Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  With a few exceptions, there was not quite so much relentless vigilantism in other private eye novels of the thirties and forties. Most writers seemed to prefer the freewheeling, wisecracking style which evolved in the pulps, to no small degree because of a consistent misunderstanding that the wisecrack was an integral factor in the success of such writers as Hammett and Chandler, and of why those writers used the occasional flip remark in the first place. In Chandler's work especially, wisecracks helped mask Philip Marlowe's emotions; they gave him time to think and they helped him put people off their guard. They are a distinct character trait, like picking one's nose in public or drinking four quarts of whiskey a day – not a deliberate attempt on the part of the author to inject either toughness or humor.

  As a result of this misunderstanding, too many private eyes became what can only be called smart-asses, an annoying convention which unhappily continues in the work of some contemporary writers. Among the first wave of thirties smart-asses was one named Tip O'Neil, who stars in James Edward Grant's The Green Shadow (1935).

  According to a biographical sketch at the back of the book, Grant was the son of the Chief Investigator for the State Attorney of Illinois, a former prizefighter, the manager of boxers and a "toe dancer", and the author of a syndicated newspaper column out of Chicago called "It's a Racket," which "led him into a personal acquaintance with most of Chicago's boom-boom boys" and "caused such a stir in the Chicago underworld that several prominent mobsters left town."

  The plot of The Green Shadow can more or less be summed up by quoting the jacket blurb: "The Harding Case was no pushover—even for Tip O'Neil. He could see that the minute he arrived on the scene, for the whole family was screwy from the poker-playing, Scotch-soaked, maiden-aunt Amelia down to Nancy of the round heels, the amateur tart who tried to seduce her father's own investigators while they fought to break the case. Corinne, the other daughter, was the only really normal one of the lot—and she vanished from a crowded city street in broad daylight. Leland, her lover, stacked up all right, or seemed to, till Tip O'Neil got ideas and manhandled his own private skeleton out of the closet. And Paul himself—well, any man who can sit and watch the exquisite torture of another's body and never bat an eye, then roar with laughter when the victim's legs are broken, ought to qualify as patient in a crime clinic, hands down. Tip's right bower, Lilly—and don't get the idea he was one—had it right when he said: 'The whole thing's a cockeyed maze.'"

  Here is Tip O'Neil being a smart-ass:

  "This is Senator Wafflepoop," I said, "here's a tip. There's a couple of New York—or New Jersey—mobbies hanging around the Senate. One fellow is about six foot and a hundred and ninety. . . . Got it?"

  He said: "Yes. By the way, who is this calling?"

  "Philo Vance," I confessed. "The other clown is around five-eight . . . blue eyes, black hair slicked with bear-grease and a mouth that looks like it was cut-in with a ham slicer. Got it?"

  He said: "Just a minute till I get a pencil. Who is this speaking?"

  "Bishop Cannon," I said. "Tell your dummies to watch the little yegg. He's wearing loose, pleated pants which probably means he's got a zipper front and one of those crotch guns. Or don't you hicks keep up with the times?"

  "Who is this?" he asked again.

  "Huey Long," I told him and hung up.

  A second notable quality of the O'Neil/James Edward Grant combo is the fashion in which O'Neil figures his way out of the "cockeyed maze"—the old "bolt of lightning" method refined to an art:

  I shrugged, we shook hands and I left. Just walking around my car to get in a passing cab sloshed a tidal wave of water into my face. As I wiped it away, the whole picture became clear and as usual when a case breaks I began to curse myself for dumbness.

  Then I climbed in and went home to make my pinch. (Italics Grant's.)

