MARTIN H. GREENBERG, Editor – Deadly Doings. Ivy, paperback original; 1st printing, 1989.

#5. WILLIAM CAMPBELL GAULT “Never Marry Murder.” Short story. First published in Dime Mystery Magazine, December 1949, as by Roney Scott. Not collected or reprinted elsewhere.

   Most readers of this blog will recognize William Campbell Gault as the author of two long-running series of private eye novels, eight with a fellow named Joe Puma and fourteen with Brock “The Rock” Callahan, both working cases all over the southern California landscape.

   Less known is the fact that Gault also had a long career writing detective and crime stories for the pulp magazines, well over a hundred of them, starting with “Crime Collection” in the January 1940 issue of 10-Story Detective Magazine.

   Some of them featured PI’s or wanna-be PI’s, but “Never Marry Murder” is not one of them. (That the byline on the story is Roney Scott is due to the fact that Gault had another story in the same issue under his own name, “Slay You in My Freams,” a common practice in those days.)

   No, this one’s a straightforward domestic crime tale, one that would not be out of place in, say, Alfred Hitchcock’s Magazine, back when it started after the success of the TV show; that is t= say, a story that depends on a surprise ending, a unexpected twist, if you will.

   A man who’s made his fortune by killing his first two wives has decided to settle down with the woman of his dreams, until, that is, he finds out that she’s been seeing another man. He doesn’t hesitate a minute. She has to go, victim number three.

   Unfortunately I knew exactly what was coming well before the ending, long before the protagonist did, and you may, too, with only the information I’ve given you. The story’s well told — you could say the same thing about everything Gault ever wrote — but when the story’s as predictable as this one is, I think editor Martin H. Greenberg might have found a better one. He certainly had plenty to choose from.

         —

Previously in this Martin Greenberg anthology: SUE GRAFTON “The Parker Shotgun.”

Question: What is the only James Bond theme song to have reached number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart?

Answer:

  LOU SAHADI, Editor – An Argosy Special: Science Fiction. One-shot reprint magazine. Popular Publications, 1977.

#2. CHAD OLIVER “The Land of Lost Content.” Short story. First published in Super Science Stories, November 1950. Collected in A Star Above It and Other Stories (NESFA Press, hardcover, 2003).

   Of the many SF writers of his day, Chad Oliver certainly had the credentials for the job. He had a PhD in anthropology from UCLA and was a fixture in that department at the University of Texas for nearly 50 years, including twice being chairman. He didn’t write a lot of science fiction, but as they say, what he did write was choice.

   My favorite of the nine novels he wrote, some of which were westerns, was The Winds of Time (1956), in which a race of aliens who came to Earth thousands of years in past decide to go into suspended animation to wait for a civilized mankind to evolve.

   “The Land of Lost Content” was Oliver’s first published story, and frankly, while certainly quite readable even today, it doesn’t show him at his best. The story line is unfortunately a very familiar one, that of a group of underground survivors of a nuclear and/or germ-based catastrophe on the surface of the Earth deciding generations later to break all of their dying society’s laws and see if they can make it to the land above.

   The last few lines sum it up: “Could they succeed where gods had faltered? He shook his head. Probably, almost certainly they would fail. But they would try. For that was what it meant to be a man.”

       —

Previously from this Lou Sahadi anthology: ROGER DEE “First Life.”

         February 4.

HOW TO BEAT THE HIGH COST OF LIVING. Filmways, 1980. Susan Saint James, Jane Curtin, Jessica Lange, Richard Benjamin, Eddie Albert, Cathryn Damon, Dabney Coleman, Director: Robert Scheerer. [Watched on HBO.]

   Essentially a time-waster, and I’m sorry I did. The only moral to this sad story of three suburban ladies trying to cope with double-digit-inflation seems to be that the only solution is to turn to crime. And of course, that way nobody loses but the insurance company.

   It’s supposed to be a comedy,but we have a problem right there, It’s not very funny. There are a couple of scenes worth laughing at. Unfortunately one of them — as Susan St. James tries to hold up a supermarket at the checkout counter — was spoiled by overexposure: I’d already seen it in the coming attractions.

   (One of my favorite spots on HBO, by the way — the best way tp id out which movies to avoid. It didn’t work this time.)

   Dabney Coleman, who was superb as Dolly Parton’s lecherous boss in Nine to Five, plays a lecherous policeman in this one, and he is superb again. Otherwise the movie is essentially Jane Curtin’s; the others are along solely for the ride.

