Gore-y Death: The Edgar Box Detective Novels of Gore Vidal, Part 1

Death legs it

Although not, to be sure, exactly on the level, in terms of fame and repute, as the works of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the short "Edgar Box" series of  detective novels by the distinguished man of letters Gore Vidal--Death in the Fifth Position (1952), Death Before Breakfast (1953) and Death Likes it Hot (1954)--also is not exactly forgotten, either.  The novels were frequently reprinted over the years since their original publication, but as of last year they had been out of print for two decades.  Now all three of the Box novels have been brought back in stylish new paperback editions by Vintage Books' Black Lizard imprint--you know, the one that also brings us Hammett and Chandler, as well as Ross Macdonald (No slouch, that Black Lizard!).

Girls with Guns: a Signet combo

Are Gore Vidal's mysteries on the exalted level of Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald? The blunt answer (and Gore Vidal himself is nothing if not blunt) is no.  Gore Vidal himself terms them potboilers, claiming that each was written in eight days, in order to earn money after the critical shunning he received over the publication of his pioneering gay novel The City and the Pillar in 1948.  This story has always struck me as exaggerated: The City and the Pillar was a bestselling book and Vidal's novels continued to be reviewed in the following years in the New York Times Book Review--some of them favorably.  Still, there's no question they did not sell like The City and the Pillar--controversy could do wonders for a novel's sales back then just like today--and Vidal needed needed money, especially after buying a stately 1820 New York Greek Revival mansion in 1950.  

"SPILLANE IN MINK"
the sort of blurb
for which publishers yearn

Happily, along came Victor Weybright, the publisher of Signet Books (what Vidal calls "an extremely adventurous paperback series"), with the suggestion that Vidal write mysteries, in the style of Mickey Spillane, who was making a fortune for Signet with his racy and violent Mike Hammer novels.  These would be reprinted in paperback by Signet, with the same sort of titillating covers Signet used for books not only by Spillane, but also for higher-browed authors such as James M. Cain, Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner.  According to Vidal, Weybright declared that with a salacious cover he could sell any book, even a "nearly unreadable" William Faukner novel like Absalom, Absalom!--though comprehensible sex and violence in the text was a plus. These Signet covers are fascinating mementos of the literary culture in the 1950s: the sort of stuff that could get Congressional committees all hot and bothered but that sold books like hotcakes.

Spillane's canny combination of sex and
violence--along with steamy illustrations--
had paperbacks flying off shelves

In the Edgar Box detective novels Gore Vidal seems not to have been interested in violence (he loathed Mickey Spillane), but he did supply the desired sex (the name Edgar Box, by the way, was derived in part from a famous "Edgar"--Vidal thought Poe, while Weybright thought Wallace).  In short, Gore Vidal clearly did his best to live up to Signet's reputation in the sex line! Ultimately the Box series as a whole is most interesting for the sex elements, plus the lightly biting, satirical tone Vidal adopts.  To be sure, as detective novels the Boxes are pikers compared to the great Dame Agatha, or, for that matter, to the hard-boiled boys Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald; though it must be conceded they do show improvement as detective novels over the course of the series (Death Before Bedtime and Death Likes It Hot will be discussed in part 2).

John Kriza of the American Ballet Theatre
was one of Gore Vidal's ballet interests

Because of knee damage he sustained while serving on a ship based in Alaska during World War Two, Gore Vidal after the war took ballet lessons as restorative therapy.  During this time he became interested in ballet and ballet dancers--particularly male ones.  With dancer Harold Lang Vidal had an affair, discussed in the 1995 Vidal memoir, Palimpsest, which also shows a photo of Vidal on the beach with John Kriza, best known for dancing the lead role in Aaron Copland's Billy the Kid.  I wondered whether Louis Giraud, the most memorable character in Death in the Fifth Position, might have been partly drawn from Lang and Kriza, but Vidal does not say.  However, Lang was known as "the Beast of the Ballet" according to Vidal, which certainly accords with the character of Louis (on this matter see below)!

Death in the Fifth Position concerns a rash of violent demises afflicting the Grand St. Petersburg Ballet Company while it is performing at the New York City Metropolitan Opera House.  Vidal's amateur detective in this novel and its two sequels is the brash P.R. man Peter Cutler Sargeant II, Pacific War veteran and Harvard graduate.  Vidal himself saw neither actual fighting in World War Two nor a Harvard degree (he published his first novel at the age of twenty), but in other ways he seems rather similar to Peter Sargeant. Like Vidal, Sargeant has a biting wit and he despises fifties Red-baiters and American police in general.  Here's Sargeant (i.e., Vidal, on the subject):

I have a dislike of policemen which must be the real thing since I've never had anything to do with them up to until now, outside of the traffic courts.  There is something about the state putting the power to bully into the hands of a group of subnormal, sadistic apes that makes my blood boil.

Gore Vidal and a really big ship
(not the one on which he served in WWII)

Sargeant also resembles Gore Vidal in being a sexual swordsman, though Sargeant's conquests are female and Vidal's were male (of Harold Lang's promiscuity during the time of their relationship, Vidal in Palimpsest writes: "This hardly bothered me, since I was almost as promiscuous as Harold"). Sargeant's frequent couplings with the ballerina Jane Garden and Jane's fetching physical features are described at length by Vidal.  

Yet much of the historical value of Death in the Fifth Position stems from the gay subject matter, which is rather remarkably detailed for the 1950s.  The star male ballet dancer Louis Giraud--who, we are informed, "started life as  a longshoreman in Marseilles"--hits on every attractive man who crosses his sight and it seems that for most men resistance is futile.  To his displeasure Sargeant becomes Louis' particular object of interest over the course of the murder investigation.  This is humorously treated by Vidal, in contrast to how one imagines Spillane would have handled it (one suspects Mike Hammer would have killed Louis in some particularly unpleasant fashion).  Here's a bit of conversation between Sargeant and his girlfriend of the moment, Jane, about Louis, which should demostrate how this novel must have been quite spicy in the day:

"[Louis] pads, you know."