  And so it was with the private-detective novel until the late forties, when two completely different writers added new elements to the mystique and produced a pair of original characters. The most important of these writers was, of course, Frank Morrison "Mickey" Spillane, whose first Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury, appeared in 1947. Spillane's own peculiar brand of sex, sadism, and the private eye as avenging angel and self-appointed guardian of democracy struck a responsive chord in a segment of the population already stirred up by the first of the great Communist witch-hunts in 1946. Mike Hammer is Race Williams refined, updated, libidinalized. He is the ultimate vigilante, a warped symbol of rugged individualism and law and order at the point of a gun. There are no wisecracks in Mike Hammer, no nonsense of any kind: when he has a job to do he goes out and does it – relentlessly, implacably. If he was not in love with his secretary, Velda, his one weakness, he would be the perfect killing machine.

  The character of Mike Hammer is nowhere better demonstrated than in One Lonely Night (1951), Spillane's nastiest novel, which pits Hammer against the Red Menace in a bloody paean to "Tailgunner Joe" McCarthy and his ilk. The book begins with Hammer futilely trying to save the life of a frightened woman on a rain-swept bridge ("Maybe you can smack a dame around all you want and make her life as miserable as hell, but nobody has the right to scare the daylights out of any woman") and ends with Hammer rescuing Velda, who has been strung up naked and who is in the process of being tortured, from an MVD stronghold. The way he rescues her is to use a tommy gun to slaughter a roomful of Commies who "slobbered with lust and pleasure . . . even drooled with the passion that was death made slow in the fulfillment of the philosophy that lived under a red flag!" His rationale for the slaughter would be laughable if it were not so terrifying: "I lived only to kill the scum and the lice that wanted to kill themselves. I lived to kill so that others could live. I lived to kill because my soul was a hardened thing that reveled in the thought of taking the blood of the bastards who made murder their business - . . I was the evil that opposed other evil, leaving the good and the meek in the middle to live and inherit the earth!" (Italics Spillane's.)

  As William Ruehlmann says in Saint with a Gun: The Unlawful American Private Eye: "World without end, amen."

  I, the Jury, probably Spillane's most widely read novel, is also an alternative classic. A blood-spattered tale of revenge in which Hammer sets out to find the killer of his best friend, it is riddled with such lines as "Living alone with one maid, a few rooms was all that was necessary" and "It gave me ideas, which I quickly ignored," and amply illustrates Spillane's dubious plotting technique. Two of the murders, for example, take place in a brothel that Hammer has under observation; both the murderess, a woman named Charlotte, and one of the victims are well known to Hammer, and neither has any idea he is watching the brothel; yet both manage to enter by the front door without Hammer seeing either of them. Another murder takes place at a society party with 250 guests; afterward, Hammer dismisses all 250 as suspects because, he says, they all have alibis for the time of the killing. In the final slaying—that is, the final one before Hammer pumps a .45 slug into Charlotte on the last page—Charlotte shoots another woman, Myrna, who is wearing Charlotte's coat; removes the coat, finds Myrna's own coat, shoots a hole through it in exactly the right spot to correspond with the hole in Myrna, and puts the coat on the body; conceals the bullethole in her own coat (how is not explained), as well as keeps the gun and its silencer on her person while the police are on the scene; and later manages to get coat, gun, and silencer off the premises under Hammer's allegedly gimlet eye.

  The best summary of I, the Jury, as critic Francis M. Nevins has pointed out, is by Spillane himself when he has Hammer go to a detective film in Chapter 12 and subsequently call it "A fantastic murder mystery that had more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese."

  Spillane's enormous success in the fifties—his first seven novels are among the top fiction bestsellers of all time—spawned a host of imitators. One of these was Jimmy Shannon, whose only book, The Devil's Passkey, was published in 1952. The hero of this remarkable work is one Ruff Morgan, who, like Mike
Hammer, operates out of New York City. If he is not the least intelligent detective in private eyedom—alongside Morgan, Race Williams is a genius—he must surely be a close runner-up.

  To give you an idea of what "Ruff Boy" is like, this is how the novel opens:

  It's only a fool who doesn't know his own strength, and last night was my night to prove it. I'd just walked into Dave's Place. A dame was sitting by the hat-check counter. When she saw me she got up and said, "Mr. Morgan?"

