Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  Tuskanni stood in the open doorway at the top of the stairs, a .38 Colt automatic in his hand, watching as the burly drivers tried to bring down the two brothers—their efforts making as much sense as the termite who was a conscientious objector and went around trying to eat up draft boards!

  All in the same motion, he snap-kicked the man in the right armpit! The knife clattered to the floor as Mace finished the slob off with a mule-kick to his scrotum. Looking like a goof who had just discovered that ice-cream cones are hollow, the man sagged to the floor.

  And if those two passages aren't the essence of alternative literature, I don't know what is.

  9. "In the Name of

  God—Whose Hand?"

  Several women were looking at themselves in the mirrored panels, inserted the entire width of the dance floor, and one of them in shimmering green which displayed a lot of tanned shoulders, and considerably more underneath the shoulders where they begin to swell out and mean something if you like them that way, stopped in front of the table.

  —Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet,

  The Feather Cloak Murders

  With one of those queer kinks common to all lunatics, Damian was not homicidally inclined towards his victim. He might kill him, but it would be a pure inadvertence. He might kill millions of others, maliciously, but Windermaine was required for another and far greater end.

  —Austin J. Small,

  The Avenging Ray

  The novel of suspense—or thriller, as the British call it—has historically been almost as popular among mystery-fiction addicts as the roman policier or the whodunit. Its antecedents are the Gothic novel and the supernatural horror story; in its early years, such writers as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Eden Phillpotts mixed qualities of both with the traditional tale of mystery and detection to create the basic hybrid.

  H. Douglas Thomson, in Masters of Mystery (1931), the first book in the English language to assess crime fiction critically and historically, offers a succinct definition of the thriller and a "recipe" of its three basic ingredients. Thomson's opinions are not always to be trusted, nor are his historical facts; he makes the following gaffe-strewn dismissal of Hammett and Sam Spade, for instance: "Sam Spade, the ex-Pinkerton man of Mr. Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, The Dain Curse, and Red Harvest, is an honest-to-goodness, 100 percent American detective. There does not appear to be much more than this to commend him." But Thomson's comments on the tale of suspense are nonetheless valid.

  The main attraction of the thriller, he says, is "derived from the excitement of the action, from a primitive and pugilistic romance. The first, second and third virtues . . . are, like the orator's, Action. Human life is cheaper in the thriller. The connoisseur has to bear with the 'copious effusion of blood.'" Continuing, Thomson lists the thriller's three ingredients:

  Careful attention to creating "the nerve-wracking atmosphere. Otherwise, there will be no catharsis, and at the best we will be mildly amused."

  A brisk simple narrative, "unvarnished save with horror."

  Exploitation of the dramatic effect. "Forlorn hopes, narrow shaves, last-minute rescues, 'tense' situations, all the frills and furbelows of sensation come under this heading."

  Thomson goes on to document four plots "which the thriller shows a reluctance to abandon"; that may have been true fifty years ago, but contemporary thriller writers have abandoned such gambits as "the daughter of a murdered man determines to avenge her father's murder," and "the rescue of a beautiful girl who has got into the clutches of a criminal gang." Or, at least, the writers of good thrillers have abandoned them. The writers of bad thrillers, like sentimentalists and packrats, never abandon anything they can still get a little use out of.

  One of the favorite ploys of early thriller authors good and bad, which Thomson neglects to mention, is the invention of a supercriminal to terrify the populace, baffle the police, flaunt his villainous ways, perform feats of iniquitous derring-do, and generally make a nuisance of himself. In the 1920s, the most famous of these devilish desperadoes was the Bat—the somewhat deformed offspring of the then-queen of Gothic thrillers, Mary Roberts Rinehart.

  The Bat was first conceived by Mrs. Rinehart as a play in 1918, based on her novel The Circular Staircase; but by her own testimony, in her autobiography My Story (1931), she was worried about her sons who were fighting in World War I and did not have her heart in the creation of bats and archfiends. With two acts completed, she turned the play over to her friend Avery Hopwood, who supplied the third and final act. The Bat was produced in 1920 and ran successfully on Broadway and in road versions for a number of years thereafter. Some audiences howled with laughter when they saw it, Mrs. Rinehart notes, and not just during the moments of planned comic relief. This seems to have mildly depressed her; the play was, after all, conceived as an amusing thriller, not a farce.

