Lateshows

by Frank Moorhouse

  He told me that he is forty years old and has three children. The oldest is eleven. This tallies with the dedication in his and Faye’s books.

  He decided to write full-time two and a half years ago and has been winding down his practice as a child psychologist over that time. He points out that as a clinical psychologist he couldn’t just drop his patients and some of his child patients now come to him as young adults. He had struggled to get published for thirteen years.

  His books have done very well and he will publish another Alex Delaware novel this October entitled Time Bomb. He said that he and his wife ‘critique’ each other’s work and are collaborating on a ‘comedic’ novel. This is California-talk.

  He said that he and Faye have no trouble living together as writers. ‘Only a writer understands a writer,’ he said. ‘Who else would understand why you get up at three a.m. and begin making notes?’

  He did not do a course in creative writing and, surprisingly for an American, he has reservations about them unless the teacher of the course is exceptional. He did major in English at university. He thinks most good crime writers did something else in life before becoming crime writers. He thought that writing courses damaged idiosyncrasy.

  He gives much attention to plot so as ‘not to cheat the reader’ but his interest is in character and motivation.

  He has contacts within the LAPD but said that crime writers ‘know where to go to research their work’.

  He tries to write a book a year.

  I said, ‘Now we come to the sensitive part of any writer interview.’

  There was a slight pause as he readied himself.

  ‘What computer do you use?’ I asked.

  He said he uses an IBM PC but with an esoteric word processing program called Einstein Writer designed by a friend. But he is not a computer buff. ‘I wrote three books on a typewriter before going across to a computer,’ he said. ‘I do find that I have to revise more on the computer because the writing on a computer is less deliberate.’

  He agreed that computers had taken the place of tax avoidance as the subject most talked about by writers now. I didn’t reveal my strange economic position.

  He was defensive about his use of a computer. This is something that I’ve found among writers who fear that the technology would degrade their art.

  ‘Having written three books on a typewriter, I felt I’d earned the right to a computer. But the computer doesn’t give you talent.’

  I segued my way into the kernel of the interview. I suggested that Thomas Harris was perhaps a pseudonym.

  ‘I’m flattered,’ Kellerman said. ‘I’m a great admirer of Thomas Harris.’

  I quoted the evidence I had amassed. ‘What about the way both books use the highly unusual word segued?’

  He couldn’t explain that.

  ‘The Butcher’s Theater came about a year before The Silence of the Lambs,’ he said. ‘I had long been interested in setting a book in Jerusalem. A horrid crime in a holy city.’

  A check of the publishing history shows that both books came out in 1988. They could not have read each other’s work.

  I said I wasn’t suggesting that either had been influenced by the other.

  ‘It is strange,’ Kellerman conceded. ‘I don’t know Harris. I’ve never met him. He is a bit of a recluse. Lives down in South Carolina.’

  I had never heard of a reclusive newspaper man.

  Kellerman said that there were a number of serial murder books around that year, including Pattern Crimes by William Bayer, which curiously was also set in Jerusalem.

  ‘There were startling similarities between Bayer’s book and mine. That was commented on by the press here.’ I felt Kellerman was pointing me away from my inquiries.

  I pressed him again about Harris.

  Kellerman said that Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs was based on the celebrated Gein Case, which was also the basis of the film Psycho. Gein was a murderer and necrophiliac who also robbed graves and tanned human skins.

  I quizzed him about whether he knew anyone who knew Harris.

  ‘No one sees him much,’ Kellerman said, avoiding a direct answer.

  Obviously this line of questioning was leading nowhere.

  It seemed that I would now need to track down the ‘reclusive’ former newsman, Thomas Harris, whom no one sees much.

  III

  Further and Deeper Confusion Surrounding

  Crime Writer Harris: Some Fascinating

  Elucidation.

  I want to thank all those club members who offered me back problem remedies. My back is now perfectly healthy. Yes, I have tried the half push-up. No, I do not think I will try hanging from my ankles with ten kilo weights in my hands. I have continued with the prescribed drugs because they make me feel deliriously good.