   Rated PG, for bad language again (although not the ‘F’ word, which may be the difference) and (surprisingly) or a brief look at the conclusion of a topless strip tease act, performed admirably by Jane Curtin. (Since it was headless, too, as I recall, the body may actually have been someone else’s. Since we had already seen a panting Richard Benjamin stripped to his shorts earlier in the movie, we do know it was not his.)

   For reasons which will become clear about halfway through this column, my subject this month is David Goodis. Most of you who are reading this probably know a little about the man, but for the benefit of those who need their recollections refreshed, I’ll begin with a brief sketch of Goodis and his world.

   He was born in Philadelphia on March 2, 1917 and, except for a few years in Hollywood, spent most of his life there. Soon after graduating from Temple University he broke into print with RETREAT FROM OBLIVION (1939), a mainstream novel that made zero impact at the time and hasn’t been reprinted since.

   Rejected for military service in World War II, he spent the war years cranking out an estimated five and a half million words for Battle Birds and a slew of other pulp magazines, mainly tales of air combat with titles like “Death Flies the Coffins of Hitler,” “Death Rides My Cockpit” and “Guns of the Sea Raiders.”

   Almost none of this material has been reprinted either, and probably never will be. His greatest commercial success was his second novel, DARK PASSAGE (1946), a noir thriller about an innocent man convicted of his wife’s murder who escapes from San Quentin, has plastic surgery performed on his face and begins a hunt for the real killer.

   The Saturday Evening Post paid Goodis a huge sum for the right to serialize the book before its hardcover release, which inspired rave reviews including one from Anthony Boucher in the San Francisco Chronicle (October 20, 1946): “[H]ere is the most notable talent to emerge in the field in a long time. Mr. Goodis has an originality of naturalism, a precise feeling for petty lives, a creatively compelling vividness of detail….This is the goods.”

   Very little time passed before Warner Bros. paid Goodis another huge sum of money for the movie rights. DARK PASSAGE (1947) was an excellent film noir directed by Delmer Daves and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Warners offered Goodis a screenwriting contract, but the results were disappointing from both his and the studio’s point of view. In 1950 he returned to Philadelphia and his parents’ house and reinvented himself as a writer of paperback originals.

   The style of DARK PASSAGE and his other novels of the late Forties evoked the naturalism of authors like Hemingway, but his initial impact on suspense fiction approximated that of Cornell Woolrich. Stylistically his paperbacks resembled his hardcovers except that a vital element had been discarded. What makes Woolrich the Hitchcock of the written word is his uncanny genius for making us feel the terror and uncertainty of his menaced protagonists. But we can’t experience true terror or uncertainty unless the outcome is genuinely in doubt, and in fact we can’t tell until the climax of a Woolrich novel or story whether it’s allègre or noir, whether the characters whose nightmares we share will be saved or destroyed.

   In Goodis’s paperbacks, however, there is no basis for even a moment’s hope and thus no real suspense. His people are born losers and victims who try to cheat their fate by living as zombies, shunning all involvement with others and the world, sustained by booze, cigarettes and mechanical sex. What they learn is that there’s no way out of the trap they’re in. Whatever they do or don’t do, life is going to get them.

   Character types, settings and motifs recur in his paperbacks with ritualistic frequency. A run-down old house in a seedy district of Philadelphia. A loud corner tavern, filled at all hours of the night with smoke and sweat, gin fumes and derelicts beyond hope. The docks, with at least one graphically described fistfight every time Goodis takes us there. A frightened, friendless, lonely man, living in the night. A fat sadistic woman, oozing grotesque sexuality. A brilliant creative person defeated by the world so badly that he’s reduced to a passive drunken wisp, muttering mournfully of meaninglessness. Bizarre little philosophic conversations between total strangers. Beaten protagonists dully resuming zombie lives as the novels end.

   It’s typical of Goodis’ world that in THE MOON IN THE GUTTER (Gold Medal pb #348, 1953) the viewpoint character Kerrigan lets go free the parolee whom his wife hired to beat him to death, gives up hunting for the man who raped his sister and caused her suicide, and goes back to live with his vicious wife.

   Or take that gem of noir BLACK FRIDAY (Lion pb #224, 1954). “January cold came in from two rivers, formed four walls around Hart and closed in on him.” The chilly hell that envelops Goodis’s luckless man-on-the-run from this first sentence only becomes more hellish as he stumbles upon a man shot to death in the street, gets away with a wallet containing $12,000 and winds up in a house on the northwest edge of Philadelphia and with, as in Sartre’s play, no exit.

