Son of Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  Talk about your birds of a feather—

  Well, these were the birds and the cat’s meow.

  I used to sling their hash—that’s how

  I got wise to the sonofaguns

  Who’d bump a guy off for a couple of buns.

  And:

  There wasn’t a job pulled off I missed.

  And I’ve seen a yap with a yen for some twist

  Gum the works because the yap

  Got needled and blew off his trap;

  And the fall guy did a stretch in stir

  All on account of him and her.

  When he stepped out of the cooler, Gawd,

  What didn’t he do to him and his broad!

  Hell, how can an egg expect a skirt

  To be on the up-and-up; they’re dirt.

  Give ’em sugar and a nifty spiel,

  Load ’em with ice; just let ’em feel

  The old hoop on that finger, Christ

  They’re yours and crying to be spliced.

  And:

  I lamped Spike’s mug; his glims were wide,

  He had a pound of hop inside.

  Crazy with coke he swayed there grinning,

  It darned well looked like the snowbird’s inning—

  And all of a sudden his rod went spinning,

  And down he crumped [sic] like a hunk of wood

  Slithering into the Panther’s blood.

  And:

  The Kid is smoking a cigarette.

  “Lord, have mercy . . . !” (Your hands are wet.)

  “Christ, have mercy . . . !” The Kid is smoking.

  The Father’s voice is thick. You’re choking.

  The Kid takes the cigarette out of his mouth:

  “Don’t weaken, Father . . . I’m heading south.

  We all got to croak. And I’d rather sit stiff

  In a chair than be coughing in bed. What’s the diff?”

  He paces the twenty feet to the Chair,

  Puffing his cigarette, sniffing the air

  Greedily like a young horse. The beat

  of the priest’s voice quickens. “Well, here’s the hot seat!”

  This amazing little book, complete with several dubious illustrations by somebody named Ervine Metzl, is dedicated to Ogden Nash. It is not known whether Nash ever read it; or if he did, whether he took any sort of legal or physical action against Joseph Auslander.

  The Scarf on the Scarecrow,

  MARTIN J. FREEMAN (1938)

  This novel’s chief claim to alternative fame is that its opening two pages are told from the point of view of a buzzard.

  Twenty-five miles southeast of Chicago a gaunt buzzard spiralled nervously above the twelve hundred acres of the Wendover Dule estate, his hunger-sharpened brain vexed by three fears and one desire.

  His nostrils scented and his keen wings felt the coming Autumn storm, forecast by purple clouds aswirl beyond the Dule woods to the northeast, like larger and unwelcome birds swept forward by the wind to join him. He also feared the night, upon whose darker wings the storm was riding. . . . If the storm came, if night came, before the buzzard got what he wanted, he would return dinnerless to his wretched nest of dragged-together sticks.

  His third fear, and the one that made him angriest, because without it, night and the coming storm would not have troubled him, stood in the deserted garden six hundred feet beneath, gesticulating in the wind with gloved yet boneless hands.

  This was a scarecrow, and harmless, although the buzzard did not know that. . . . Men erect, the buzzard knew, were always dangerous; men supine or prone less often so. The buzzard preferred them motionless, sprawled on their backs.

  The rest of the book, unfortunately, does not live up to the promise of this masterful and innovative opening ploy—although the ploy itself is enough to elevate The Scarf on the Scarecrow to Hall of Fame status. Humans take over, in particular a criminologist named Jerry Todd and his lady friend, Molly Clerkenwell, and the action and story line become all too prosaic and familiar. A horny female cat named Ethelberta makes an appearance, but not for long; and we are not made privy to her thoughts.

  The buzzard, annoyingly enough, does not reappear. And the mystery of what happened to him is far more intriguing than the one surrounding the murder of Wendover Dule. I mean, did he or did he not keep returning dinnerless to his wretched nest of dragged-together sticks?

  The Bat Woman, CROMWELL GIBBONS (1938)

  No, this is not a novel about a female Caped Crusader. It is a novel about a female vampire. It is also a novel about a lot of other things, among them (in the appoximate order of their appearance):

  •A man who runs into his dead wife at the opera.

  •South American headhunters and shrunken mummified heads and bodies.

  •Piratical soldiers of fortune hunting platinum in a remote region of the Amazon.