  Secondly, I wish to clarify the term secretor. A barrister friend tells me that secretor is not simply someone who leaves a trace of body fluid of one sort or another at the scene of a crime, but is a person having those blood groups which show up in body fluid tests. For some reason known only to God, not all blood groups show up in testing body fluids (other than blood). Those whose blood groups show up are called secretors.

  Hardly any biographical information was available about Harris. When I cross-questioned Kellerman he said that he didn’t know Harris and that Harris was a ‘bit of a recluse’ and lived ‘somewhere down in South Carolina’.

  The only biographical note about Harris is a couple of sentences buried at the back of Black Sunday which says that Harris is ‘native of Mississippi’.

  His Australian publisher, Louise Adler of Octopus, and her publicity people were strangely reticent about providing anything at all about Harris although she seemed willing to talk to me about back problems. Maybe I called on Jewish Sabbath.

  I was stumped. Then while sitting in the Fine Bouche with a corporate lawyer friend, I noticed the legendary Paul Hamlyn, the owner of Octopus Books worldwide, dining with a friend. Paul Hamlyn, in a sense, owns Harris.

  We were invited to join his table and I asked him about Harris.

  ‘I have never seen this man Harris,’ said Paul, who is UK-based and who has been one of the most influential people in international publishing over the last twenty-five years and should know. He did not know if Harris was in fact Kellerman although it wouldn’t surprise him. Nothing about writers surprised Paul Hamlyn. He would check.

  He became uneasy as I continually brought the conversation back to the Kellerman/Harris mystery. My lawyer friend suggested I needed a rest and that we leave. She and some of the staff helped me from the restaurant into a cab. It was not my back this time but my legs.

  That week, no replies came from requests for information about Harris from overseas sources. However, at the club I received a facsimile transmission from the indefatigable Bookseller and Reader Nicholas Pounder. Pounder leads the Push Who Believe Harris Exists.

  The facsimile transmission read: ‘Follows some material I’ve put together over the past couple of days. I am urged by some of my informants (those Southern gentlemen who have laid hand and eye on the man in question [i.e. Harris]) to get money onto the table on their behalf, but friends don’t do that. Do they?’ I assumed this referred to gambling.

  Followed some ‘biographical’ material which now claimed that Harris was ‘born in Tennessee’.

  We have this Harris wandering around the South – South Carolina, Mississippi, now Tennessee.

  Followed some more ‘biographical’ information sent by Pounder: he has Harris going to Daylor University, a co-ed university affiliated with the Southern Baptist Church in Texas. So now we’re in Texas.

  Pounder would have us believe that the state of Texas and the Southern Baptist Church could produce the world’s most notorious writer of transsexual mutilation fiction.

  Followed some more material: ‘Worked up from a copy boy to police reporter.’ This is a biographical cliché, typical of a blurb writer’s idea o
f a colourful background describing journalists of the Old School. If a hack was to invent a biographical background for a pseudonymous writer it would be copy-boy-to-police reporter.

  But follows now two new names: ‘With fellow newsmen Sam Maull and Dick Riley he researched his first novel Black Sunday.’

  Hello. I find no credit to Sam Maull and Dick Riley in the book Black Sunday. What we have here is The Ploy of the Forking Trail. Throw in more suspects. More names, suggestions of co-authorship.

  Or a suggestion that Harris is an alias for Maull and Riley?

  Or are Maull and Riley and Harris inventions of Kellerman? This gang of beer-drinking Texas/ Mississippi/Tennessee/South Carolina police rounds reporters, Good Old Boys, sitting around making up a best seller. Isn’t that a cliché of the crime fiction writer? We like to think that a bunch of hard-living newspaper men from police rounds can write a best seller – they like to think like that. Every police rounds reporter I have ever worked with dreams of writing a best seller. Name one who has.