"He what?"

"You know...like a falsie: well, they say he wears one too, when he's in tights."

"Oh, no, he doesn't," I said, remembering my little tussle with the ballet's glamour boy.

"You, too?"  She sat bolt upright.

"Me too what?

"He didn't...go after you, too, did he?"

"Well as a matter of fact he did but I fought him off."  And I told her the story of how I had saved my honor.

She was very skeptical.  "He's had every boy in the company... even the ones who like girls...I expect he's irresistible."

"I resisted."

this Signet cover gives full force
to the phrase "a come hither look"

Even detection purist Jacques Barzun praised Louis in Death in the Fifth Position ("There is...one extreme parody of a homosexual bruiser-type dancer, which is really funny because free from sniggering"), so Louis apparently is irresistible--at least as a comic character, anyway.  There are some other good amusing characters too, particularly the "elderly" (she's 51) prima ballerina assoluta, Anna Eglanova. Unfortunately the detection is not so good.  Vidal indulges himself in what can only be called an information dump near the end of the novel.  Sargeant intuits the solution (heck, who couldn't at this point), but he has no proof, since the whole thing is conjectural.  So Vidal allows his hero to literally stumble over the proof he needs. This is kind of unsatisfying if you are a detection fan!  Vidal takes the easy way out in this respect, but after all he was just a beginner in this one.

Gore Vidal (alias Edgar Box)
 gets the Signet treatment

So in all honesty I cannot recommend Death in the Fifth Position as a tale of detection.  Yet I can recommend it as an entertaining satirical 1950s American novel.  In its witty depiction of sexual farce in a ballet company confronting a murder investigation, it gives us an interesting picture of the fifties that we don't get on television!  As Peter Sargeant puts it:

[I]t's all very confusing and I intend one day to sit down and figure the whole thing out. It's like that poem of Auden's, one of whose quatrains goes:

Louis is telling Anne what Molly

Said to Mark behind her back;

Jack likes Jill who worships George

Who has the hots for Jack.

Kind of flip but the legend of our age.

this dame means trouble year round

In part 2, I will discuss Death Before Bedtime and Death Likes it Hot, where sexual content (particularly gay sexual content) is reduced and the detection, coincidentally or not, improved.  In Bedtime, Gore Vidal lets his satirical eye wander over to the political world of Washington, D. C., while in Hot, he takes on the upper crust society of the Hamptons.  Both novels essentially are country house mysteries in the classical English tradition, with the difference that both the men and women in them are something less... inhibited, shall we say?

For more on Edgar Box, see my reviews of Death Before Bedtime and Death Likes It Hot.

Forgotten Novel: Crime in Corn Weather (1935), by Mary Meigs Atwater

"Corn as high as an elephant's eye"--I was reminded of this line by this forgotten mystery novel from 1935: Crime in Corn Weather, by Mary Meigs Atwater.  Though the line comes from the musical Oklahoma! I don't see why it shouldn't appy to Iowa as well, especially after reading Atwater's book.  The atmosphere of corn is so palpable that as you read you feel it all around you...As in fact do the citizens of the town of Keedora, Iowa, the setting of the novel:

Keedora lay like an island in a sea of corn that lapped at the fringes of the town. Houses that ventured out only a little way beyond the concrete, the iron lampposts, and the clipped lawns were overwhelmed in it--a vast green tide that stood half-roof high like a tidal wave about to break.

smoldering, baby-killing, soul-sickening weather

Atwater describes "corn weather" as "smoldering, baby-killing, soul-sickening weather." Corn may thrive in that sort of weather, but humans don't. Yet excitement comes to enervated Keedora citizens when Will Breen, "president of the People's State Bank, ex-mayor, and prominent citizen"--disappears.  Like banker Mr. Potter of It's a Wonderful Life (1946), for whom he could have served as a prototype, Will Breen is hated by everyone in his home town, so if he's been murdered (and he has--readers are shown the killing at the beginning of the novel), there's no shortage of suspects. Heading the list is his nephew, Harold, whose inheritance Will was to control until Harold turned 25.

I'd say "Murder is Corny"
but Rex Stout beat me to it

Atwater does a fine job of portraying life in small Iowa farm town in the 1930s.  She shows how a murder is, first and foremost, just plain exciting to the locals, especially when the victim is Will Breen, someone no one liked anyway, not even his mother, old (she's all of seventy) Grandma Breen.  Although, in contrast with some of the people who have read Corn Weather (it was reprinted in 1992 by Interweave Press--see left--but since forgotten), I do not see the book as a comic novel, there are some excellent sardonic passages about the townspeople's reaction to the "tragedy" in their corny midst.

When a spade is discovered that might have been used to bury Will Breen in a shallow grave somewhere in the cornfields, there's considerable morbid fascination among the townspeople:

The spade was carried, in great excitement, to the sheriff's office.  For months it might have been seen there, standing in a corner against the wall.  Perhaps it is still there. Mrs. Belinda Blum, the Woman's Club poetess, wrote a sonnet to it, beginning:

O implement of honest, useful toil,
To what dread use hast thou been put, alas!

She sent the poem to the Bugle and it appeared, in a neat box of black lines, in the middle of the editorial page on the day of the great mass-search for the "corpus delecti," and it was later copied by many papers all over the country.  So it was to William Breen that Mrs. Blum owed her literary triumph.  She later delivered a paper on "The Art of Poesie" before the Woman's Club in which she explained just why she had decided on "implement of honest, useful toil" rather than "honest implement of useful toil" or "useful implement of honest toil."  It made a very profound impression.