  •Hairy jungle beasts who wrestle giant crocodiles.

  •Children born with vestigial tails.

  •A bilious-looking, emaciated Chinese with a walruslike mustache who speaks in aphorisms reminiscent of Charlie Chan.

  •The scar-faced, rum-soaked captain of a tramp freighter who issues such curious orders as “All hands on deck and the cook!”

  •A typhoon and a sort of mutiny on the Java Sea.

  •Ten mysterious oaken chests perforated with small holes, from which emanate weird muffled squealings and rustlings.

  •The live burial of an Indian yogi.

  •A respected mortician who has an underground reputation as a corpse snatcher.

  •A Long Island lighthouse called Execution Light because a “jolly-boat of rebel malefactors” was hanged there during the Revolutionary War.

  •A captured female gorilla named Miss Congo.

  •A Russian vampire who “pinched his wife most cruelly.”

  •A nocturnal visit to a cemetery to “snatch a moll what’s croaked” and not incidentally to have a dentist examine her teeth.

  •A case of South African sleeping sickness.

  •A trip to the New York City morgue and some dialogue with a misanthropic attendant named Pedro who once “got drunk and mixed up all the stiffs.”

  •Two corpses whose bodies have been drained of blood by an alleged “voodoo fiend.”

  •A cat that “coyly cocks her head and begs for sugar.”

  •A mad scientist’s laboratory lighted by a mysterious purple glow.

  •“A chubby little beetle [that] flashes a red light at both ends of its body, and green lights along its sides [and as a result] almost meets a maritime regulation.”

  •A hypodermic needle filled with “a glandular secretion—a duckless [sic] gland . . . prepared from a living person” (the “duckless gland” being “the seat of the human soul,” as if you didn’t know).

  •A gaggle of Desmodus rufus or bloodsucking bats from the tropics which “rear up on their hind legs and walk” and “guzzle blood with their long tongues like a cat lapping a bowl of milk.”

  •The severed brain of a beautiful blond woman kept alive in a jar.

  •An electric needle or “heart-starter” which can shock dead people back to life.

  •A shipwrecked sailor turned cannibal who prefers to eat people “who did not smoke, as the flesh of the chronic tobacco-user was bitter and not to his epicurean taste.”

  •The wee-hours kidnapping of a half-naked young woman with a “firm, slow-curving breast.”

  •And last but by no means least, a rousing climax in a browns tone fortress in the heart of Manhattan in which a dead young woman dies a second death as an old hag, the gaggle of vampire bats is unleashed on a raiding party of New York’s Finest, and the shell of a human nut is perforated by a tommy gun that “belches a chattering burst.”

  The detective who tries (and fails) to make sense out of this mind-boggling potpourri is a criminologist named Rex Huxford, who is also the “hero” of Cromwell Gibbons’s only other mystery novel, Murder in Hollywood (1936). Hux
ford, who has dubious credentials at best (one of his pals works for the Gestapo in Nazi Germany), is little more than a cipher who stands ever-ready to spout all sorts of esoteric information, some of which may even be accurate. Not much more memorable are his trio of “assistants”— two ex-Prohibition plug-uglies named Spike Salieno and Plugger Martin, and a Stepin Fetchit black called Zipp. They appear in only one chapter, so we are treated just that once to such stirring dialogue as, “Say, nigger, shove me yuh mit,” and “Yessir, yessir. Yessir, Mr. Spike.”

  Far and away the most interesting character is the villain of the piece, Dr. Eric von Schalkenbach. We first meet him early on, in a flashback to an incident in the Amazonian jungle, as narrated by a member of the Explorer’s Club:

  “We were even more astonished to see grappling with this giant crocodile a powerful beast, more powerful than anything I had ever dared to imagine—a hairy thing like a gorilla. . . . Yet the monstrous thing looked even more like a rugged primitive man—perhaps, a descendant of some prehistoric race like the Neanderthal, a brute species of giant man from the lost world. What was it . . . this creature, hideous beyond belief, that at any moment might spot us and annihilate our puny group?

  “I raised my gun and fired a shot high over the beast’s bushy head. It bounded around in startled surprise. Its shaggy hair fell away from its face, its eyes flashed with savage rage, and its enormous lips curled into a menacing snarl.