  I had my mouth open to answer, "Yes," when a big lug staggers out of the phone booth and slams into me.

  "Look where you're going, Buster," I say, brushing him off. But he comes back and tries to use me for a lamppost, whereupon I get a little resentful and touch him one—kinda sharp.

  That's when he jammed my left eye so far back in my head that it went to work with the brains department.

  What transpires after that is a chaotic scramble (the dust jacket calls it "a terrifying, action-packed thriller by an exciting new talent in the suspense field") involving a professor named Magnus Crocker, who has invented a formula for a cheap narcotic called Trilium; a bunch of "malignant czars of crime and vice" who are out to steal the formula; and dead bodies all over the place, most of them having been shot in a hail of bullets. ("Next thing I knew, lead was being slung from one side of the lab to the other. Bullets like a splattering of hail. Men crying out as the hail struck. Hell's hail it was! I saw them dying all around me.")

  There is some sadism, as may be inferred from the foregoing, though Morgan is no Mike Hammer in the teeth-kicking, gut-shooting game. And plenty of sex, too, after a fashion.

  Here, Miss Jerry Selbridge turned on the sprinkler system—something I wasn't prepared for at all. If there's one thing in the world that turns me into a lump of sog it's a woman who cries. I knew only one way to deal with it. Take the gal into your arms. Pat her. Maybe give her a fatherly kiss.

  Somehow, I hadn't thought this one was the kind you could kiss. She and her incompatibility. Silly boy! She began to lean and I found out she had what for to lean on. When our lips met, as the fiction writers say, my temperature was hitting 99° and going up!

  Now I'm not prudish or old-fashioned and I think it's the bunk that business and pleasure can't mix, but—I just wasn't in the mood. Maybe it was the mouse on my glimmer. Maybe I didn't want to take off my dark glasses.

  "Warm for April," I cracked and got up to pour us two slugs of sherry.

  "How do you like my version of the Dance of the Nile, Ruff'!" she whispered in my ear.

  "More!" I said.

  Dames! Out here with seventy people using you for a pushball, they'll do anything! But get 'em in a closed room!

  Kathy's curves went round and round, and I began to think—maybe this was going to be my Midnight on the Ganges with Kathy in my arms.

  "Um . . . mmm," Kathy hummed in my ear.

  "You smell so good, Ruff Boy. You smell like a fondant with perfume inside."

  "More!" says I going into a trance.

  "You taste yummy too."

  "What flavor?"

  "Nut chocolate bar."

  "Tell me more . . ." I murmur in a golden daze.

  A much more accomplished Spillane imitator was John B. West, whose private eye Rocky Steele blasted his way through six novels from 1959 to 1961, all of which were published by Spillane's paperback house, New American Library. Steele, too, is a New York City op and considerably more intelligent and sobersided than Ruff Morgan; neither was he inclined to moon sentimentally over a well-turned ankle or any other well-turned part of the female anatomy. He tended to regard women with a more cynical eye:

  "Private detective Rocky Steele," the cat at the reception desk meowed at me. She sounded like a cat on a back fence at three in the morning, and looked like the same cat twenty-four hours later. Her mug would have soured cream at twenty paces. (Never Kill a Cop)

  She was beautifully undressed in a transparent blue thing she called a negligee, and brother, was it negligent when it came to hiding what she had! From the top of her spun-gold head to the tips of her ruby-red toenails, was pure gold—twenty-four carat gold. I knew she could be a twenty-four carat bitch, too, when she wanted to be, and so did everybody else that new her, but right then, I loved every one of her carats, gold or bitch. (Bullets are My Business)

  Of course, the prospect of imminent sex did make Steele eloquent on occasion.