I was reminded at times of Sinclair Lewis' Main Street. although I would say Atwater's satire is more affectionate than condescending (Atwater ultimately is more Willa Cather than Sinclair Lewis).  She seems genuinely to like many of the people in the town and to have sympathy for their troubles.  Among others we have:

Grandma Breen, forced to endure the indignities of her cold son gradually taking over her house;

Norman Jeffers, a Great War veteran who never recovered from his battlefield experiences (he sneers in disgust when someone mentions his local medal ceremony of long ago);

Milly Slater, the nice young woman "in trouble" who in desperation visits an abortionist (the harrowing aftermath of this visit is directly described by the author: the patient, suffering from hemorrhages, is bundled out of the house by family members, the abortionist all the while demanding that the bedsheets the girl is wrapped in be returned to her). To allude to out-of-wedlock pregnancy and even abortion by a "nice" middle-class girl in a mystery genre novel from the 1930s is extremely unusual in my reading experience.

In addition to her bluntness on sexual matters and her strong grasp of setting and character, the author has a nice touch with prose imagery.  See, for example, this passage that comes from the section of the novel detailing Keedora's carnival-like "corpus delecti" hunt, for which practically every citizen--man, woman and child--has turned out:

The big ice-cream freezers standing under a tree were guarded by a severe woman armed with a long spoon, who was holding off with difficulty the usual swarm of small boys that always gathers about a parked ice-cream freezer as fruit flies gather to a basket of grapes.

Gradually, it dawns on us that Crime in Corn Weather is less a a detective novel than a novel about a murder and its impact on a community (and that impact isn't quite what W. H. Auden--see his "The Guilty Vicarage" essay--thinks it should be!).  In fact Corn Weather is more an inverted crime novel, with memorable rural local color (pretty early on the reader should realize who the murderer is, by the author's intent).  It is well worth reading as such--just don't expect an Agatha Christiesque clue puzzle!

Mary Meigs Atwater (1878-1956) and son

Who was Mary Meigs Atwater (1878-1956)?  A granddaughter of Montgomery C. Meigs (1816-1892), Quartermaster General of the United States during the American Civil War, she was born in Illinois but raised in Iowa and educated in design at the Chicago Art Institute and in Paris.

After marrying mining engineer Maxwell W. Atwater, she traveled with him around the American West, Mexico and South America, after his death settling permanently in Montana, where she organized a nationally influential hand loom weavers' guild (today she is known as "the dean of American handweaving").

According to Linda Ligon of Interweave Press, author of the preface to the 1992 reprint edition of Crime in Corn Weather Atwater was fascinated with the criminal mind and "frequented the scenes of violent crimes, attended local trials, and wrote 'whodunits' and articles for True Crime magazine in the wee hours of the morning, after finishing her work for the Shuttle-Craft Guild of American Handweavers."

Linda Ligon comments that Crime in Corn Weather "doesn't fit into either of the major mystery genres of the day--the 'tough guy' stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler or the bucolic 'cozies' of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayer [sic]." Of course there were many, many mystery novels of the day that did not fit "cozily" into these two "genres" (and I dispute the claim that all the novels by Christie and Sayers were bucolic cozies), but Crime in Corn Weather is still something out of the common rut.

Reading Crime in Corn Weather--a small number of copies of the reprint edition can still be found at low prices--is educational as well as entertaining.  Try it!

Note: For more on Mary Meigs Atwater, see the Thrums blog.--The Passing Tramp.

Life's a Beach, Then You Die: The Barbarous Coast (1956), by Ross Macdonald

The Passing Tramp is still passing time in California--the California of hard-boiled fiction that is.  He's just been on the coast with Ross Macdonald, and he'll soon be hitching up to the mountains to see Bill Pronzini.

The cleverly titled The Barbarous Coast is the sixth Lew Archer detective novel by Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) and the last, I believe, of his more Chandler-derivative tales.  Beginning, I would argue, with The Doomsters (1958) and certainly by The Galton Case (1959) Macdonald definitively established a voice independent of the Chandler-Hammett tradition. Since Kevin Burton Smith puts it so well at thrillingdetective.com, I will quote his words:

The Galton Case became a watershed, both personally and artistically, in Millar's life. Archer's (and Millar's) obsession with the twisted, secret history of families, and how the sins of the past shape the present, were finally nailed down, for all who cared to see. Although the early Archer's were well-written and tightly plotted, The Galton Case really got down to business. From that point on, it has been noted, Macdonald wrote the same story over and over, endless variations on the same themes of lost and abandoned children, absent parents, family secrets denied.  

The Barbarous Coast is not quite in this mold, but it does seem to me transitional in some ways.  As explained in Tom Nolan's splendid biography of Macdonald, this period, the mid to late 1950s, brought difficulties to the lives of Macdonald, his wife (the equally distinguished crime novelist Margaret Millar) and their troubled daughter, Linda.  Though Macdonald actually completed The Barbarous Coast before 1956, when his daughter Linda was embroiled in a hit-and-run fatal accident case (a shattering event in Macdonald's life), Macdonald's interest in psychiatry--something that was to become a dominant element in his later books--already plays a pivotal role in Coast, as well be seen below.

Coast is the third of the early group of six Archer detective novels that I have read and I think the most problematic (my favorite is The Ivory Grin).  Macdonald's uncertainly over Coast's title may suggest some uncertainty in its composition. His publisher, Knopf, rejected Macdonald's proposed title, The Dying Animal; we hardly can blame Knopf for this, although some of Knopf's proposed alternatives, it must be conceded, were simply horrendous:

Skull Crasher
Cut the Throat Slowly
My Gun Is Me
The Blood Pit
Blood on My Knuckles
His Head in the Gutter
A Fist in the Guts
A Handful of Guts

Some people at Knopf seemed to be under the impression Ross Macdonald was Mickey Spillane!  In the end Macdonald had the brilliant inspiration of "The Barbarous Coast"; yet, unfortunately the novel is not, in my view, as successful as the final title.

