The Getaway Car

by Donald E. Westlake

  I guess it would have been better to swing him around with the left hand and sock him with the right, because with the conversation he starts a left that I have to back quick to get away from. There’s one of these single wire railings around the lawn, and I back neatly into it, do a back flipflop, and come down on the base of my neck. The boy dives on me like he dived on the dog. I get hold of the inside of his coat, rip the pocket out, then feel something like a star-shell explode under my left eye. Next thing I have is the box, which I throw at random; the guy is standing over me now and I see him lift his foot back to kick me in the middle of the face. I see him lift his foot back, I repeat; after that, as Shakespeare says, is silence.

  Nothing remains the same—as my waistline keeps reminding me. The vitality of a new genre is partly caused by that very newness. As time goes on, the novelty must inevitably fade, and at that point the genre itself must either fade or find some other kind of vitality, nourishment from a different source. I would like to suggest that in popular fiction, when a new genre moves out of its youth, the vitality necessary to its survival comes in fact from ritual, and, further, that ritual is a kind of poison which inevitably will kill it. Like those poisons which give the human face an appearance of ruddy health while doing their quiet work within the body. Or, more appropriately, like those substances, such as strychnine, which in controlled doses are useful to a body waning in vitality, but which in overdosages or prolonged use inevitably produce death.

  Marshall McLuhan, who said a lot of foolish things, sometimes said interesting things as well, and one thing he said was that it is impossible to describe an environment if you are in it. Environments can only be described from the outside. My own corollary from that would be that we might be able to describe our own environment by inference, if we study similar environments. Coming back to Earth, I would like to spend a moment comparing the hardboiled detective story with the Western. Both forms, of course, are ways of trying to describe a specific world to people who are only slightly familiar with, but fascinated with, that world. The Western described the frontier to the stay-at-homes. The hardboiled detective story described the wreck of society to those who were living on the parts yet afloat. In contrast, the puzzle story is an affirmation of the existence and axioms of an agreed-upon shared social structure, and so is less like the hardboiled story than the Western is.

  The Western began as exaggerated reportage. The penny dreadfuls, the hyped-up exploits of people like Buffalo Bill and Wyatt Earp, were lies and nonsense and tall stories, but the point is that they were lies told by people who knew the truth. The first writers in the genre had been there, out West, out on the frontier among the pioneers, and they had behind them a reality upon which to build when telling the lies they knew would please an audience back East. They might invent gun battles, Indian raids, grizzly bear attacks, some of them even went so far as to invent non-existent animals, but the spirit behind the stories—and the terrain on which the stories were played—were real and alive and vibrant in the writers’ minds. There was a half-conscious truth beneath the lies, and a part of that truth was the writers’ love for the places and the people they were writing about. They even loved the lies, as being a part of the scene—the lies were part of the truth.

  As time went on, though, and as the reality of the West itself changed, that early relationship between the writer and his material had to change. New writers came along who had never walked that ground but who nevertheless wrote the stories. Clarence E. Mulford, writer of the Hopalong Cassidy stories, lived his life in New England and was over fifty the first time he traveled west of the Hudson River. These writers, who hadn’t been there, who hadn’t lived the truth, had nothing to go by but their predecessor’s stories. Their invention could not springboard from the rocks and dust and trails and trees of the actual terrain, but had to develop out of previous fiction. Which is what leads to ritual. In order to be sure not to stray too far from the acceptable—that is, not the real, but what was perceived as real—in order to stay within what the readership would believe, the writers had to tell them things that had already been believed before.

  For instance, in the historical Old West, not every adult male owned a sidearm, a revolver, but among those who did, fewer than one in ten also owned a holster, hanging down there on the right hip. Most men who owned a revolver, if they wanted it with them, carried it either in a pocket or stuck into their belt. But the ritual required not only that all men own revolvers and that all men own holsters, but that all men had practiced at getting the one out of the other very fast.

