Son of Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  Naturally the Japanese government is upset about this, and so relations between Nippon and the United States are badly strained. A fifth emissary, the staunchly pro-American Mr. Hakura, arrives to meet with Albert Drysdale of the Treasury Department. Since neither Drysdale nor the local authorities have made much progress in finding out who is making bunches of articulated bones out of Mr. Hakura’s political comrades, Hakura proposes to take matters into his own hands by hiring a private detective—the internationally famous snooper, Jigger Masters.

  But before a willing Masters can do much, a car in which Hakura and Drysdale are riding is forced off the road and two masked figures kidnap the dignitaries. Where have Drysdale and Mr. Hakura been taken? Jigger wonders. Could it be that “both bodies had been snatched for the grisly purposes of the skeleton-maker?”

  Jigger’s investigation eventually leads him to the Gormely estate, where he and his assistant, Tom Gildersleeve, find the entrance to a secret passage inside the garage. All sorts of exciting things take place in the subterranean passage, and in a branch of it that leads to a boathouse on Long Island Sound and that was “possibly . . . used to land speedboat cargoes of illicit liquor in the days of prohibition, though such acts were hard to reconcile with the upright, forceful character of the owner, Robert Gormely.” Masters, separated from Gildersleeve, survives a gun battle and some hand-to-hand combat but is then whacked on the head and knocked out. And when he wakes he is in the underground lair of the organizer of the grisly feast, the “surgeon monster” who gets his jollies transforming Japanese politicians into skeleton dinner guests.

  The skeleton-maker’s name is Dr. Arnold Chadwick, and this is what he looks like:

  He was two or three inches above six feet, but so gaunt and sunken of cheek he looked even taller. He was hairless of head, and strange furrows, alternating purple and ghastly white, ran transversely across the dome of his high, narrow head. There were puckered scars in both his cheeks, and his ears had been shorn off close to his head.

  Chadwick wasn’t born resembling a cross betwen Frankenstein’s monster and the Phantom of the Opera; nor had he always been a homicidal maniac. No, “this horrible looking specter had once been the personal physician-surgeon to a President of the United States!” But at that time he was also a traitor selling valuable information to Japan (“he was said to be a descendant of Benedict Arnold,” which explains it at least to Masters’s satisfaction). Then Japan had caught him selling their secrets to Germany, and so they tortured him by cutting off his ears and putting purple furrows on his head, and then returned him secretly to this country, where he was locked in a nut ward at Walter Reed Hospital. The ever-resourceful Chadwick escaped, however, and ended up at the Gormely estate (he was the one who built the secret passages, “in case his plans went wrong,” though how he did it without Gormely or anybody else finding out is left to the reader’s imagination), and his purpose in creating the feast of skeletons is to wreak vengeance on the two nations he hates by fomenting war between them. A devilishly diabolical scheme, eh?

  The trussed-up Masters is soon taken into Chadwick’s surgery, the place where “decaying human flesh was stripped from mortal bones.” There, Jigger discovers Mr. Hakura (who, alas, is already dead) and an unconscious Albert Drysdale. But neither of them is to be the mad doctor’s next dinner guest:

  “And now, for making a profession of minding the business of other men, you will meet the just reward of the snooper, Mr. Masters! You will be reduced to the essentials right now, and given place number five at my little dinner of death!” . . .

  “Great God!” breathed Masters, not having to feign the horror in his voice, as he tried a verbal experiment to gain time, “you don’t mean to cut me up alive?”

  “Why not?” asked the surgeon nonchalantly. . . . “You will be a trifle too large to seem the skeleton of a Nipponese, but that cannot be helped. I had intended to have thirteen Orientals at my feast before it was finished; but I see, now that one snooper has found me out, that I shall never glimpse the other eight Japanese. So I must make shift with what materials come to my hand. . . .”

  “Plunge in your knife . . . end it!” [Jigger] gritted. “You were a white man . . . once!”

  “Ah, don’t be childish,” gently censured the fiend.

  Well, Masters doesn’t get carved up, of course. He uses a bit of glass he’s managed to pick up to saw through the lamb’s gut that binds his wrists and then hurls himself at the skeleton-maker. A terrific fight ensues, which Jigger ends by breaking the fiend’s scrawny neck. Tom Gildersleeve helps take care of Chadwick’s henchmen, and order is restored not only to the Gormely estate but to the political arena, where friendly relations between Japan and the United States are reestablished—for a few years, anyway.