Knopf seemed to be under the impression
that Ross Macdonald was Mickey Spillane

Still, this is a Ross Macdonald novel I am discussing, so there is plenty of interest in it. Certainly Coast does not lack incident: we have a couple young nymphettes (one already murdered when the novel begins, one possibly about to be); a schizophrenic matron; a pretty boy boxer turned actor ("He's got prettier muscles than Brando"); a corrupt movie executive making the move into Las Vegas; a crooked cop; vicious mobsters (straight and gay); and some first rate beatings-up of our hero, Archer, in the best Chandler style (at one point Archer gets sapped three times in a few hours by my recollection and never has to seek medical assistance--the man gives extra meaning to the word hardheaded).

Unfortunately the plot is not one of Macdonald's most inspired and the portrayals of the film industry and of Las Vegas remain more quick, bright sketches than sustained, in-depth canvases.  The comparative dearth of true ratiocination is especially disappointing from my perspective.  Archer does do a bit of good deduction from the clue of a dropped earring, but mostly he wanders around getting people to spill their guts to them (sometimes this happens literally).  Much of the solution is handed to Archer near to end of the book, in the form of a long lecture from a psychiatrist (here we have wandered a long way from Casa Chandler and Hammett Hideaway).  Despite said lecture, I found the culprit for the many murders unconvincing.

this one is more distinguished
for writing than for plotting

At this point it must sound like I am not recommending this novel, but, hey, not so fast, buddy!  Besides colorful incident, there is the writing: like Chandler, Macdonald is always worth reading for that.  Major and even minor characters come alive in this tale (so that we want the latter to become major characters): the vain yet at her core realistic mother of one of the nymphettes; the aging, retired boxer turned security guard; the young African American lifeguard who came back from Korea determined to better himself through education (this utterly winning character makes one entire chapter and allows Macdonald some commentary on fifties racism); the homely, sourpuss Las Vegas hotel manager, and others.

This latter character, the hotel sourpuss, gives rise to something I have found a comparative rarity in the usually ever so serious and sober Macdonald: a really good Chandleresque jokey one-liner. When sourpuss thinks the attractive woman she has been asked by Archer to talk about may be in big trouble her face brightens:

"Are you after her for some crime?"
"Third-degree pulchritude."
She chewed on this like a camel, then shut the door in my face.

Archer tries to be cynical and tough-hearted, like the hard-boiled patron dick, the Continental Op.

As here:

"You leave a trail of destruction like Sherman marching through Georgia."

 And here:

I braced myself for another life-story.  Something about my face, maybe a gullible look, invited them.

Yet he simply cannot help helping people.

As here:

I put George in my bed.  My cleaning woman had been there that morning, and the sheets were fresh.  Hanging his torn clothes on a chair, I asked myself what I thought I was doing and why.  I looked across the hall at the door of the bedless bedroom where nobody slept any more.  An onion taste of grief rose at the back of my throat.  It seemed very important to me that George should get together with his wife and take her away from Los Angeles.  And live happily ever after.

And here:

The problem was to love people, try to serve them, without wanting anything from them.  I was a long way from solving that one.

Scattered throughout the novel are some beautiful examples of Macdonald's fine writing. Here are some I highlighted for this piece:

He reached for the string that controlled the light, and jerked the grief-stricken room downward into darkness.

Dancers were sliding around on the waxed tiles to the music of a decimated orchestra.

I felt his glance like an icicle parting my hair.

Self-pity stalked me, snuffing at my spoor.

That was the trouble with alcohol as a sedative.  It floated you off reality for a while, but it brought you back by a route that meandered though the ash-dumps of hell.

The brightness left his eyes like something quick and timid retreating into its hole.

Memory had given him a sudden stab.

The [swimming] pool was gray and restless like a coffined piece of the sea.

Such writing makes a Ross Macdonald crime novel always worth reading, even when the plot is not his most entrancing.  The Barbarous Coast is worth a stop and a dip.

Detections and Tribulations: Short Stories by Dashiell Hammett and Bill Pronzini (Then and Now #2)

Stories considered:

By Bill Pronzini
It's a Lousy World (1968) (Casefile, St. Martin's, 1983) (C)
Death of a Nobody (1970) (C)
The Pulp Connection (1978) (C)
Cat's-Paw (1983) (Spadework, Crippen & Landru, 1996)
Skeleton Rattle Your Mouldy Leg (1984) (S)
Twenty Miles to Paradise (1985) (S)
Ace in the Hole (1986) (S)
Here Comes Santa Claus (1989) (S)
Worried Mother Job (1996) (S)

I got out one of the issues of Black Mask I keep in desk drawer to pass idle time, but I couldn't concentrate on the Frederick Nebel story I tried to read.  I put the pulp away and lit another cigarette.

--"Death of a Nobody"

"It's a Lousy World," Bill Pronzini's original Nameless Detective short story, was published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine in 1968, thirty-five years after the appearance in The Black Mask of Dashiell Hammett's first Continental Op short story, "Arson Plus."  Unlike Hammett, whose entire body of Op detective stories appeared in a relatively short creative burst, the eight year period from 1923 through 1930, the Pronzini Nameless stories under consideration here were published over three decades.  It is fascinating to study the evolution of the hard-boiled detective story in the creative hands of Bill Pronzini, a writer adept at providing both human and puzzle interest in his work.

The two early Nameless tales, "It's a Lousy World" and "Death of a Nobody," both published before Pronzini was thirty years old, reflect the influence, I think, of Hammett but more particularly Raymond Chandler.  Consider the classic cadence of the writing:

Colly Babcock was shot to death on the night of September 9, in an alley between Twenty-ninth and Valley streets in the Glen Park District of San Francisco....I reed about it the following morning over coffee and undercooked eggs in a cafeteria on Taylor Street, a block and a half from  my office.  The story was on my inside page, concise and dispassionate; they teach that kind of objective writing in the journalism classes.  Just the cold facts.  A man dies, but he's nothing more than a statistic, a name in black type, a faceless nonentity to be considered and then forgotten along with your breakfast coffee.

