Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

Ever since the newspapers had blasted his alleged drowning of a beautiful movie starlet, he had been as—nothing! Movie dust! A human thing consigned to a heap of discarded celebrities, for foolish people jumping to conclusions before his trial had warned movie producers that they would no longer allow their families to attend movies which starred him. It was cheap and cruel, but it was the way of the world. And so at this moment he felt out of place in a world where a man made a place for himself, or became a segment of the mud at the feet of people who counted.

  The plot in this one revolves around the roller-derby circuit, some juvenile delinquents, the movie business, and an aspiring actress and all-around "plucky girl" named Macey Love (who at one point fastens a scuba tank between her breasts, floats in a swimming pool, and pretends to be dead in front of a dozen or so people, not one of them with eyesight keen enough to notice the oxygen bubbles from her breathing apparatus). The first time Justin sets eyes on Macey, he's smitten.

  Justin's glance dropped to the gracefully formed cleft which separated breasts made as stout and round as summer melons. Then he appraised the contour of her hips and legs and felt a queerness coursing through his veins—for this was a woman!

  He knows what to say to her, too, in his charming, suave, ex-matinee-idol-and-crooner fashion. "Jeez, baby," he says. "You're really something!"

  Later he sings a song to her, and she gets all excited, and they hurry off under a pier on the beach for several paragraphs of heavy breathing. The result of this is inevitable. Like Justin, Macey is hot-blooded and passionate and knows what she wants. "Oh my beloved darling!" she says softly, excitedly. "Sing to me some more!"

  And so he sings to her some more. All through the book, he sings to her and sings to her. Nothing much else happens, but in no other mystery will you find half so many bedtime lullabies.

  The emphasis in the paperback original of the seventies seemed to be on graphic violence, at least in the series-character category, as previously discussed. The Executioner, the Death Merchant, Nick Carter—these and carbon copies had the highest sales figures of that decade's criminous soft covers. In the mid seventies, an offshoot that likewise became popular was the occult-detective series. These forebears of today's large-scale occult thrillers were similar to the male-action sagas of Pendleton and Rosenberger in their unstinting devotion to blood and maimed flesh, the only appreciable difference being that the righteous heroes went around slaughtering vampires, werewolves, and members of satanic cults instead of gangsters and paramilitary groups.

  One such series was "The Satan Sleuth," authored by the creator of Ed Noon, Michael Avallone, and featuring the unpleasant exploits of Philip St. George, "a man with a mission . . . on the side of the angels, those sentinels of Reason and Goodness who continually must wage war against Satan and his projects."

  In the first of the series, Fallen Angel (1974), St. George vows vengeance on all satanists when a Manson-like group of devil worshipers brutally murders his wife. This particular bunch is led by a pair of individuals who call themselves Wolfman (he has a "grotesque hump" between his shoulder blades) and Dracula, who is as "gay as a green goose when the bare asses were down." St. George methodically tracks them down and obliterates them, initiating such immortal lines in the process as "'Geezis!' Dracula whimpered in a low, girlish voice. 'Let's get the hell out of here!"

  One paperback publisher of the late seventies embraced the more traditional type of mystery and not incidentally followed in the footsteps of the early Ace Doubles by producing a long and impressive list of clinkers. This was Major Books, another southern California venture that was established in 1975 and that apparently went out of business in 1981. During their first few years, they published dozens of mystery, Western, Gothic, and science-fiction titles, among them the first Western novel of venerable screen cowboy Rory Calhoun, called The Man from Padera. It would be unfair to say that all the Major mysteries are of a breed that qualifies them for inclusion in these pages. But not by much.

  A representative example is William L. Rivera's Panic Walks Alone (1976). This stars one Arthur "Turo" Bironico, Investigative Consultant, who works mainly for insurance companies and who has offices in San Francisco. The case he is called upon to solve concerns the murder of an insurance executive, a psychotic killer, a spate of willing women, plenty of running around (to Mexico and Europe, among other places), and a final confrontation in an "austere Presbyterian church." But the novel's main attraction is neither Bironico nor the plot; it is Rivera's own special brand of prose.