  Disingenuously, Pounder referred me to the Bureau of Information Resources, Division of Vital Record and Public Health Statistics in Jackson, Mississippi, ignoring the information that the so-called Harris was allegedly born in Tennessee.

  Follows a further suggestion that Harris really lives in Italy (unsourced). Ho ho.

  I continue faxing the US for Harris’s address or his agent’s name but get no response. Compare this with the alacrity that we had Kellerman on the telephone, Jewish Sabbath or no Jewish Sabbath.

  I next receive an urgent fax from the remarkable writer Jean Bedford, who wishes to point out ‘… that the American crime writer James Ellroy uses the word segue five or six times – overuse if you ask me – in his book The Big Nowhere but in this book there is also a minor character, a lawyer, called Jake Kellerman. There is a cover blurb on my edition written by Jonathan Keller man, praising the book.’

  She also notes that ‘in Thomas Harris’ first book, Black Sunday, his main female Arab guerrilla’s first name is Dahlia. James Ellroy’s best-known book is The Black Dahlia.’

  Jean signs off by saying, ‘I leave the obvious conclusion to you.’

  I think about this for some time but decide that I’m not sure yet what the obvious conclusion is that she has left me with.

  Finally, though, I confront the situation by laying down a challenge. (I think I have picked up the challenging-and-betting style from the world of crime writing.) I say that I will go to Italy, if that is indeed where Mr Harris lives, and talk to him. In fact, I will go anywhere in the world to resolve this mystery.

  In response to my challenge I receive a fax from Janklow and Nesbit Associates, Madison Avenue, New York. The fax reads: ‘Thank you for your telefax of today to Morton Janklow, who has asked me to respond. Mr Harris is unavailable for interviews and must regretfully decline your request. Sincerely, Lydia Wills.’

  Now the conclusion is obvious. Someone is hiding something. Only time and history now will reveal what it is they are hiding and who it is that is doing the hiding.

  For the moment, let us assume there is a Harris and there is a Kellerman and that they are different writers. What are we to make of the similarities of style and vocabulary, subject, preoccupations and detail in the works of Kellerman and Harris?

  The outstanding Australian crime writer Peter Corris has himself kindly written to me at length about the Kellerman/Harris mystery and sheds some light on it in a most unusual direction.

  Readers will recall that both Kellerman and Harris books use the very unusual musical expression segue. This had been my first clue.

  ‘I was intrigued by “segue” myself,’ writes Corris. ‘I struck it first in James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere (and had to look it up). Ellroy is another American slash writer, best known here for a book on an unsolved LA murder/dismemberment case, The Black Dahlia.’

  Let us pause here for a second. Note that Corris, the professional, introduces us to the correct terminology. I have been calling these writers ‘mutilation writers’. The term is slash writer. Thank you. Against any inclination or interest, I am now elbow-deep in the world of slash writing, mutilation, dismemberment, body fluids, secretors, flenching and pellis-mania. Dear god. When can I get on with my life and find true love?

  Corris goes on: ‘Two questions arise. 1. Why does “segue” get such heavy use from slash writers? 2. Who will be the first Australian writer to use the word?’

  Corris adds, ‘I thought of using it myself in a recent book but decided not to.’

  Then he too, like Pounder, talks of ‘having a bet’ on it.

  Why do these crime writers and crime readers talk about betting all the time? Do they like to link themselves to the Good Old Boy image of poker schools, crap games and beer-drinking?

  I drink beer but I don’t bet.

  The Corris letter (written on a Toshiba T1200 hard disk with Wordstar 4) rang bells for me.

  Assuming there is a Kellerman, a Harris and a writer called Ellroy, and they all use the word segue, a strange solution to the mystery offers itself.

  Crime writing, more than other genres maybe, is exposed to linguistic viruses. The crime writers are infecting each other.

  I refer you also to the remarks of Professor Stephen Knight, a world expert on crime writing. He told us at the start of this investigation that when reading a batch of new crime fiction for review he sometimes felt that it was all written by the same author.