   For housemates he has a beautiful young woman, a fat blonde whore (who has counterparts in other Goodis novels) and four psychotic criminals. When the novel ends, the poor schmuck in whose shoes Goodis has made us live is unspeakably worse off than when it began. “He had no idea where he was going and didn’t care.”

   Soon after the death of his parents with whom he’d lived since his return from Hollywood, Goodis himself died, on January 7, 1967, less than two months before his 50th birthday.

   Goodis, like Poe and Hitchcock and many others, owes a great deal of his recognition as a major figure to the French. The only biography of him to date is GOODIS: LA VIE EN NOIR ET BLANC (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984) by Philippe Garnier, who took great pains to interview everyone he could find who knew that haunted man.

   Although I and many others tried unsuccessfully for years to find a U.S. publisher for this book, it was no thanks to me that almost thirty years after its original publication some brave soul made the commitment. GOODIS: A LIFE IN BLACK AND WHITE (Black Pool Productions, 2013) is required reading for anyone who loves Goodis but is not at home in French.

   Until quite recently there was no book exploring the Goodis world, not even in French, but now we have Jay A. Gertzman’s PULP ACCORDING TO DAVID GOODIS (Down & Out Books, 2018). Gertzman, a retired professor of literature who knows Philadelphia very well indeed, doesn’t take us through the Goodis novels chronologically and developmentally — mainly, I suppose, because there are so many family resemblances among them — but opts to cover the history and sociology of the rundown Philly communities that Goodis before him knew just as well, and stresses his connections with literary and cultural icons like Hemingway, Faulkner, Freud and, first and foremost, Kafka. (The title of one of his chapters is “The Pulp Kafka of Philadelphia.”)

   Other approaches are possible, and I hope I live to see at least a few of them, but to Gertzman belongs the honor that with respect to Woolrich is mine. He was there first.

H. BEDFORD-JONES “The King Makers.” Novelette. Vincent Connor #6. First published in Short Stories April 25, 1932. Collected as the title story in The King Makers: The Adventures of Vincent Connor (Altus Press, The H. Bedford-Jones Library, trade paperback March 2015).

   Any attempt to cover H. Bedford-Jones’ career in the pulps is virtually doomed by the sheer volume of it. Writing in virtually every major pulp available (including Weird Tales), and with stories covering every historical era imaginable, he was the acknowledged King of the Pulps for much of his career, one of the highest paid writers in the field, and one whose work regularly was reprinted in hardcovers, whether it was his popular John Solomon stories written as by Allan Hawkwood, his Westerns, Mystery novels, historical novels, adventure fiction …

   He somehow even found time for a bit of poetry and non-fiction.

   Among his many series, one of the most popular featured Vincent Connor, a ne’er do well playboy American in China who would seem to be a jovial fool, but who in reality is one of the quickest minds and best fighters in Asia, “…an energetic young man who mixed largely in political affairs—not for his own interest, but for the good of China.”

   Not PC by any definition, in fact, another white man saving the natives, but these were the pulp magazines, and that was unfortunately the standard. Thankfully Bedford-Jones is too good to just settle for that.

   From the native city, bandits and alleged patriots had flooded into the Japanese quarter of Tientsin to kill and rob. Native mobs were being shot down, and all Tientsin was in alarm and uproar.

   Connor is in Tientsin waiting for his friend Earl Stanley when the rioting and violence break out in the Japanese quarter. A phone call from Stanley quickly summons him to an obscure restaurant in the French quarter where Connor finds the source of all the commotion “…This young native in the sweater and spectacles was Henry Chang-yin. He was the last of the line of the great Nurhachu, founder of the Manchu empire, and the throne of the Yellow Dragon was his by rights.”

   Henry is a quiet studious type who has been living in the Japanese quarter in a sort of separate peace with them, happy to let them use his status to their own needs so long as there is no violence, but now he has escaped, and in short order Connor and Stanley convince him to make a run for Manchuria where he can claim his throne and lead the advance to run the Japanese incursion out of China.

   1932, when this was written, was early in the Japanese imperial adventure in China that would become one of the bloodiest and deadliest in history, and Bedford-Jones can be forgiven in using it for a background for high adventure and political skull-duggery as it would be in countless stories, books, and films of the period. It’s only been in the last thirty years or so that the whole story of the Japanese war crimes in China has been fully exposed.

   In 1932 it was still possible to use the tragedy as a background for exotic adventure.

   The battle is bloody and hard fought with Colonel Honzai, the tough but honorable Japanese officer pursuing them. Bedford-Jones was an expert at orchestrating this kind of tale and pulls out no stops here.