  Eliko stood there just inside the door, holding it ajar, and she was clad only in a gossamer thing as light and airy as moonbeams, her platinum hair falling in shining cascades around her rose-pink shoulders and sparkling through the moonbeams where a woman's hair should sparkle. She was all platinum, from stem to stern. Those two peaches thrust out from her chest like they were trying to push their way through the moonbeams, and I gave 'em some help. (Cobra Venom)

  That is a fair sampling of West's prose—nothing spectacular, a serviceable imitation of the Daly/Spillane style. His plots involve various and sundry gangsters, treacherous "frails," sympathetic and unsympathetic policemen, wicked government agents, a butler who does do it, and a great deal of violent action and death. His characters are moderately well drawn examples of the type found in dozens of other private-eye novels of the period, including Spillane's; they neither say nor do anything outside the norm and concern themselves not at all with philosophical or sociological matters. All of which might make the Rocky Steele series only mildly interesting if it were not for one fact.

  John B. West was black.

  With the exception of the last title in the series, Death on the Rocks (published posthumously, as were two others; West died in 1960), there are no black characters in the Steele novels. The setting of Death on the Rocks is West Africa, and a black African policeman figures prominently in the action; some attention is also paid to black customs and habits. But the emphasis is on death and destruction as it pertains to Steele and the other white characters.

  This is even more curious in light of West's background. According to a blurb on the back cover of An Eye for an Eye (1959), he "was born in Washington, D.C., and educated at Howard University and Harvard University. He holds five academic degrees. Dr. West is a specialist in the prevention and treatment of tropical diseases, and he has a general practice in Liberia, Africa. He also owns and operates the Liberian Broadcasting Company, is President of the National Manufacturing Company and President of the Liberian Hotel and Restaurant Corporation."

  It is true that black writers were not exactly popular in the fifties, and black detectives were few and far between. There were only three of note in those pre-Virgil Tibbs days: Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, a pair of Harlem cops invented by expatriate black writer Chester Himes; and Touissant Moore, hero of the Edgar-winning Room to Swing (1957) by Ed Lacy, who was white but who had been married to a black woman for a number of years. Yet West made no real attempt to hide the fact of his race. His publishers surely knew he was not a Caucasian. Why such an educated and successful black doctor would want to write slavish, lily-white imitations of Spillane instead of more serious work remains one of mystery fiction's unsolved mysteries.

  The second private eye phenomenon born in the late forties was Shell Scott, a 6-foot-2 inch 200-pound Los Angeles detective with bristly white hair that sticks straight up on his scalp. The new wrinkle that Scott's creator, native Californian Richard S. Prather, added to the mystique is in one sense the antithesis of that wrought by Spillane. Which is not to say that a certain amount of lusty sex and violence, replete with corpses in bunches, cannot be found in each and every Scott caper; the hard-boiled school's influence on Prather is not minute. But whereas Mike Hammer is a cold, hard, humorless individual—a walking time bomb looking for a place to explode—Shell Scott is a happy-go-lucky sort, full of cheer, virility, and what folks used to call piss and vinegar. Prather's gift to the literature of the private investigator is that of "comic vitality," as Larry N. Landrum puts it in his essay on Prather for Twenti
eth Century Crime and Mystery Writers—meaning broad, farcical humor and plenty of it. With emphasis on sex, and plenty of that, too.

  A Scott caper abounds in wisecracks, double entendres, and quite a bit of what is known as bathroom comedy; but there are also occasionally hilarious plot devices, plus enough reductio ad absurdum scenes to delight the satirical minded. Testimony to the fact that. Prather's brand of humor tickled funny bones in the fifties and sixties (and into the seventies) is an aggregate of some forty million books sold. Of course, not everyone thinks Prather is funny—intentionally or otherwise. One person's guffaw is another's yawn. You can reach your own verdict by considering, first of all, the openings to several Scott escapades:

  She yanked the door open with a crash and said, "Gran—" but then she stopped and stared at me. She was nude as a noodle.

  I stared right back at her.

  "Oh!" she squealed. "You're not Grandma!"

  "No," I said, "I'm Shell Scott, and you're not Grandma, either."

  She slammed the door in my face.

  Yep, I thought, this is the right house. (The Wailing Frail)