  I now want to refer you back to the Corris letter. There is something arresting and curious about this letter.

  Corris says, ‘Who will be the first Australian writer to use the word?… I thought of using it myself.’

  He reveals that he is fighting off a virus. He makes it sound as if he is resisting a cold.

  Journalism, too, is vulnerable to verbal viruses. We have words which spread through the vocabularies of reporters and commentators. Politicians also catch verbal viruses.

  There has to be a ‘first contact’. With the mythology of AIDS there is an airline steward who is called Patient Zero. A reporter or politician or crime writer picks up the word virus usually from a specialist and finds that word irresistible – something like a cough or sneeze – and has to be used again and again. Other communicators become infected.

  Eventually the virus is isolated by communication doctors – those writers who like to write about ‘misuse and abuse’ of language in other writers. They isolate a virus and curse it. They work as witch doctors, witch writers – and the word or phrase is exorcised from the language.

  These writers are the sort of person who is forever decrying ‘Americanisms’, as if a refreshing, fancy, vogue word borrowed from another culture is a linguistic crime.

  Our evidence shows that crime writers become infected by viruses other than the verbal – they pick up social preoccupations and fashions also. Probably because of the life they lead and the people they mix with.

  More, it suggests that crime writers are not so much ‘masters of the criminal mind’, are not closely dependent on the criminal rhythms or necessarily close to the ‘crime world’ – they are instead finely tuned to the world of crime writing.

  They are breeding from their communal spawn in their own narrative breeding tank.

  This is not a put-down of crime writers. All fiction (except the first oral tale) is blended from other books, other stories, the oral tradition, together with some original genesis. Maybe it is more obvious in crime writing because the conventions are tighter.

  It is more complicated than that. Raymond Chandler, for instance, invented a criminal argot. He made up the expressions Big Sleep, meaning death, The Persuader, meaning a handgun, and other terms. Criminals sometimes took their vocabulary from crime writers. The words then found their way into other crime fiction.

  To even talk of ‘verbal viruses’ is to borrow from the language system of immunology now in the mainstream language because of AIDS. Andrew Feitelson has a theory that
the immune system is a metaphor for the post-modern condition. We fear not only that our own bodies’ immune systems are failing but that the planet’s immune system is failing. Andrew further suggests that the knowledge of the dangers to the immune system and to the planet is itself creating a form of stress. The stress of knowledge.

  THE MOVIE

  Working With Makavejev

  This is a story about how the flow of life is made into stories, how stories become films, how the making of stories and films itself becomes stories, and how stories become the flow of life.

  The story begins in 1960 when I was a restless, uncomfortably married, young, d-grade reporter in Wagga Wagga, a sheep and wheat town in New South Wales, Australia, working on the Daily Advertiser. My wife and I went to a party at the Country Club put on by the Wagga Wagga Young Liberals, the sons and daughters of the town’s business people. It was a come-as-a-bohemian party. I’d left the city to escape bohemia. I’d come to the country to find rural harmony. Anyhow, I didn’t have trouble with the costume. It was in my luggage. At the party I met an American who turned out to be an executive of Coca-Cola out from Atlanta to help set up Coca-Cola franchises in Australia. As a young socialist I had an obligatory argument with him about Coca-Cola’s wasting of world resources while people starved. Although I couldn’t admit it then, I found him more interesting than anyone else at the party. A few years later this meeting was turned into a short story called ‘The Coca-Cola Kid’. My records show it was completed in February 1969 and won the Henry Lawson short story competition in 1970. It was the starting point for a book which was to become The Americans, Baby. For a time an earlier version of this book was called The Coca-Cola Kid, and was in fact accepted for publication at Queensland University Press but vetoed by the then Vice-Chancellor Zelman Cowen (later Sir Zelman and Australian Governor-General). An expanded and developed assembly of the stories was published in 1972 with the new title. Three years later, although I was no longer married, no longer a d-grade reporter, and no longer in Wagga Wagga, I received a letter which I felt sure would change my life for the better.