   Despite the lack of political correctness, Bedford-Jones is far to good a writer to deal in the usual stereotypes. There are no evil Asian masterminds here (even when he did that trope he managed it with finesse), and both the would-be emperor, Connor’s driver, Wang, and their Japanese nemesis are written as intelligent and capable men, which doesn’t hurt the sense of adventure and action one bit, and even adds to it.

   The story ends with a nice ironic twist, with Connor’s dream of playing king-maker in China is lost, but not before undergoing a solid adventure tale in the old style by one of the masters of the genre.

       The Vincent Connor series —

A Prince for Sale (ss) Argosy Jun 13 1931

House of Missing Men (ss) Argosy Jul 4 1931
The Tomb-Robber (ss) Argosy Aug 1 1931
Diplomacy by Air (ss) Argosy Sep 19 1931
Connor Takes Charge (nv) Argosy Dec 19 1931
The King Makers (nv) Short Stories Apr 25 1932

   All six are included in the Altus Press collection.

KILLER WOMEN “La Sicaria.” ABC, 07 January 2014. Season 1, Episode 1. 60 minutes. Tricia Helfer (as Molly Parker, a Texas Ranger), Marc Blucas, Alex Fernandez, Michael Trucco, Marta Milans. Guest star: Nadine Velazquez. Written by Hannah Shakespeare. Director: Lawrence Trilling.

   Tricia Helfer, previously seen to good advantage n a regular basis as Number Six, a ultra-sexy humanoid Cylon on Battlestar Galactica, plays newly appointed Texas Ranger Molly Parker in this short-loved series taking place in the San Antonio area. Only six of eight episodes that were filmed for the first season were ever aired. There was no second season.

   The premise for the series was that every week Molly is assigned cases of murder all of which were committed by women. In “La Sicaria” (the feminine form of the word “sicario,” or “hit man”), the killer of an ADA immediately after she says “I do” in church on her wedding day is easily identified. The question is, given that her stated motive doesn’t make sense, why did she do it?

   The series didn’t fare will with the critics and was ignored by TV audiences, but I thought at was well done, and I enjoyed as many of the episodes as I was able to watch at the time. That Tricia Helfer makes a Texas Ranger’s uniform as well filled out as a Texas Ranger’s uniform ever could be might have had something to do with it. Plus she has the swagger of a Texas Ranger down pat. You might even call it a sashay. Poetry in motion.

THE BIG LEBOWSKI. Polygram, 1998. Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, David Huddleston, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tara Reid, John Turturro, Sam Elliott, Ben Gazarra, and Jon Polito. Written & directed by Joel & Ethan Coen.

ADAM BERTOCCI – Two Gentlemen of Lebowski: A Most Excellent Comedie and Tragical Romance. Simon & Schuster, trade paperback, 2010.

   Okay, so this time it’s a movie and the book inspired by it – or as Adam Bertocci would have it, the text of the play Shakespeare wrote after seeing it. Got that?

   At this point there’s really no use going into a detailed synopsis or critique of The Big Lebowkski. It’s a cult film, which means you either love it or can’t imagine why anyone would. There’s enough lawlessness, detection and mayhem to qualify it for anyone’s list of crime films, but suffused throughout with so much deliberate quirkiness that the question of Whodunit seems completely irrelevant.

   What strikes me about Lebowski though, is its compelling similarity to Robert Altman’s film of The Long Goodbye (UA/Lions Gate, 1973). Besides the obvious L.A. ambiance, both films feature protagonists seriously out of step with the world they inhabit, cast into convoluted plots which they — and we (and, I suspect, the writers) — only partly comprehend, adrift in an ocean of whackos, weirdoes and certified wing nuts, dancing with sudden death like a monkey on a high wire. Mark Rydell in Goodbye has Ben Gazarra as his counterpart in Lebowski, just as Sterling Hayden in the earlier film is mirrored by David Huiddleston in the later one. It’s as if the Coens saw Altman’s screwy classic when they were impressionable teens and never got over it.

   Like I say, there’s been enough written about this film already, but I want to make note of the pitch-perfect performances of Philip Seymour Hoffman as an unflappable toady and John Turturro doing a dead-on impression of Timothy Carey as a mad bowler. Add Steve Buscemi as the kegler equivalent of Elisha Cook Jr, and you have an able supporting cast indeed — all blown off the screen by John Goodman’s perennial Nam Vet, Walter.