--"It's a Lousy World"

He was drinking whiskey at the long bar, leaning his head on his arms and staring at the wall.  Two men in work clothes were drinking beer and eating sandwiches from lunch pails at the other end, and in the middle an old lady in a black shawl sipped red wine from a glass held with arthritic fingers.  I sat on a stool next to Tommy and said hello.

He turned his head slowly, his eyes moved upward.  His face was an anemic white, and his bald head shone with beaded perspiration.  He had trouble focusing his eyes; he swiped at them with the back of one veined hand.  He was pretty drunk.  And I was pretty sure I knew why.

--It's a Lousy World

His name was Nello....He was what sociologists call "an addictive drinker who has lost all semblance of faith in God, humanity or himself."  And what the average citizen dismisses unconcernedly as "a Skid Row wino.

--Death of a Nobody

In these two tales "Nameless" seems a morose, disconnected loner (he does have a cop friend named Eberhardt, however; a long-recurring character).  The bleakness is indicated by the change in title of the first story, "It's a Lousy World" (its title in Casefile).  In its original magazine appearance it is called, more hopefully, "Sometimes There is Justice."

In both tales, however, Nameless acts from a genuine sense of empathy to find the truth about downtrodden murder victims: his ex-con friend in "Lousy World" and a homeless wino in "Nobody."  Though I think it's a myth that the Continental Op never shows any sympathy for his fellow human beings in the Hammett stories, Pronzini feels closer to Chandler here.

Both are moving stories, with rather simple plots that feel like they could have come straight from the newspapers.  Something significant was to change in Pronzini's work, however.  The author himself writes about this change in his Casefile collection.

Pronzini, it seems, had determined to kill off Nameless in 1975, by giving the heavy smoker terminal lung cancer.  Once he changed his mind, making that lesion on Nameless' lung providentially non-malignant, Pronzini not only had Nameless give up smoking but also "change his outlook and...develop in a different direction," becoming "mellower" and "more cheerful" and showing "more of his sense of humor."  Also notably for Pronzini's readers, Nameless' cases became more "puzzling than his straightforward investigations during the pre-lesion period."

One sees this new style immediately in the 1978 story "The Pulp Connection" (published, appropriately, in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine).  Here is a story where Pronzini breaks with Chandler, who as we know from his "Simple Art of Murder" professed disdain for "gimmicky" plots.  Fortunately, I love them, so I appreciate this development in Mr. Pronzini's work!

Chandler might not have approved of "The Pulp Connection"--oh well!

Despite being associated with hard-boiled writing specidically, Bill Pronzini has a great love for and vast knowledge of the mystery genre in general, including works of classical detection ostensibly incompatible with the hard-boiled style (for evidence of this see his and Marcia Muller's 1001 Midnights and his Gun in Cheek and its sequel Son of Gun in Cheek).  In "The Pulp Connection," Pronzini has Nameless confront both a locked room problem and a dying message!

"He's dead--murdered."
....
"He was found here by his niece shortly before one o'clock.  In a locked room."
"Locked room?"
"Something the matter with your hearing today?...Yes, a damned locked room."

Some hard-boiled fans wear it as a badge of honor that their favored mode of crime writing is "above" such things as locked rooms and dying messages, but I don't see why.  Surely it is no crime for any genre writer to be entertaining.  Dashiell Hammett himself wrote a story that has a locked room situation ("Mike, Alec, or Rufus") and one that is in effect a closed circle country house mystery (Night Shots).  "The Pulp Connection" fits right in with the spirit of those tales.

Pulp fiction functions as a dying message
in "The Pulp Connection"

As do the Cats-Paw, an award-winning Pronzini tale, and Ace in the Hole, a little tour de force--both collected in the Crippen & Landru collection Spadework.  In the latter story Nameless functions as an armchair detective, in the manner of Baroness Orczy's Man in the Corner, solving a miracle problem ("locked doors, disappearing guns--screwball stuff") during a poker game.

In the later tales, Pronzini also humanizes Nameless by letting him have sustained personal relationships, most importantly with his girlfriend, Kerry.  In "Twenty Miles from Paradise," Kerry is along for the ride when Nameless nimbly realizes appearances can deceive, and she helps provide an amusing (and somewhat racy) ending.

In another tale, "Here Comes Santa Claus," Kerry puts Nameless into a situation in which one could never imagine the Op, Spade or Marlowe getting inveigled, especially by a dame: acting as "Santa" at a Christmas party.  Detection is light in this one, but the story delights.

Nameless makes a better Santa than this guy, anyway

My two favorite Nameless short stories, "Skeleton Rattle Your Mouldy Leg" and "Worried Mother Job," represent the crime tale at its peak, combining genuine detection and fair play clueing with genuinely moving situations.  "Skeleton," built upon a Francois Villon poem, offers a powerful and memorable depiction of a depressing residence hotel for senior citizens and some of the most haunting closing lines I can recall in a short story, genre or otherwise.

Worried Mother Job for me recalls Ross Macdonald's favorite Hammett short story, Fly Paper, with its searing portrayal of dysfunctional family relationships (it recalls the work of Ross Macdonald too, for that matter).  It's another one you will remember--both for the anguished characters and the adept clueing.

Bill Pronzini's short stories honor both the hard-boiled tradition and that of the classical detective story--as, I would argue, do many of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op tales.  While he frequently offers  readers clever and teasing problems Pronzini does not neglect the human dimension either.  While Pronzini tales like "Pulp" "Cat's-Paw" and "Ace" are pure puzzles, in stories like "Skeleton" and "Job," murder is very real--and it really hurts. The great Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald storytelling tradition is done ample justice by Bill Pronzini.