  Melodrama of a much different sort is the substance of Michael Morgan’s “Charity Begins at Homicide” (Dime Detective, September 1950). The setting is Hollywood, and instead of mad doctors, skeleton feasts, and goofy plans to foment war, the devilishly diabolical scheme here is much more down-to-earth: a gang of murderous big-con artists is out to bilk a large-scale charity campaign called the Fund for Needy Children. And the hero is not a renowned snooper of Jigger Masters’s nonpareil abilities but rather a somewhat bumbling amateur sleuth named Bill Ryan.

  Michael Morgan, as you’ll recall if you’ve read Gun in Cheek, is the author of that spectacular alternative masterwork Decoy. He (or rather they, Michael Morgan being the collaborative pseudonym of C. E. “Teet” Carle and Dean M. Dorn) is also the author of yet another Alternative Hall of Fame novel, Nine More Lives, which we’ll examine at some length later in these pages. Bill Ryan stars in all of the entries in the Michael Morgan oeuvre—the two novels mentioned above and a handful of long novelettes in Dime Detective, Mammoth Detective, and Hunted Mystery Magazine in the late forties and early fifties. Ryan is a movie stuntman with an eye for the ladies and a penchant for homicide who often must use his stuntman’s wiles to get himself out of—and sometimes into— dangerous situations that crop up during his avocation as an unwitting detective.

  Alternatively speaking, “Charity Begins at Homicide” is the best of the shorter works featuring Ryan. It plunges our reluctant hero into all sorts of hot water (some cold water, too, in which he is almost drowned)—all as a result of his relationships with a woman named Merna Powers (who works for the Fund for Needy Children), the wife of dipso film director Wally Wells, several corpses, and the big-con artists mentioned above; and it culminates in a wild and woolly scene in San Pedro Harbor in which Ryan, with police sanction and assistance, drops from a helicopter onto the gang’s “floating hideout,” a yacht called the Tippy Lou, in order to rescue Merna from a fate worse than death. This feat of derring-do he somehow manages to perform on a night so windy the crooks on the yacht don’t hear the chopper as it hovers close enough overhead for Ryan to drop off a rope ladder onto the deck. Some stuntman! Some brave hero! Some inspired nonsense!

  The distinctive Michael Morgan prose style, which reached such heights of marvelous absurdity in Decoy (it soars pretty high in Nine More Lives, too, as you’ll soon discover), is clearly in evidence here. The epigraph to this chapter is one of the highlights from “Charity Begins at Homicide”; here are a few of the others that help to make this a Hall of Fame short story.

  She’d never been on a [movie] set before, she explained with a voice that had the same sort of ripe promise which comes from thumping a cool mid-summer watermelon.

  His voice was so oily it would repulse water.

  “Bill Ryan,” I said bitterly [to myself], “why don’t you get your brains counted? You see a girl with real class whom you want to know so badly that your saliva glands pain . . . so what do you do but insult her and send her out of your life even before she’s at the threshold of being in it.”

  If sarcasm was molasses, I’d have been covered with goo.

  Arlene was dead. The handle of an ice pick said so. It was all that showed above he
r body. The remainder was buried in her chest. The presence of it protruding from the cool flesh had an appearance of finality.

  [Ryan, having been hit on the head]: A million violins screeched on one horribly high note and the house blew up inside my skull.

  Merna . . . thrust out her arm and swept the desk lamp onto the floor. The room blanked into a crash of darkness.

  His voice went back to slapping my head from one side to another.

  Thus Florence Mae Pettee, Anthony Rud, and Michael Morgan, and some of their efforts for those glorious pulp-paper magazines of long ago—just a few of the many treasures to be found, no doubt, among the thousands of criminous stories that appeared in their now brittle and crumbling pages.

  The pulps are dead. Long live the pulps!

  6

  “Loaded To The Gunwale With Superpowered Quake-Stuff To Make Your Withers Quiver!”

  Inspector Barnard’s latest and most sinister quest is another test of his superbly intelligent scrutinies. His assignment is the capture of a killer, known in the press and in Scotland Yard as the Ear Hound because he hacks off an ear from each victim. . . .

  The Ear Hound’s seventh victim is found—”And it must be his last!” commands the Chief. The case goes to Inspector Barnard after another man is reported to have been driven insane by it. Sergeant Trotter and his famous old bowler hat lend their assistance to Barnard. The ancient bowler in this case, having served well for unexpected purposes, meets its doom—in an episode that is a positive pinnacle of nerve-battering achievement.