   More than a decade after Lebowksi hit the screens, Adam Bertocci wondered in print what The Big Lebowski would have been like if written by the Bard of Avon. He even went so far as to write an afterword, detailing how Shakespeare might have seen someone else’s Elizabethan play of the story and stolen it (as playwrights of his time were wont to do—leading to flocks of Angry Bards) for his own Two Gentlemen of Lebowski.

   I should say up front that this will appeal mainly to those who have some familiarity with the works we call Shakespeare’s. When Sam Elliott (I forgot to mention him, didn’t I?) says “Sometimes you get the Bear” one doesn’t automatically recall the stage direction from Winter’s Tale, “Exit, pursued by a bear.” But Bertocci does.

   It will be lost on some. As will many (most?) of the other allusions. But no one should miss the author’s seriocomic “footnotes” explaining things like Cracked Cheeks (“Maps of the period depicted wind in the form of clouds blowing over the land and possibly on freshly-painted toes.”) and Haters of Jewry (“Anti-semites. In Elizabethan England, a synonym for ‘everyone’.”)

   Cult items to be sure. Take them for all in all, we most likely shall not look upon their like again. But we can hope.

 MARTIN H. GREENBERG, Editor – Deadly Doings. Ivy, paperback original; 1st printing, 1989.

#4. SUE GRAFTON “The Parker Shotgun.” Short story. First published in the PWA anthology Mean Streets, edited by Robert J. Randisi (Mysterious Press, 1986). [See Comment #3.] Reprinted many times, including The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, edited by Tony Hillerman & Rosemary Herbert (Oxford University Press, hardcover, April 1996). First collected in Kinsey and Me (G.P. Putnam, hardcover, 2013). Winner of the Macavity and Anthony awards.

   I don’t know, but maybe someone reading this does. When Sue Grafton wrote the first Kinsey Millhone story, “A” Is for Alibi, way back in 1984, was she planning ahead? Did she have any idea that the series would continue on all the way through the letter Y before sadly she died late in 2017?

   Along the way, if my count is right, she wrote nine short stories about Kinsey, of which this is probably the most well known. In it she tackles a case that the police have given up on, that of the death of her client’s husband, a man known to have been dealing in cocaine. He had given it up when he married Kinsey’s client, but the police have taken the easy way out and chalked it up to just another drug deal gone bad.

   Kinsey, as always, tells the story herself, in her usual chipper fashion, even though some of the people she meets along the way do not belong to the nicest people in society. The titular shotgun, as expected, was the murder weapon, but not expected is that it’s a classic, a collectible worth in the vicinity of nearly $100,000, which is a nice area to be in, to be sure.

   Kinsey makes short work of the case, maybe too short. I’d have liked a little more meat to the tale myself, but as a fine example of a PI at work in the short story form, you shouldn’t need to look any farther than this one.

         —

Previously in this Martin Greenberg anthology:JACK FINNEY “It Wouldn’t Be Fair.”

HELL BOUND. United Artists / Bel-Air Productions, 1957. John Russell, June Blair, Stuart Whitman, Margo Woode. Director: William J. Hole Jr.

   Hell Bound opens with voice-over narration that tells the viewer what is going on. It’s technique familiar to all of us who have watched numerous low budget 1950s crime films and police procedurals. Where the narrator instructs us as to what is happening on the screen, as if we needed some additional help. But in this Bel-Air Production, the narration goes on and on. And on. Or so it seems. All of which leads the viewer to wonder what exactly is going on? Is the whole film going to be like this?

   But eventually the narration ends. And as it turns out, what you were watching was a 16mm film within a film. A short movie that was filmed by a thief named Jordan (John Russell) in order to “sell” his vision to a businessman who could finance his latest criminal scheme: to steal narcotics from a ship set to arrive in the Los Angeles harbor. It’s a clever device, one that immediately lets the viewer know that this isn’t going to be one just another stodgy and formulaic police procedural.

   Hell Bound is a lot grittier than what most of those films even hope to offer. It’s soaked in sweat, oozes sexual innuendo, and has its fair share of odd, unsavory characters, including a blind heroin dealer who simply goes by the name Daddy (Dehl Berti). The film has a lot of visual signposts and trademarks of what has become known as film noir. There’s a gin-soaked nightclub with an exotic dancer, neon lights, and a ruthless degree of criminal brutality. There is also a stark, but exquisitely filmed finale in a junk yard filled with old trolley cars, one of the more creative endings I’ve seen in a while.

   Look for former Playboy Playmate June Blair as Jordan’s primary accomplice, and a for youthful Stuart Whitman as an honest hardworking ambulance driver who inadvertently gets mixed up in the whole affair. Les Baxter provides the soundtrack. Recommended.