  “‘Pass auf! Pass auf! Don’t shoot, I’m a white man!’ the thing bellowed, sticking its chunky hands up.

  “We were stupefied. I lowered my gun but kept my finger on the trigger. On he came, in a shuffling, awkward gait, weaving [sic] his massive arms fearsomely, the jungle growth giving way before his beastlike bulk.

  “‘I’m Dr. Eric von Schalkenbach,’ the brute announced, towering above us and extending his hand in greeting. ‘I apologize if I have caused you alarm. You must forgive my unkempt appearance.’”

  Von Schalkenbach, you see, is a freak of nature, “an extraordinary throwback, with the inherited characteristics of the powerful cave man of the Stone Age . . . a giant man with prodigious intelligence and superknowledge.” He is an expert on the shrinking and mummifying of heads, a hypnotist, a biologist, a “dexterous field surgeon,” a plastic surgeon, an accomplished ship’s helmsman and navigator, a devotee of the opera, a brilliant organist, a platinum prospector, and a “finite creature who defies the Infinite” by monkeying around (pun intended) with experiments into the nature of “things Man was not meant to know.” He went off to live in the jungle like an Amazonian Tarzan, Gibbons tells us, because he got tired of people making fun of his hideous physiognomy. He came out of the jungle, Gibbons further tells us, because he finally discovered the secret of how to turn beautiful young women into slavering vampires (that secret being the “duckless gland,” of course) and because, being a virgin, he figured it was the only way he would ever get laid. What woman would willingly go to bed, after all, with a guy whose “thick lips bulge ungainly in his evening dress and stuffed shirt”?

  Unfortunately for Eric, though, he never does succeed in losing his virginity before the good guys blow him away. The best planned lays and all that. Moral: Freaks of nature, no matter how much superknowledge they might possess, never get to have any fun.

  Crime Hound, MARY SEMPLE SCOTT (1940)

  It would be unfair to say that Crime Hound is a real dog—a pedigreed alternative purebred, as it were. It does, however, have sufficient kennel credentials to lift it out of the mongrel class and justify its inclusion here. Immediate proof of this is its howl of an opening paragraph:

  The first mournful notes of the noon whistle startled Herbert Crosby’s unaccustomed ears. He looked through the agent’s second-story window as if expecting reactions in the heavens from such a blast of sound. But the calm bright blue of the sky showed no sign of agitation as the crescendo pulsed against it before dropping down scale to the final moan. The powder-puff clouds were not hastened in their lazy course. The pointed tops of the tall pines on the lake front beyond the main street did not bend.

  The “crime hound” of the title, and the novel’s protagonist, is this fellow Herbert Crosby, who purports to be “Fourth Assistant” to the District Attorney of St. Louis. He has enough money, however, the source of which is never explained, to rent a fancy summer cottage on a secluded lake and to “laze through a long vacation under the ministrations of mother and sister who would follow,” the St. Louis D.A. having allegedly given him as much time off as he needs to recuperate from solving “a grueling crime investigation.” Hmmm. He doesn’t even seem to know just what it is a D.A. does. When an attractive (but obviously not very bright) young woman asks him, “What is a District Attorney?” he says glibly, “One who catches the bad boys and sends them to jail.” Double hmmm.

  While in Brantford, a lakeside town in an unnamed Midwestern state (presumably Wisconsin, since it has a town called Sheboygan in it), Crosby runs afoul of some local intrigue and finds himself mixed up in the murder of a sleazy real estate agent named Jediah Cook, whose avocation was defiling young women. Being an avid crime-hound, Crosby sniffs around and “hops with great agility,” as the dust jacket blurb puts it, mixing its animal (and other) metaphors nicely, “from a series of frying pans into corresponding conflagrations until at the climax of the book he, with the evidence of the murder in his grasp, [is] handcuffed and chucked into jail.” Along the way he meets a fascinating array of characters, among them:

  •An Indian trapper named (Honest Injun!) Chief Rain-in-the-Face, a.k.a. “Rain,” one of whose many children was born blond and blue-eyed.

  •Dr. Gaius Giddens, a G.P. who doubles as coroner and who possesses a magnificent storehouse of medical knowledge, such as is demonstrated when he runs his fingers down the back of a corpse’s head and then announces, “There’s another welt here, just above the medulla.”