  After a few quiet minutes of window staring, Langly put his things away, donned his coat and exited his office. He had taken two stem into his secretary's office when he felt a sharpt pain just beneath his left shoulder blade. The pain quickly became searing. His breath changed from a smooth flow to quick, stunted gasps. He slowly turned to face his attacker. His assailant gave him a sterile, malevolent gaze. Their riveted eyes seemed to have suspended time and motion.

  Langly, sinking rapidly now, expleted: "You!"

  [Turo] normally prepared the coffee pot the night before—which was what he did last night, so he would only have to exert a minimum amount of effort until after his first cup had awakened him. Since he used the coffee cannister more than the other two, he usually placed it an inch away from the wall for easier retrieval. As he looked at the three cannisters, he noted that they were all flush against the wall.

  His distress increased as alarm bells went off in his head. His lair had been transgressed upon!

  It was two in the morning when the killer creeped out of his hiding place.

  "Who are you investigating, our former employee, Mr. Oosting?"

  The fencing had begun, thought Turo. I'll be coy too. "Yes," he said simply.

  The shock of the separation with Sue permeated through Bironico's senses. He wanted to lash out at these snotty women libbers, who poisoned the atmosphere with their hysterical hostility, and just think, Sue bought that crap, he concluded. His angry thoughts roamed all over the deck. He was a casualty in this war of liberation; and Sue was a willing rifle-person. The dumb bitch!

  Long live the paperback original!

  12. Ante-Bellem Days; or,

  "My Roscoe Sneezed:

  Ka-chee!"

  A thunderous bellow flashed from Dave Donald-son's service .38, full at the prop man's elly-bay. Welch gasped like a leaky flue, hugged his punctured tripes, and slowly doubled over, fell flat on his smeller. A bullet can give a man a terrific case of indigestion, frequently ending in a trip to the boneyard.

  —Robert Leslie Bellem,

  "Diamonds of Death"

  Good things, as the saying goes, come in small packages. Take the criminous short story, for instance. In his introduction to The Best [English] Detective Stories of the Year 1928, Father Ronald Knox said, "The short story must always take an honorable place in detective fiction; it is the medium which has given us some of the best Holmes literature, and the whole cycle of Father Brown." Howard Haycraft, the eminent critic and author of Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (1941), is just one of the many who concur: "The short story has often been called the perfect and ideal form of expression for detective fiction. However that may be, it has surely been the most influential. Think of the authors and detective characters who have survived from an earlier day to the present: almost without exception they have flourished in the shorter medium."

  All of which, when applied inversely, turns out to be just as true. Wonderful bad things come in small packages, too. And some of mystery fiction's finest alternatives may be found in the short story.

  When Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first detective stories in the 1840s, he could not possibly have envisioned the directions his new form would take in future generations. If he had known what Doyle, Chesterton, and others of similar talents would create, he might have approved. If he had known, on the other hand, that there lurked a vast horde of lurid-covered pulp magazines somewhere in the mists of ti
me ahead, and that among those who would write for them was the awesome figure of Robert Leslie Bellem, he might have burned the manuscripts of "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Gold Bug," "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," and "The Purloined Letter," and run screaming into the streets. Poe was not noted for his sense of humor, especially when it came to literary matters.

  Those of us in the contemporary world who have read Bellem's work might also be inclined to run screaming into the streets—but with laughter, not anguish. Anyone whose sense of humor leans toward the ribald, the outrageous, the utterly absurd is liable to find himself convulsed by the antics and colloquialisms of Dan Turner, Bellem's immortal "private skulk." The list of Bellem admirers is long and distinguished and includes humorist S. J. Perelman, who, in an essay called "Somewhere a Roscoe . . ." called Turner "the apotheosis of all private detectives," and said he was "out of Ma Barker by Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade." Heady praise, indeed.