  Years after the period of the Old West, an ancient survivor of seven barroom shootouts—not much in ritual terms, but a lot in real life—described how he’d done it. He did own a holster, and when he saw that shooting was about to start, he’d reach down and pull the trigger. The bullet would go into the floor, of course, but the main point was the noise. While his opponent tried to figure out whether he’d just been killed or not, this guy would in leisurely fashion draw his revolver and shoot him dead.

  But that sort of reality will never overtake the ritual. And what happens is that the genre becomes increasingly predictable and routinized, until you can never be sure if you’ve read this one already or not. In another example, several years ago there was a paperback fad for gothic romance, and an editor in the field told me one day about a book he was publishing—one of the four gothics from his house that month—that he was truly excited about because it was a bold breakthrough. “The girl isn’t a governess,” he said. “She’s the cook!”

  There was no strength in those gothic romances beyond the ritual, so they soon withered and died. The Western had strength, and survived, and endured, and from time to time the very ritual itself leads to art. I think of Jack Schaefer’s novel Shane.

  From exaggerated reality to ritualized refried fiction to the possibility of art; that’s the Western. How does that illuminate the hardboiled detective?

  In the first place, both the Western and the hardboiled detective story are involved with the same ritual subject: the chivalrous man in an unchivalrous world. That wasn’t exactly what either the penny dreadfuls or the early Black Mask were about, but it became what the rituals were in aid of. And this, of course, takes us directly to Raymond Chandler.

  Hammett was the premier practitioner of the first wave, those who had been there and knew the reality that was their raw material. A decade later, in 1936, Chandler began writing for Black Mask: a bookish, English-educated sort of mama’s boy whose raw material was not the truth but the first decade of the fiction.

  This is not to denigrate Chandler, or at least not to denigrate him very much. The fact is, as time went on, the world continued to change, the first wave of writers were themselves further from their origins, the First World War was buried in the rumbling rumors of the next war to come, Prohibition was ended and replaced by a Depression, and even the social attitudes underwent a further shift; with the Depression, people needed one another more, and needed to believe in commonality rather than isolated individuality. With all these changes, and the passage of time, most of the first-wave writers, including Hammett, simply ran out of steam.

  One of the strangest sequences in fiction occurs in Hammett’s last novel, The Thin Man. Nick and Nora Charles are in a speakeasy called the Pigiron Club, talking with the owner, Studsy, a thug named Morelli, and a few other people. Then we have this:

  An immensely fat blond man—so blond he was nearly albino—who had been sitting at Miriam’s table came over and said to me in a thin, tremulous voice: “So you’re the party who put it to little Art Nunhei—”

  Morelli hit the fat man in his fat belly, as hard as he could without getting up. Studsy, suddenly on his feet, leaned over Morelli and smashed a big fist into the fat man’s face. I noticed, foolishly, that he still led with his right. Hunchbacked Pete came up behind the fat man and banged his empty tray down with full force on the fat man’s head. The fat man fell back,
upsetting three people and a table. Both bar-tenders were with us by then. One of them hit the fat man with a blackjack as he tried to get up, knocking him forward on hands and knees, the other put a hand down inside the fat man’s collar in back, twisting the collar to choke him. With Morelli’s help they got the fat man to his feet and hustled him out.

  Pete looked after them and sucked a tooth. “That goddamned Sparrow,” he explained to me, “you can’t take no chances on him when he’s drinking.”

  Studsy was at the next table, the one that had been upset, helping people pick up themselves and their possessions. “That’s bad,” he was saying, “bad for business, but where you going to draw the line? I ain’t running a dive, but I ain’t trying to run a young ladies’ seminary neither.”

  Dorothy was pale, frightened; Nora wide-eyed and amazed. “It’s a madhouse,” she said. “What’d they do that for?”

  “You know as much about it as I do,” I told her.