  Farce, however, is what it is.

  And farce is what the novel version is, too.

  Published in 1926 and written by Mrs. Rinehart alone, although Hopwood is given a joint byline, The Bat has the rare distinction of being a novel based on a play based on a novel.

  The stage version bears little resemblance to The Circular Staircase, which evidently persuaded Mrs. Rinehart (or her publishers) that the play could be novelized, changing the character names, without subsequent cries of self-plagiarism. And she was right; judging from sales figures, her audience appears to have welcomed The Bat with open wings.

  What elevates the novel to classic status is its consistently maintained high pitch of melodrama. Reading it, one does not envision a play; one envisions a Pearl White silent-movie serial, replete with actors heavily made up and mugging at the camera, the villain in cape and mask and sinister pose, outdoor shots of a howling storm, indoor shots of shadows on walls that resemble bats, hidden rooms, clutching hands, sudden blackouts, and fast and furious action. You can almost hear the creepy organ music playing in the background, full of crescendos. Whatever else may be said about Mrs. Rinehart's literary abilities, she was indeed masterful at the concoction of Gothic melodrama in its purest form.

  The Bat opens with a lengthy commentary on the super-crook's crimes—jewel robberies, bank robberies, six known murders—and the police department's frustrated efforts to put an end to his reign of terror. Among the more feverish descriptive passages, we have:

  "Get him—get him—get him—get him!" From a thousand sources now the clamor rose—press, police and public alike crying out for the capture of the master-criminal of a century—lost voices hounding a specter down the alleyways of the wind. And still the meshes broke and the quarry slipped away before the hounds were well on the scent—leaving behind a trail of shattered safes and rifled jewel cases—while ever the clamor rose higher to "Get him—get him—get—"

  Get whom, in God's name—get what? Beast, man or devil? A specter—a flying shadow—the shadow of a Bat

  The Bat—they called him the Bat. Like a bat he chose the night hours for his work of rapine—like a bat he struck and vanished, pouncingly, noiselessly—like a bat he never showed himself to the face of the day. He'd never been in stir—the bulls had never mugged him—he didn't run with a mob—he played a lone hand and fenced his stuff so that even Ikey the Fence couldn't swear he knew his face. Most lone wolves had a moll at any rate—women were their ruin—but if the Bat had a moll, not even the grapevine telegraph could locate her.

  Columnists took him up—played with the name and the terror—used the name and the terror as a starting-point from which to exhibit their own particular opinions on everything from the immortality of the soul to the merits or demerits of the Lucy Stone League. Ministers mentioned him in sermons—cranks wrote fanatic letters denouncing him as one of the seven-headed beasts of the Apocalypse and a forerunner of the end of the world—a popular revue put on a special Bat number wherein eighteen beautiful chorus-girls appeared masked and black-winged in costumes of Brazilian bat-fur—there were Bat club sa
ndwiches, Bat cigarettes and a new shade of silk hosiery called simply and succinctly "Bat." He became a fad—a catchword—a national figure. And yet—he was walking Death—cold—remorseless. But Death itself has become a toy of Publicity in these days of limelight and jazz.

  (If you conclude from the above that Mrs. Rinehart's favorite form of punctuation was the dash, you are correct. The Bat contains more dashes per page than even a Carolyn Wells novel—no small achievement—to be sure.)

  Next we are introduced to some of the lead players in the melodrama. First we meet Detective Anderson, one of the chief's best men, who has been working on another case and thus hasn't been able to go bat hunting until the present. Then we meet the "indomitable" Miss Cornelia Van Gorder—sixtyfive, longing for some adventure at the end of a quiet, discreet life; Miss Cornelia's comic-relief Irish maid, Lizzie ("'I'm not going to bed! Do you think I want to wake up in the morning with my throat cut?'"); Miss Cornelia's Japanese butler, Billy ("'She no take nap. She out in srubbery shotting."); and Miss Cornelia's favorite niece, Dale Ogden, who has recently fallen in love with someone.