  For those readers not acquainted with the background of Robert Leslie, a short biographical sketch:

  He was born in 1902, began writing for the pulps in the mid-1920s, and was soon producing over a million words a year for such magazines as Spicy Detective, Spicy Mystery, Popular Detective, and Private Detective. In 1942, he helped launch his own magazine, Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective (later Hollywood Detective), which featured at least one and sometimes several Turner capers and for which Bellem customarily wrote the entire contents under a variety of pseudonyms. In less than three decades, until the collapse of the pulp market in the early fifties, Bellem penned the staggering total of three thousand pulp stories. He also managed to find time for two novels under his own name, Blue Murder (1938) and The Window of the Sleeping Nude (1950); two collaborations with Cleve F. Adams, The Vice-Czar Murders (1941), as by Franklin Charles, and No Wings on a Cop (1950), as by Adams; and a ghosted mystery, Half-Past Mortem (1947), as by John A. Saxon. In the fifties and early sixties, he concentrated on teleplays and was a regular contributor to such popular TV shows as The Lone Ranger, Superman, Perry Mason, 77 Sunset Strip, and The FBI. He died in Los Angeles in 1968.

  Dan Turner's first public appearance was in the June 1934 issue of Spicy Detective, one of a series of "Spicy" titles from a Delaware (of all places) outfit that called itself, ironically enough, Culture Publications, Inc. The Spicys featured fast action and as much sexual titillation as the law would allow in the 1930s. Mandatory in every story was mention of bare breasts, lithe hips, and alabaster thighs and the appearance of at least one hot-blooded female character. Those issues from 1934 to 1936 also contained mild descriptions of foreplay to intercourse, with the hero clasping a nude or seminude female to him and either fondling or drooling on her bosom; such "hot" scenes would then terminate in the ever-popular ellipses. Another feature of the Spicys was provocative illustrations of those same nude or seminude women, sometimes in the throes of ecstasy but more often being shot, stabbed, or tortured in a multitude of fiendish ways.

  "Public decency" organizations, outraged over such moral turpitude, waged an all-out battle against the Spicys that eventually proved victorious. Pressured by these groups, the US Postal Service first required Culture Publications to tone down the sexual content of their magazines, in order to avoid a revocation of their second-class mailing privileges, and then, when this failed to satisfy the guardians of American morals, forced Culture to abolish the entire Spicy line not long after America's entry into World War II. Culture Publications, however, was nothing if not resourceful; by adopting a new series title, "Speed," and abandoning all sexual content beyond mild innuendo, they were able to re-obtain second-class mailing privileges and to perpetuate their detective, Western, and adventure books until the early fifties.

  Dan Turner was easily the most popular Spicy/Speed series character, as evidenced by the success of his own magazine and the fact that he and Hollywood Detective were the last of Culture's stable to become extinct. Turner's appeal to readers seems to have been predicated on two factors: the wildly improbable but at the same time comfortably predictable plots Bellem concocted; and Bellem's breezy, sexy, colloquial style. Many of the Dan Turner stories deal with some aspect of Hollywood filmmaking and are populated with fast women, Bogart-style tough guys, and plenty of false glitter. (Bellem's evocation of the Hollywood milieu of the period lacks the true color and insights of the work of Raymond Chandler, Steve Fisher, and other writers who made southern California their stock-in-trade.) Corpses turn up in great quantities, most of them leaking "arterial ketchup"; there are gun battles, fistfights, and car chases galore. Bellem's prose, which may or may not have been intentionally humorous, is unlike that of any other writer in or out of the pulps, past or present. As Perelman indicated in his essay, the Bellem style can't be described; it has to be experienced.