For part one of this piece, which considers short stories by Dashiell Hammett, see http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2012/02/detections-and-tribulations-short.html

Detections and Tribulations: Short Stories by Dashiell Hammett and Bill Pronzini (Then and Now #2)

Stories discussed:

By Dashiell Hammett (in part one)
Arson Plus (1923) (Crime Stories and Other Writings, Library of America, 2001) (CSAOW)
Slippery Fingers (1923) (CSAOW)
Crooked Souls (1923) (CSAOW)
Night Shots (1924) (Detective Stories, Coyote Canyon Press, 2009) (DS) (also in Nightmare Town, Vintage, 2000)
Who Killed Bob Teal? (1924) (DS) (NT)
Mike, Alec, or Rufus (1925) (DS) (NT)
The Scorched Face (1925) (CSAOW) (also in The Big Knockover, Vintage, 1989)
The Gutting of Couffignal (1925) (CSAOW) (BK)
Creeping Siamese (1926) (CSAOW)

By Bill Pronzini (in part two)
It's a Lousy World (1968) (Casefile, St. Martin's, 1983) (C)
Death of a Nobody (1970) (C)
The Pulp Connection (1978) (C)
Cat's-Paw (1983) (Spadework, Crippen & Landru, 1996)
Skeleton Rattle Your Mouldy Leg (1984) (S)
Twenty Miles to Paradise (1985) (S)
Ace in the Hole (1986) (S)
Here Comes Santa Claus (1989) (S)
Worried Mother Job (1996) (S)

the putative hard-boiled credo:
shoot first, ask questions later

Frequently it is asserted that the hard-boiled style crime tale is inherently antithetical to the classical, puzzle-oriented mystery story associated most strongly with the Golden Age of detective fiction.

I challenge this assertion.

Notable instances of true detection can be found both in Dashiell Hammett's pioneering hard-boiled tales of the doings of his tough Continental Detective Agency operative, "the Continental Op," as well as in the "Nameless Detective" stories of Bill Pronzini, a modern master in the hard-boiled school who has never looked down his nose at "mere puzzles."

Yet the short works by both men also offer instances where a puzzle is combined with the sort of greater literary depth associated with mainstream literature.  That puzzles and literary depth have been mutually exclusive neither in the Golden Age of detective fiction nor in more recent times is demonstrated in the best tales by these two fine writers.

Dashiell Hammett memorably burst on the crime lit scene in 1923 with the publication in The Black Mask of the first of his Continental Op stories (for a fascinating, very detailed look at these stories as puzzles see Mike Grost's analysis of them).  Hammett's three earliest Op tales, published within two weeks of each other, are "Arson Plus," "Slippery Fingers" and "Crooked Souls."  All three works are straightforward detective stories.

the presence of ratiocination in hard-boiled tales
can be lost in blinding hails of gunfire,
but it nevertheless can be found
by those keeping focus

"Slippery Fingers," the most derivative of the three tales, bears a marked resemblance to R. Austin Freeman's forensic detection classic, The Red Thumb Mark (1907).  For its part, "Arson Plus" recalls the sorts of tricks used in the novels of Austin Freeman disciple Freeman Will Crofts, a British railway engineer turned mystery writer.  Crofts had made a great splash a few years earlier with his landmark intensively detailed police novel, The Cask (1920), and by 1923 he had produced three additional popular works of detective fiction: The Ponson Case (1921), The Pit Prop Syndicate (1922) and The Groote Park Murder (1923).  "Crooked Souls," the third in Hammett's initial trio of Op stories, is the most original of the group, but it too is built upon a strong puzzle plot.

In his influential introduction to a 1974 collection of Continental Op tales (The Continental Op, still in print), Steven Marcus takes a different view from the one I have expressed above, contending that there is a fundamental difference between the crime fiction of Hammett and classic puzzle-oriented detective fiction, the latter embracing rationality and the former rejecting it:

The typical "classical" detective story--unlike Hammett's--can be described as a formal game with certain specified rules of transformation.  What ordinarily happens is that the detective is faced with a situation of inadequate, false, misleading, and ambiguous information.  And the story as a whole is an exercise in disambiguation--with the final scenes being a rational demonstration that the butler did it (or not); these scenes achieve a conclusive, reassuring clarity of explanation, wherein everything is set straight, and the game we have been party to is brought to its appropriate end.  But this...is not what ordinarily happens in Hammett or with the Op.

In a 1997 interview ( Hard-Boiled Writing from a Private Eye: A Conversation with Steven Marcus ), Professor Marcus explains what he believes "ordinarily happens...with the Op."  In his analysis, the Op's explanations of the mysterious events that have beset him are not necessarily any more credible than those put forth by the putative criminals:

When the Op comes into a situation, a number of people give him accounts of what happened. These accounts do not make a great deal of sense and may, in fact, contradict one another. The Op begins to set these stories against one another, to take them apart--to use a fashionable word, to "deconstruct" them. Then he starts substituting alternative stories--stories that he has made up, stories that he has figured out, stories that he thinks are plausible for the characters with whom he is dealing. Now, the interesting thing is that most of the time the stories that he substitutes don't make any more sense morally or rationally than the ones that the people who are either guilty of a crime or involved with a crime tell him. Through one means or another, he usually finds the crook, but it is not clear that the story which he has concocted is any more accurate--or, shall we say, any less fictional--than the stories put forward by the people whom he will subsequently turn over to the law for punishment. 

I find that Professor Marcus' description of the Op tales does not really correspond with what I see in many of them.  A goodly number of Hammett Op stories, including the ones I discuss in this piece, actually have ratiocinative clarity (notably, not one of the nine stories I have selected for discussion is found in Marcus' 1974 Continental Op collection, although six of them do appear in the 2001 Library of America collection, also edited by Steven Marcus).

One point we should recall is that as a former "tec" himself Hammett had great authority with his readership.  Surely part of the appeal of many of the Op tales for 1920s readers was the feeling Hammett gave them that they were following a "realistic" crime investigation. Pertinent to this point, both the Library of America collection and that by Coyote Canyon Press (Detective Stories) include Hammett's 1923 The Smart Set article, "From the Memoirs of a Private Detective."