  •Countess Ozorsky, the wife of a dead Russian prince, who was born in Oklahoma and who knows more than she’s telling about a leaky canoe.

  •And Tender Teddie, a former bootlegger who “got into trouble during prohibition days and was senteneced to a long term in the pen,” but who is now paroled for three months every summer so he can run a fashionable underground supper club for “young dissipators.”

  Triple hmmm. . . .

  Another bark in the Crime Hound’s favor is Mary Semple Scott’s exemplary style—a sort of shaggy je ne sais quoi as epitomized in its opening paragraph. A few other examples:

  The nerves that had temporarily calmed began to shrug his shoulders, to flare his nostrils.

  [The man was] tall, straight, with intelligent eyes and a smile that imperilled the cigarette that stuck to his lower lip.

  He saw them go off with the girl he’d been talking to, who—wonder of wonders, was wearing a skirt. It was the only skirt he’d seen on girls of her age that morning. But he knew there was something more than a skirt to give her distinction—something deeper and less easily defined.

  [The Crime Hound, in a brilliant deductive observation to the local sheriff]: “Cook must have been crazy, drunk, or dead when he negotiated that road [in his car].”

  This is Mary Semple Scott’s only published novel. Dammit.

  2

  Of Talking Skeletons, Noseless Monsters, And Boomalacka Browne

  “After all, Jigger,” [the medical examiner] suggested familiarly, “why don’t you let it go at that? Andrews knows his business pretty well. Chances are he’s right. This isn’t like that Corlaes affair, where murder was plain right from the start, and corpses were falling around us like pulpy persimmons from the tree. Men can get up on their hind legs, and die under their own power, you know!”

  —Anthony M. Rud,

  The Stuffed Men, 1935

  In the good old days of publishing, when paper was cheap, readers were plentiful, and network television was just a gleam in the Devil’s eye, certain houses could be counted on to consistently produce cer
tain types of books. Down on the alternative level, there were the lending library publishers of the thirties and forties— houses such as Phoenix Press (to which an entire chapter of Gun in Cheek is devoted), Arcadia, Gateway, Godwin, Hillman-Curl, and Dodge, among others that provided a steady stream of mystery, Western, and light-romance novels. But these houses did not have a lock on the mediocre-to-bad genre fiction market, not by any means; nor were they the first to specialize in this kind of “hardcover pulp.” As far back as the teens, there were enterprising purveyors of popular schlock between cloth covers.

  One such early publisher was Chelsea House, whose “Popular Copyrights” line of mystery, Western, adventure, and love novels vied, from 1924 to 1933, for shelf space in bookshops with inexpensively produced reprint titles from such houses as Grosset & Dunlap and A. L. Burt. Chelsea’s claim that “this line represents a distinct innovation in book publishing [for] the books are not what are known as ‘reprints,’ but are original stories that have never appeared in any other edition” was essentially true, although a great many did appear first in pulp magazines. Among Chelsea’s more notable authors were Johnston McCulley, the creator of Zorro and of such forgettable detective heroes as the Thunderbolt, the Avenging Twins, and the Crimson Clown; and Carroll John Daly, whose collaborative first novel (with C. H. Waddell), Two-Gun Gerta, was published by Chelsea in 1926 as “A Western Story,” although it is actually a mystery/adventure novel set in Mexico. It features a movie actor and stuntman, one Red Conners, who sounds (and acts) suspiciously like Race Williams:

  The pay was bound to be big. Any American is the kitten’s patent leathers in greaserland; and for an all-around, high-class guy like myself—well, they’d have to bid some if they wanted my services. As for any incidental gun play, I can twirl a fairly mean gat myself.

  Chelsea House, at least, made no real attempt to hide the fact that it was a schlock peddler. Other publishers of the period did. G. H. Watt was one; Penn Publishing Company, out of Philadelphia, was another. But the very first, and certainly the greatest, of the schlock houses—the publisher whose line of general trade books in the twenties and early thirties was to alternative publishing what Phoenix Press’s lending-library line was from the late thirties to the early fifties—was the “pride” of 381 Fourth Avenue, New York City: The Macaulay Company.