  To begin with, here is Dan Turner on various Spicy ladies:

  I tackled her, tripped her. She went down. I mashed her with my weight. She squirmed, moaned feebly. Then she pulled an unexpected stunt. She wrapped her arms around my neck; glued her crimson kisser to my lips. She fed me an osculation that sent seven thousand volts of electricity past my tonsils. ("Design for Dying")

  Of all the tamales who've come up from south of the Rio Grande, Carmen was tops in talent, looks and that quality they call yoomph. ("Coffin Frame")

  This yellow-haired wren was maybe a couple of years younger than the one with the russet coiffure, but she was just as pretty. Her plump figure was something to knock your optic out, particularly since she was garnished in a gossamer negligee that didn't leave much to the imagination. From my spot on the floor I could pipe her shapely shafts, the lilting symmetry of her thighs under the diaphanous chiffon that draped them.

  Farther up, her attributes were equally thrilling.

  Her hips had just the proper amount of lyric flare and her breasts reminded me of ten nights in a Turkish harem. But when I finally glued the glimpse on her piquant pan, all I saw was a cargo of misery and woe. There were tears brimming on her azure peepers, and tremulous grief twisted her kisser. ("Forgery's Foil")

  The feminine "attribute" in which Bellem and Dan Turner seemed most interested was the bosom.

  She swayed toward me, a sob swelling her perky pretty-pretties. ("Killer's Harvest")

  And the curves above were lush white melons nestling in mesh cups of a formfitting bandeau. ("Forgery's Foil")

  It [a red satin dress] clung to her slender curves like sprayed varnish; emphasized the lilt of her hips and the perky arrogance of her firm little tiddlywinks. ("Killer's Keepsake")

  I sneaked a downward gander at the low-slashed decolletage of her red evening gown where it dipped into the tempting valley between her creamy bonbons. ("Killer's Harvest")

  Her breastworks were firm and full and erect; [they] possessed a voluptuous maturity that left me gasping like a gaffed shark. ("Bullet from Nowhere")

  The swim suit's brassiere top had cupped the niftiest set of plumply domed whatchacallems this side of a castaway's dream. ("Killer's Keepsake")

  One may infer from all this that Turner, if not Bellem, was a card-carrying male chauvinist. He also had a tendency toward sadism in that he was forever smacking "frills" and "janes" around and on occasion shooting them if he felt they deserved it. And lie was more or less inadvertently responsible for the deaths of hundreds of others: no sooner would he finish making love to this or that beauteous frill than she would turn up quite messily dead.

  The typical Turner scenario begins with Dan encountering a perky set of tiddly-winks, in or out of distress, with or without a rod in evidence. He then seduces or almost seduces her, after which somebody either takes a shot at him or the woman and/ or knocks him over the head. Of course, "takes a shot at him" and "knocks him over the head" are far too pallid descriptive phrases for Bellem and Turner. These actions are described with such color and flare, and recurring frequency, and inventive variation, that they have become the Bellem trademark.

  First, the roscoe:

&n
bsp; And then, from the doorway, a gun barked:

  "Chow-chow!" and I went drifting to dreamland. ("Design for Dying") The rod sneezed: Chow! Ka-Chow! and pushed two pills through Reggie's left thigh. ("Murder Has Four Letters")

  Against a backdrop of darkness the heater sneezed: Ka-Chowp! Chowp! Chowp! and sent three sparking ribbons of orange flame burning into the pillow. ("Come Die for Me")

  From the window behind her, a roscoe poked under the drawn blind. It went: "Blooey—BlooeyBlooey!" ("Murder on the Sound Stage")

  From the window that opened onto the roof-top sun deck a roscoe sneezed: Ka-Chow! Chowpfl and a red-hot hornet creased its stinger across my dome; bashed me to dreamland. ("Lake of the Left-Hand Moon")

  From the front doorway of the wigwam a roscoe stuttered: Ka-chow! Chow! Chow! and a red-hot slug maced me across the back of the cranium, knockedme into the middle of nowhere. ("Killer's Keepsake")

  "Ker-choob!" a cannon sneezed through the woodwork, sent a spurt of flame and lead and wooden splinters stabbing at the spot where I would normally have been standing. ("Killer's Keepsake")