money was intended, naturally makes a quick appearance; and the mysterious Don Blake, who claims to have been a wartime buddy of Alan, makes an uneasy alliance with Kathy.
It doesn’t work completely, but hitting on 15 of 16 cylinders at high speed is a pretty good percentage. If there is such a thing as noir fiction, this is it, and it’s top notch.
PostScript: The reason for the last statement, and I could be wrong, is that I take noir to be a film term, not a book-related one. I wish I could remember seeing the movie, but I can’t. If it follows the story-line of the book at all, and with the cast it has, I know it would be tough to forget if I had.
— February 2004
[UPDATE] 03-02-13. Well, I hadn’t seen the movie when I wrote this review, but I have since, and I’ve even posted my comments here on this blog, way back in 2009. I liked the movie as much as I did the book, as you can go read for yourself.
SUE GRAFTON – V is for Vengeance. Putnam’s, hardcover, December 2011. Berkley, reprint paperback, November 2012.
There are very few mystery writers who have attained the iconic status of having their books published with only their name on the cover and (for all intents and purposes) a single letter. For most of Sue Grafton’s fans, that’s all they need.
I was a bit disappointed with this one, though. The stakes, through most of the book, seem too small, for one thing. PI Kinsey Millhone’s adversary is a gang of shoplifters. A gang of well-organized shoplifters, to be sure, but except for the very highest-up, shoplifters are all they are.
Nor do I think that I’m the only one to miss some of the other characters who’ve populated most of Kinsey’s earlier adventures. Her elderly landlord and next door neighbor Henry Pitts is off in Chicago for most of Vengeance, and her relationship with Cheney Phillips, Kinsey’s good friend on the police force, whatever that relationship may currently be, seems to be on maintenance so low that a quick flip through the book doesn’t turn up a single scene in which he appears (but he does).
Kinsey is her own feisty, well-spoken self, with her portion of the novel told in first person, but the alternating scenes telling us another story (which we instinctively know will eventually be connected, don’t we, inveterate mystery readers?) are told in third person, and often become a chore to chug through (comparatively speaking).
At just over 400 pages in the paperback edition, you do get your money’s worth, though, but around the 200 page mark I confess to mind-wandering, just a little bit, thinking of the very same things I’ve just been talking about, and that’s not a good sign in anyone’s book.
FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins
The first time I saw Mickey Spillane was at a Bouchercon, back when he was the public face of Miller Lite beer. The second and last time I saw him was on April 27, 1995, the evening of that year’s MWA dinner. As 1994 Awards chair I got to host the pre-dinner cocktail party for Edgar nominees, and Spillane got to attend because, over vehement objections from some older mystery writers who were on the other side of the culture wars of the HUAC-McCarthy-Red Menace era, he was about to be given the Grand Master award.
Like just about everyone else in America I had read Spillane’s early novels — the septet of bestsellers that began with I, the Jury (1947) and climaxed, if that’s the word, with Kiss Me Deadly (1952) — but almost nothing that he’d written in the Sixties and later. Like just about no one else in America except intellectuals and critics, I thought his books were terrible. What turned me off was not so much the rabid right-wing politics or the gruesome sadism of the action scenes as it was the inept plotting and linguistic boners.
The basic storyline of I, the Jury is simplicity itself. Manhattan PI Mike Hammer vows to personally execute the murderer of his buddy, ex-cop Jack Williams, who had lost an arm in the Pacific saving Hammer’s life. In his search he meets a seductive female psychiatrist, a pair of man-hungry twin sisters, a medical student who lives with a racket boss, and other lovables. After wading through the carnage of four more murders he gets to carry out his grim sentence, gut-shooting the psychiatrist and narcotics queenpin Charlotte Manning. The last two lines of the book are justly famous, or at least infamous. Manning: “How c-could you?†Hammer: “It was easy.â€
I could devote several pages to how and where I, the Jury goes off the rails but will limit myself to three specimens of track-jumping, the first trivial but telling, the others crucial.
(1) In Chapter 3 Hammer is discussing the case with his friendly enemy Captain Pat Chambers of Homicide. Chambers argues that “somebody was afraid of what [Williams] knew and bumped him.†Hammer suggests that Chambers doesn’t know much about murderers and offers the alternate theory that “To protect himself, the killer knocked Jack off.†Talk about a distinction without a difference!
(2) The second and third murders take place in a whorehouse which Hammer has under personal surveillance. Both the second victim and Charlotte Manning, the murderer, are by this time well known to our sleuth, and neither of them knows he’s on the scene, yet both manage to get in by the front door without Hammer spotting them. Miraculous luck is again with Charlotte as she escapes from the house and area while police have the whole block surrounded.
In Chapter 12 Hammer visits a movie theater and sees a crime film, calling it “a fantastic murder mystery which had more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese.†The perfect description for any Spillane novel!
***
One of the things that surprised me when I revisited I, the Jury recently was that so much of the writing is so pedestrian and ordinaire. Clearly Spillane hadn’t yet mastered the psychotic rants which pockmark his novels of the early Fifties. But every so often one finds a linguistic flub that lingers in the memory:
“My thoughts wandered around the general aspects of the case without reaching any conclusions.â€
“Living alone with one maid, a few rooms was all that was necessary.â€
“It gave me ideas, which I quickly ignored.â€
“He took off like a herd of turtles.â€
“When Velda heard about this she’d throw the roof at me.â€
“‘Well, you know that he was in a medical school. Pre-med, to be exact.’â€
Talk about a distinction with a difference! Was Spillane the inspiration for all those lunatic lines that began streaming from the smoking typewriter of Michael Avallone a few years later?