My favorite bit from Hammett's "Memoirs" is this mordant observation:

The chief of police of a Southern city once gave me a description of a man, complete even to a mole on his neck, but neglected to mention that he had only one arm.

But Hammett also delivers more strictly serious pronouncements, such as: 

Even where the criminal makes no attempt to efface the prints of his fingers, but leaves them all over the scene of the crime, the chances are about one in ten of finding a print that is sufficiently clear to be of any value.

In his Op tales, we often find Hammett, through his lead  character, giving similar tips about the tec biz to his readers.  Here for example is some expert wisdom from "Mike, Alec, or Rufus":

An identification of the sort the janitor was giving isn't worth a damn one way or the other. Even positive and immediate identifications aren't always the goods.  A lot of people who don't know any better--and some who do, or should--have given circumstantial evidence  a bad name.  It is misleading sometimes.  But for genuine, undiluted, pre-war untrustworthiness, it can't come within gunshot of human testimony.

Sounds to me like the Op is talking up the possibility of finding "reassuring clarity" here!

In "Arson Plus," the Op is called in to investigate a case of possible arson and murder.  The Op's investigation and the criminal gambits are so classical in form that the tale easily could be resituated in an English village and investigated by Agatha Christie's Miss Marple (okay, minus the car chase and gunshots at the end).

There are some bits that are all Hammett, however.  The brief appearance of "a scrawny little man named Philo" who stutters "moistly" is rather amusing when one considers that Hammett would scathingly review S. S. Van Dine's debut Philo Vance detective novel, The Benson Murder Case (1926), a few years later.  Like him or not, the affected Philo Vance is one of the mystery genre's great dilettante gentlemen detectives, a world away in social type from Hammett's all-professional, fat and fortyish Op.

Hammett no doubt agreed with Ogden Nash that Philo Vance
--and likely his creator as well--
deserved a good kick in the pance

Also of note is the Op's casual spurning of traditional love interest, when presented with a lovely woman--a potential suspect--in the case:

I had to wait three-quarters of an hour for Mrs. Evelyn Trowbridge to dress.  If I had been younger, or a social caller, I suppose I'd have felt amply rewarded when she finally came in....But I was a busy, middle-aged detective, who was fuming over having his time wasted; and I was a lot more interested in finding the bird who struck the match than I was in feminine beauty.

Although "Arson Plus" in form is a traditional puzzle story, the above quotation indicates an aspect of it that must have seemed so compelling and fresh to American readers in 1923: the language.  It sounds like real American people, not storybook characters.  Compare Hammett's writing with the rather prissy description of an underworld den from a cumbrously titled 1929 American detective novel, The Strange Disappearance of Mary Young (by Milton M. Propper):

Pop Ashby's was a rooming-house, a saloon, and a dance hall combined: and it was something of a blot upon the record of Philadelphia's law and order.  The most vicious denizens of the underworld frequented its rooms, and the lowest dregs of humanity could be found there.  The evil that was there hatched would horrify the average citizen and cause a widespread demand for its destruction, and destruction it undoubtedly deserved.

No one reading the above passage, surely, would imagine that the author (only 22 when he wrote it!), talented mystery plotter though he was, had actual experience with the squalid locale about which he was writing.  With Hammett, on the other hand, one can easily believe the author had first-hand knowledge of everything about which he wrote.

"Arson Plus" is a good tale (though there is one question that surprisingly goes unasked by the usually incisive Op), but "Crooked Souls" is even better, Hammett's first great Op classic of the crime genre.  As the evocative title indicates, here Hammett already evinces more interest in character.  Where "Arson Plus" is strictly a crime problem story, "Crooked Souls" also is a crime story about people with problems.

A tale of kidnapping and family dysfunction, "Crooked Souls" introduces the first in Hammett's long gallery of overbearing, ruthless and predatory millionaire businessmen, one Harvey Gatewood.  "He had made his several millions by sandbagging everybody that stood in his way," the Op matter-of-factly informs his readers of Mr. Gatewood.

Gatewood's mansion is the sort associated with snobbish English country house mystery tales, but the domicile is sardonically described without reverence by the distinctly unawed Op:

At the Gatewood residence I found butlers, second men, chauffuers, cooks, maids, upstairs girls, downstairs girls, and a raft of miscellaneous flunkies--he had enough servants to run a hotel.

There is certainly action in "Crooked Souls":

Coming silently to the door of apartment 202, I listened.  Not a sound.  This was no time for hesitation.  I pressed the bell-button.

As close together as the tapping of three keys under the fingers of an expert typist, but a thousand items more vicious, came three pistol shots.  And waist-high in the door of apartment 202 were thee bullet holes.

The three bullets would have been in my fat carcass if I hadn't learned years ago to stand to one side of strange doors when making uninvited calls.

But there is also plenty of ratiocination by the Op.  "How'd you rap to it?" the Op is asked at the end of the tale, after he has rounded up the criminals (in the process of said rounding up deadpanning the immortal line, "Get up and receive company"). "Several ways," the Op answers--and then lists them.  Unlike Professor Marcus, I gather, I find that the Op's solution makes both rational and moral sense.

"Night Shots," "Who Killed Bob Teal?" and "Mike, Alec, or Rufus" (also known as "Tom, Dick, or Harry") were not included by Professor Marcus in the LOA edition of Hammett short stories, though each is a cracking good tec tale.  Fortunately all three works are found in the Coyote Canyon Press edition of Hammett detective stories as well as Vintage Books' Nightmare Town collection.

"Night Shots," which finds the Op on hand to find out who tried to kill another of Hammett's venal and ornery millionaires, offers a clever hard-boiled variant on the classical closed setting, country house mystery story:

The house was of red brick, large and square, with a green slate roof whose wide overhang gave the building an appearance of being too squat for its two stories; and it stood on a grassy hill, well away from the country road upon which it turned its back to look down on the Mokelumne River.