  Miss Cornelia has rented a country house belonging to Courtleigh Fleming, president of the Union Bank, which has just failed because the cashier, a young man named Jack Bailey, has allegedly absconded with most of the funds. Fleming, meanwhile, is reported to have fled to Colorado; his son, Richard, was the one who rented the house to Miss Cornelia.

  She and Lizzie and Billy arrive at the house, which is "two miles from the nearest railroad" and otherwise isolated. No sooner do they settle in than strange things begin to happen: Miss Cornelia receives a note warning her to leave immediately or she'll be killed; prowlers are seen on the premises; Miss Cornelia's Ouija board spells out "BAT," further terrifying the superstitious Lizzie. But Miss Cornelia refuses to be intimidated; the excitement of the mystery appeals to her. She has in her possession a revolver, which for unexplained reasons she purchased two years previously, and proceeds to take some target practice with it. Which is what she is doing when Dale arrives from the city. (" 'Good heavens, child! I might have shot you like a rabbit,' and, overcome with emotion, she sat down on the ground and started to fan herself mechanically with a cartridge.")

  Enter the rest of the principals. First there is Brooks, who purports to be a gardener but who thinks urticaria, rubeola, and alopecia are types of shrubbery ("'Young man, urticaria is hives— rubeola is measles—alopecia is baldness!' "). Then Detective Anderson shows up, having been summoned from the city by Miss Cornelia, who evidently has friends in high places. Then comes Dr. Wells, a local physician who acts in a decidedly peculiar fashion when nobody is paying attention to him; Richard Fleming, Courtleigh's son; a young lawyer friend of Richard's named Beresford; and a bloodied Unknown who has a penchant for turning up at odd moments.

  One of these men, of course, is the Bat.

  And why is the Bat flying around this particular old country house? Because he knows that somewhere inside it is hidden a fortune in cash—the very money Jack Bailey was accused of stealing from Courtleigh Fleming's failed bank, but which Fleming himself stole and hid in the house. How the Bat knows this is uncertain; how we know it is because Mrs. Rinehart has revealed that Brooks isn't really a gardener, or named Brooks, but instead is Jack Bailey, who happens to be the man Dale Ogden fell in love with and who has been brought to the house by Dale in order to protect him from the police and also so he can search for the missing money, which he is convinced is hidden inside a hidden room.

  Clear?

  "'Listen, honey,' " Bailey says to Dale at one point, "'it's like this. Here's the house that Courtleigh Fleming built—here, somewhere, is the Hidden Room in the house that Courtleigh Fleming built—and here—somewhere—pray Heaven—is the money—in the Hidden Room—in the house that Courtleigh Fleming built. When you're low in your mind, just say that over!'"

  "'I've forgotten it already,'" Dale says, drooping.

  More strange and exciting things happen. A second warning note is thrown through one of the French windows, tied around a rock. The lights go out unexpectedly, and a sinister figure slips inside the house and up the rear staircase. Lizzie spies the figure and gives vent to "a piercing shriek that would have shamed the siren of a fire-engine." When Miss Cornelia rushes in, accompanied by Detective Anderson, she accidentally spills hot coffee on Lizzie's foot, causing the maid to dance up and down and squeal hysterically, "Oh, my foot—my foot!"

  Miss Cornelia tried to shake her back to her senses.

  "My patience! Did you yell like that because you stubbed your toe?"

  "You scalded it!" cried Lizzie, wildly. "It went up the staircase!"

  "Your toe went up the staircase?"