  And that’s the truth. The fat man called Sparrow will never reappear in the book. This sequence doesn’t come out of anything, and it doesn’t lead to anything. Its only reason for existing at all is to show that Nick doesn’t know what’s going on anymore, he’s become a visitor to the scene he used to live in. And when I say Nick, I mean Hammett.

  Hammett was a major writer, for a lot of reasons, one of them being that the texture in his writing comes so very much from himself. Writing inside an action genre, where subtleties of character and milieu are not primary considerations, he nevertheless was, word by word and sentence by sentence, subtle and many-layered, both allusive and elusive, delicate and aloof among all the smashing fists and crashing guns. He put himself in his writing, and that makes The Thin Man a very strange read, in that singular way that The Tempest is strange; inside the story, the writer can be seen, preparing his departure.

  A little before the Sparrow sequence, Nick arrives at one of the parties that dot the book, parties he much prefers to the crime-solving he’s supposed to be involved with. The host and hostess are described far beyond their importance to the story, and then there’s a bit of dialogue:

  Halsey Edge was a tall scrawny man of fifty-something with a pinched yellow face and no hair at all. He called himself “a ghoul by profession and inclination”—his only joke, if that is what it was—by which he meant he was an archaeologist, and he was very proud of his collection of battle-axes. He was not so bad once you had resigned yourself to the fact that you were in for occasional cataloguings of his armory—stone axes, copper axes, bronze axes, double-bladed axes, faceted axes, polygonal axes, scalloped axes, hammer axes, adze axes, Mesopotamian axes, Hungarian axes, Nordic axes, and all of them looking pretty moth-eaten. It was his wife we objected to. Her name was Leda, but he called her Tip. She was very small and her hair, eyes, and skin, though naturally of different shades, were all muddy. She seldom sat—she perched on things—and liked to cock her head a little to one side. Nora had a theory that once when Edge opened an antique grave, Tip ran out of it, and Margot Innes always spoke of her as the gnome, pronouncing all the letters. She once told me that she did not think any literature of twenty years ago would live, because it had no psychiatry in it. They lived in a pleasant old three-story house on the edge of Greenwich Village and their liquor was excellent.

  A dozen or more people were there when we arrived. Tip introduced us to the ones we did not know and then backed me into a corner. “Why didn’t you tell me that those people I met at your place Christmas were mixed up in a murder mystery?” she asked, tilting her head to the left until her ear was practically resting on her shoulder.

  “I don’t know that they are. Besides, what’s one murder mystery nowadays.”

  The nowadays, by the way, is also strange in that book. It was published in January 1934, nearly a year after the end of Prohibition, but it contains speakeasies and seems to exist within the Prohibition era. At the same time, it is very aware of the Depression, and contains characters who are much more sophisticated than those in the hardboiled stories of the twenties.

  You notice also the passing reference to literature that will or will not last. The Thin Man is a very sad book, made even sadder by how bravely and smilingly the narrator hides his sadness. Hammett is not leaving the hardboiled detective story. The genre is leaving him.

  Enter ritual, to save the form. Chandler took the tough-guy lingo and smoothed it into a kind of narrative poetry, all baroque images and Weltanschauung. Stylistically, his antecedents are not the Black Mask writers; the clouds he comes out of are Milton’s. “Him there they found squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve,” was written by Milton, not Chandler. In fact, Paradise Lost is a very Raymond Chandler sort of title, isn’t it?

  The English like Chandler better than Hammett because they can understand him more. The ritual is firmly in control. In Hammett, in The Dain Curse, there’s a question about some money a character has, and we get this:

  Rhino said, “Ain’t nobody’s business where I got my money, I got it. I got—” He put his cigar on the edge of the table, picked up the money, wet a thumb as big as a heel on a tongue like a bath-mat, and counted his roll bill by bill down on the table. “Twenty—thirty—eighty—hundred—hundred and ten—two hundred and ten—three hundred and ten—three hundred and thirty—three hundred and thirty-five—four hundred and thirty-five—five hundred and thirty-five—five hundred and eighty-five—six hundred and five—six hundred and ten—six hundred and twenty—seven hundred and twenty—seven hundred and seventy—eight hundred and forty—nine hundred and forty—nine hundred and sixty—nine hundred and ninety-five—ten hundred and fifteen—ten hundred and twenty—eleven hundred and twenty—eleven hundred and seventy. Anybody wants to know what I got, that’s what I got—eleven hundred and seventy dollars. Anybody want to know where I get it, maybe I tell them, maybe I don’t. Just depend on how I feel about it.”