Mokelumne River

"Who Killed Bob Teal?"--about the murder of one of the Op's fellow ops--as the title suggests is another straightforward problem story.  At the end, the Op gives another cogent, step-by-step explanation of his deductive process.  "With all that to go on," he confidently declares, "the rest was duck soup."

"Mike, Alec, or Rufus," which concerns a robbery in an apartment building, offers something in the way of a locked room problem (just how did the thief get out). The solution would have done any classical British detective story writer proud. We also get the great sarcastic and cynical line, "This sounded too much like a movie subtitle to be very promising."

In a slightly later story, "Creeping Siamese," Hammett has a lot of fun with the "Oriental vengeance" motif from Wilkie Collins' great Victorian mystery novel The Moonstone, as the Op is presented with a dead world traveler on the Agency's doorstep.  The Op's boss, the "Old Man," turns out to be even more phlegmatic than the Op himself:

The Old Man's voice and smile were as pleasantly polite as if the corpse at his feet had been part of the pattern on the carpet.  Fifty years of sleuthing have left him with no more emotion than a pawnbroker.

The Op is skeptical of any role played in the murder by "creeping Siamese":

"Don't be too hard on him," I told O'Gar.  "Being around movies all the time has poisoned his idea of what sounds plausible."

Once again, the practical Op does some solid detection and solves the problem quite satisfactorily.

"Creeping Siamese" is more cerebral than
one might think from this cover

All the stories discussed above are extremely enjoyable both as cerebral puzzle stories and as visceral tales of crime.  Yet for my money Hammett's two greatest true detective stories are "The Scorched Face" and "The Gutting of Couffignal."  Both are tours de force of hard-boiled short crime fiction (both are available in the 2001 Library of America edition and the collection The Big Knockover, currently available from Vintage Books).

In "The Scorched Face," the Op investigates a complex case involving disappearances and suicides of wealthy society matrons and debutantes.  There's much to like in this tale: a good problem, lots of action, a quality of real pathos and an interesting situation and characters.  The hard-nosed Op comes off as surprisingly empathetic here and Hammett manages to stage a brilliant last-line revelation of near O'Henry level proportions.  Bill Pronzini, who includes "Face" in his Hard-Boiled anthology, sees this tale as one of the three or four best Op stories, in part for what he calls the "the sharp surprise stinger in its final sentence."

In his and Marcia Muller's "Aficionado's Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction," 1001 Midnights (1986), Pronzini also highly praises "The Gutting of Couffignal," particularly for its "terrific atmosphere of menace and suspense." This brilliantly titled story about the brutal assault by a pack of ruthless crooks on a wealthy and privileged island community (the Op is on hand guarding wedding presents) indeed is splendidly menacing and suspenseful, but the intellectual problem Hammett offers in the tale is tops as well.

At the end of the story the Op lays out no less than twelve points that led him to his stunning deduction, and the whole chain of reasoning is strong and impressive. Further, Hammett manages another kicker of a last line and the entire climax is superbly managed (more can't be said without spoiling the story).  "Couffignal" doubtless would make my personal top ten list of favorite detective stories.  It is a brilliant piece of crime literature, indicative of how a bold and talented detective fiction writer can expand the artistic boundaries of the mystery genre without collapsing the basic puzzle framework.

In Part Two of this piece I will look at how the hard-boiled mystery tale has been treated by a modern master, Bill Pronzini.

Note: My first Then and Now blog piece concerned the detectives of Freeman Wills Crofts and Ian Rankin.  See Good Cop, Bad Cop --The Passing Tramp

Stock-taking

Time, I felt, for The Passing Tramp to do a bit of stocktaking of recent and forthcoming work:

I have written introductions to forthcoming editions by Coachwhip Publications (about which see All Hail Max! my review of Coachwhip's Ernest Bramah Max Carrados short story collection) of three J. J. Connington (Alfred Walter Stewart) Sir Clinton Driffield detective novels: Murder in the Maze (1927), The Castleford Conundrum (1932) and The Tau Cross Mystery/In Whose Dim Shadow (1935).  These are limited to American distribution.  If sales are good more titles may be made available and the distribution widened, I hope.  These titles should be available in a few weeks.

I also have a short book on another mystery author that will appear by April, I hope.  I will have more details in a few weeks.

My recent essays "J. J. Connington on Detective Fiction: The Gould-Stewart Correspondence, September 1935-December 1936" and "T. S. Eliot: Detective Fiction Critic" appear in volumes 61 and 62 respectively of CADS (Crime and Detective Stories).  These issues can be ordered from the editor, Geoff Bradley, through his email address, Geoffcads@aol.com.

My fifty-four page CADS Supplement, Was Corinne's Murder Clued? The Detection Club and Fair Play, 1930-1953, also can be ordered through the above email address.  I believe the individual issues and the pamphlet each cost about 10-12 U.S. dollars with air mail.  Corinne is, I believe, the longest piece ever published on England's venerable Detection Club.

Finally, May 31 is the listed publication date for my book with McFarland Press, Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961.  See here for my book's McFarland page.  I plan to blog a bit more on these authors as we get nearer to the actual publication date.  In addition to the material on these three authors, there is a great deal of detail on the English detective novel in general.  Nearly ten years of research and reading when into this book, so that should give you some idea!

Happy reading!  I will be back soon with Part Two in my Then and Now series: a discussion of the short stories of past master Dashiell Hammett and modern master Bill Pronzini.  After that will be the commencement of yet another series: Crippen & Landru Cavalcade, wherein I review a different book each installment  by the exquisite mystery short story publisher, Crippen & Landru.  One of the Pronzini books I write about, in fact, was published by Crippen & Landru.  The late and great Edward D. Hoch will be the first author I discuss in this series, followed by Ross Macdonald.  Finally, there will be another in-depth exploration of the life and work of a neglected Golden Age traditionalist mystery writer, another American.

Busy weeks ahead for The Passing Tramp! I hope you enjoy the stuff I bring back from my travels.