  "No, no! An eye—an eye as big as a saucer! It ran right up the staircase—"

  The action at this point becomes frenetic. Richard Fleming, unaware of the hidden room until Dale blurts out Jack Bailey's suspicion that there is one, locates the blueprints of the house, struggles over them with Dale, tosses into the fire all but a portion that reveals the location of the hidden room, and is then mysteriously shot to death for his trouble. Dale hides the blueprint portion inside a dinner roll to keep Detective Anderson from finding it. The image of a bat appears inside a flashlight beam that somebody shines through one of the windows. A dead bat turns up on one of the doorknobs. The telephone line goes dead, yet someone seems to make a call on it a little while later. The Japanese butler uses some jujitsu on Beresford, who has been lurking around outside. And, unobserved by anyone,

  a Hand stole through the broken pane of the shattered French window behind their backs and fumbled for the knob which unlocked the window-door. It found the catch—unlocked it—the window-door swung open, noiselessly—just enough to admit a crouching figure, that cramped itself uncomfortably behind the settee which Dale and the Doctor had placed to barricade those very doors. When it had settled itself, unperceived, in its lurking place—the Hand stole out again—closed the window-door, re-locked it.

  Hand or claw? Hand of man or woman or paw of beast? In the name of God—whose hand?

  Well, it turns Out to be the hand of the bloody Unknown, who makes his first up-front appearance a short while later . . - after the hidden room has been found, the lights have gone out again, Miss Cornelia and some of the others have been locked in the living room, the Bat (complete with mask and cape) has climbed up a ladder from outside and stolen the money that was hidden inside the hidden room, and there has been a fight between Anderson and Dr. Wells. The bloody Unknown knocks on the front door, and when Billy opens it, he falls wounded inside. He had been hit on the head earlier in the garage, that much he remembers; but he hasn't regained all his faculties yet and doesn't know who he is or what he's doing there. This is why he has been stumbling and lurking about the place, hiding behind furniture and flashing his hand.

  Detective Anderson says the bloody Unknown must be the murderer of Richard Fleming and that he must have hidden the stolen money somewhere on the grounds; a few minutes alone with the man, he says grimly, and he'll have the truth. At this point Miss Cornelia cries out that somebody just went through the skylight and out onto the roof, which creates a good deal of excitement and a lengthy offstage chase. Meanwhile, the Unknown remains near Miss Cornelia and regains enough of his senses to filch her revolver when she isn't looking.

  Jack Bailey returns from the chase first, and Miss Cornelia confesses that she didn't really see anyone go through the skylight onto the roof. She believes the stolen money is still inside the house and wanted Detective Anderson outside so she'd have freedom to search. She and Jack and Dale and Lizzie begin to prowl the upstairs, where they find a second body in one of the closets. This corpse is that of Courtleigh Fleming, who did not die after all in Colorado; that was just a ruse concocted by Fleming and his cohort, Dr. Wells, so Fleming could return to the house on the QT, retrieve the stolen money—he stole it in the first place, you see—and exit for South America or some other ex
otic port of call. (Wells, we are told, somehow hauled another body up to Colorado to substitute it for Fleming and thereby complete the death ruse. Ingenuity, thy name is Wells.)

  But who killed the Flemings, père et fils? Jack Bailey theorizes that Courtleigh shot his son and was in turn murdered by Dr. Wells, who wanted the money all for himself. Miss Cornelia has other ideas. Before she tells what they are, however, she wants to search for the missing money.

  In a clothes hamper, they find some books (Little Rosebud's Lover, or the Cruel Revenge is one) and unsoiled clothing that belong to Lizzie. These things were in Lizzie's satchel, meaning that somebody dumped them in order to put something else in the satchel. "Isn't that your satchel, Lizzie?" Miss Cornelia asks, indicating a battered bag she happens to notice "in a dark corner of shadows above the window." And indeed it is. Inside it, of course, is the missing money.

  Lizzie then looks out the window and notes that the barn is on fire. "Fire!" she screams. But before they can all rush out, the bloody Unknown blocks their way and throws down on them with Miss Cornelia's revolver. "Not a sound if you value your lives!" he says. "In a moment or two, a man will come into this room, either through the door or by that window—the man who started the fire to draw you out of the house."

  The suspense, lest it become too great for the reader's heart, is not allowed to linger. The ladder, up which the Bat climbed earlier, is still propped outside the window, and a black bulk appears atop it and stands outlined against the glow of the fire. "The Bat, masked and sinister on his last foray!" As soon as the Bat enters the room, the Unknown and Jack Bailey jump him and take his gun away. Then Bailey rips off the black silk handkerchief that hides the master crook's face—