***
A year and some months after Spillane was named a Grand Master, the publisher of the prestigious Library of America series asked me to comment on the authors and titles tentatively selected for the Library’s two-volume American Noir project. My only suggestion for Volume One, which covered the Nineteen Thirties and Forties, was that Cornell Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man be replaced by three or four of his short novels.
Volume Two, which dealt with the Fifties, was slated to include two books I didn’t think could be called American Noir: Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, because most of it doesn’t take place in America, and Ross Macdonald’s The Galton Case, because having a series character and first-person narrator readers can easily identify with (Lew Archer, of course) seemed to me to rule it out as noir.
I proposed as a substitute someone who was conspicuous by his absence in the table of contents. You guessed it. Mickey Spillane. As a writer, I argued, Spillane stands beside Highsmith and Macdonald roughly where Ed Wood stands among film-makers vis-a-vis Hitchcock and Fritz Lang. But in terms of the development of noir he’s of such immense historical significance that American crime fiction and crime films of the Fifties just can’t be understood without him. (This is why I never objected to his receiving that Grand Master award.)
Mike Hammer of course is a series character and first-person narrator just as much as Lew Archer but he’s certainly not one readers can easily identify with. In fact, I contended, critics would long ago have ranked Hammer with Lou Ford in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me as one of the genre’s most convincing sociopaths if only Spillane hadn’t labored under the delusion that he’d created a hero.
I’ve been commenting on mystery fiction and mystery writers for almost half a century but have discussed Spillane only once in a chartreuse moon and have never advocated for him except in my correspondence with Library of America. How did Atticus Finch do? Miserably. How many of my suggestions were accepted? You guessed it. None. But I did enjoy the interchange and wound up with complimentary copies of some very nice volumes. One of which I expect to figure in my next column.
“SHOOT HIM ON SIGHT!†– William Colt MacDonald. Ace F-389, paperback original; first printing, 1966. Ace ‘Tall Twin’ Western, 2nd printing, 1972; paired with The Troublemaker, by Edwin Booth.
Most westerns, it has been said before, and probably by me, are crime stories. They just happen to take place in the west, and mostly in the late 1800’s. Rustling, bank robberies, feuding between cattlemen and homesteaders and so on, all crime fiction, but unless there’s an element of detective work, Al Hubin does not include it in his bibliography of Crime Fiction, and rightly so. There’s a matter of intent, as well. Most western writers were (and are) writing westerns, and not crime fiction.
And of that aforementioned element of detective work, there is, I have to admit, none in this book. Not that there isn’t a crime, and it’s fairly obvious who the villain is, to the reader that is, and not the narrator of this tale, which is told – and I think this is unusual for westerns, isn’t it? – in first person by John Cardinal, who is on the run from the law.
It seems that to help out his foster parents, he extorted money from a mean, tight-fisted banker and then, knowing that he did wrong, lit out of town. What he doesn’t expect, though, is that his reputation as an outlaw would grow and grow, with WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE posters going up all across the west. Thinking that this is due to sheer laziness on the part of the law – blaming him when the local sheriffs cannot catch up with their own local desperadoes – the noose that John Cardinal has placed around his own neck grows tighter and tighter. He quickly learns to survive in wilder and wilder towns, trying his utmost to live up to his reputation.
Until he reaches the crookedest town of them all, that is, which is to say Onyxton, a town that’s run by Shel Webster, and whose girl friend is a beautiful dance hall hostess named Topaz. And this is where John Cardinal stops and makes a stand, where he finds out who he is, who’s been behind the problems he’s had in life, and what on earth are guns and ammunition doing in boxes labeled sewing machines being sent to small villages just across the border in Mexico?
A number of MacDonald’s other westerns are listed in Hubin, by the way, many of them featuring a rangeland detective named Gregory Quist, and if I have ever read any, it was so long ago that I do not remember. John Cardinal’s forte, on the other hand, seems merely to be being in the right place at the right time, once he’s decided that Topaz is the girl for him, that is.
Here’s a long quote from pages 112-113, a picturesque scene from Webster’s dance hall:
The noise was deafening: the music, the stamping of heavy feet on the dance floor, whirring of the wheel, click of poker chips and everyone talking at once. Cigar and cigarette stubs littered the floor, waves of tobacco smoke drifted through the room. I glanced through the room and finally spied Topaz, seated alone at a corner table. She was dressed about as I’d seen her yesterday, though the dress was of a different pattern, some sort of green and white figured material. Drooped loosely about her shoulders was a white, fringed Spanish shawl. God, she was beautiful, her shining red-gold hair looked as though every hair lay in place. Sleek, was the word for it. Then I thought of Shel Webster, and I scowled. I glanced around, but didn’t see anything of him; probably he was in the adjoining barroom. Not that it made any difference. He couldn’t have stopped me from going to her. I was like one of those big moths attracted to a shining flame.
There’s not a great depth involved here, as you can plainly see, but this is a smoothly told tale that’s not only tasty but a whole lot of fun to read.
— Reprinted from Durn Tootin’ #5,
July 2004 (slightly revised).
Devoted to mystery and detective fiction — the books, the films, the authors, and those who read, watch, collect and make annotated lists of them. All uncredited posts are by me, Steve Lewis.