  Now, what the hell is that all about? Chandler would never have done a thing like that. He was always too correct.

  One thing more about The Dain Curse. It was originally published as three separate novelettes in Black Mask, each with its own murders and solution, and the subsequent stitching together is craftsmanship of a very high order, even though the book winds up rather too plot-heavy. Several years ago, a movie producer approached me to write a screenplay of The Dain Curse and I re-read it for the first time in several years, making notes on how a lot of that underbrush could be cleared away and simplified, to make something movie-sized. When I got to the end, I discovered that the one character I had definitely eliminated as extraneous was the murderer. There was also no way to turn that book into a movie, which I told the producer, suggesting he make a movie out of a Hammett story called “The Gutting of Couffignal” instead. He did even better; he got out of the movie business and didn’t make any picture at all. And The Dain Curse was finally done as a mini-series on television, where there was length enough to get it all in. And I thought it was a nice touch that they didn’t cast a hero who looked like Hammett’s descriptions of The Continental Op, they cast someone who looked like Hammett. Tall, thin, white-haired. James Coburn, in clothing to emphasize the similarity. Of course Hammett was the Op, laconic and fatalistic and sure-footed.

  After Hammett and the first-wave writers, Chandler and the second-wave writers also were their characters, but not in the same way. Reality was replaced by fiction, experience replaced by ritual, storytelling replaced by literature. Self-consciousness, which we see setting in in the later Hammett, was there from the beginning with Chandler.

  Chandler also brought in another new element, a smothered, unacknowledged homosexuality. Story forms on male preserves—the Western again, sea stories, war stories, God knows prison stories—are always open to this potential, and the tougher, the more overtly heman, the genre is, the more the tension inevitably is created by this addition of homosexuality. In Chandler, it created a dark chiaroscuro that furnishes much of the fascination of his storie
s, particularly the novels. The world in which Philip Marlowe moves seems more than usually murky, with dark and unexplained patches, with an overriding sense of solitude and sadness unrelated to the plots. The social attitudes of the first wave of the writers—their belief in social disconnectedness, of general untrustworthiness relieved by isolated examples of comradeship—become both more mysterious and more poignant when given a homosexual coloring.

  About the closest this homosexual content ever came to the surface in Chandler’s work is in the first five chapters of The Long Goodbye. Marlowe’s relationship with Terry Lennox, from the moment he picks Lennox up—literally and figuratively—in front of a bar and restaurant called “The Dancers,” is inexplicable in any other way. If this is not a homosexual relationship, what on earth is it?

  I am not suggesting that Chandler was or was not homosexual, only that a homosexual content was one of the elements—along with literariness and world-weariness—that gave his hardboiled stories their texture and fascination, and make them still alive today, more than forty years after they began.

  The Second World War was not good for the private eye. The wandering daughters of bullying rich men seemed less important than before, but what could a detective, no matter how hardboiled, do against the Third Reich? Spies and innocent bystanders were heroes appropriate to the moment—that is, from reality, professional soldiers and citizen-soldiers—and the private eye had to mark time until the war was over.

  The third wave of hardboiled writers hit the beach in 1947. Kenneth Millar started then, and did three novels under his own name before inventing Lew Archer and Ross Macdonald in 1949. So did Donald Hamilton, several years before he would invent Matt Helm. And so did the writer whose first book, published in 1947, began like this:

  I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room. Nobody said a word. They stepped back politely and I could feel their eyes on me.