  —From the dust jacket blurb for

  Sinister Quest by T.C.H. Jacobs (Macaulay), 1934

  Riddle me this: What series of continuous writings in the mystery field have all-too-often been outrageous, overexaggerated, inaccuracy-filled, and unfair to the poor reader?

  Answer: Why, publishers’ dust jacket blurbs, of course.

  Blurb-writing is a minor art. Frequently, however, those denizens of publishing offices who engage in it are poor weeds in the literary garden, and the fruits of their labors are on the deformed and wormy side. They use too many superlatives. They give away too much of the plot. Or they misread (or don’t read) portions of the book and include plot elements that are incorrect, perhaps aren’t even present—at least not in the book they’re describing. They misname characters. They use dubious grammar, dubious syntax, and dubious judgment. And sometimes, when the blurb-writing denizens are frustrated fiction writers, their prose takes on a rather luminous shade of purple. Adjectives flow like cheap wine; so do adverbs and descriptive nouns, not to mention similes and metaphors of uncommon vintage.

  Occasionally, as with novels and short stories, some or all of these traits combine to produce a blurb of alternative significance. Inasmuch as I’ve created the Alternative Hall of Fame, I see no reason I can’t also create a special annex for the display of these virtuoso blurbs. This chapter is it.

  As with novels, short stories, and prose nuggets, there are different types of blurbs (and blurb writers). Some impress you with their blithe audacity, as in the following written by someone in the employ of the London publisher, Jarrolds, for a 1946 novel entitled Make the Corpse Walk by Raymond Marshall (a pseudonym of the British imitator of American hard-boiled fiction, James Hadley Chase).

  Kester Weidmann, a half-crazed millionaire, believes that his dead brother’s corpse can be reanimated by Voodoo, and contacts Rollo, crook night-club proprietor, who has negro employees. Rollo, seeing a fortune in the deal, plans to arrange a Voodoo seance. Kester’s chauffeur, who is under a debt of gratitude to Kester, steals the body in order to prevent Rollo from obtaining it. Celie, Rollo’s mistress, is also involved in the plot, and Susan Hedder is planted at Rollo’s club by Kester’s chauffeur to watch Rollo.

  After many thrills there is a grand game of hunt-the-slipper with the corpse for a slipper. The magnificent finale is worthy of Hamlet and the excitement is maintained throughout.

  Here’s another example, from the American edition (Henry Holt and Company) of a 1937 novel by a British mystery author:

  There arrives a time in the life of every detective story writer when he surpasses himself and his colleagues and produces a high-powered novel that cannot be equalled by any of the other offerings of the season. This eventful moment has arrived for Francis Gerard, and Fatal Friday proves itself to be not just another mystery story but a genuine masterpiece in its field.

  Other blurb writers take the opposite approach: low-key, straight-foward—almost dull, in fact. But those with an alternative bent manage to slip in a quiet zinger that makes you sit up and take notice. The blurb concocters at Phoenix Press were especially adept at this, as the following for Murder’s No Accident (1949) by A. S. Fleishman demonstrates:

  Max Brindle had crossed the Pacific merely because a lumpy brunette had visited him in San Diego three weeks before, and had offered him the inducement of a steamship ticket and more money than he could afford to turn down. Now, in Shanghai, he still had no idea of the job he was supposed to do, except that he was to start out by getting in touch with a certain Matthew Sand. His first attempt to see the mysterious Mr. Sand was unsuccessful, and shortly thereafter his mind was distracted from his quarry by the discovery of a corpse attached to a flagpole outside his hotel window.

  Phoenix’s blurb writer(s) wasn’t always at the top of his/her form, however. Every now and then, such as in the following from the jacket of Wallace Reed’s No Sign of Murder (1940) he/she—having read too many Phoenix mysteries, no doubt—indulged in the same sort of specious logic the authors themselves were all too often guilty of.

  Clarabelle Bates died peacefully in her sleep without apparent reason. Even an autopsy failed to reveal the manner in which her living body had become a corpse. Obviously, since not the victim of any malady which could be diagnosed, the woman had been murdered.

  Not only logic but coherency can sometimes fall by the wayside in the white heat of blurb creation, the result being a nugget of garbled nonsense such as this one for Vivian Meik’s The Curse of Red Shiva (Hillman-Curl, 1939):

  “You will gasp for mercy for your children as I have cried for mine, and only the striking blade will be the answer. Behold! By Red Shiva I curse you!” A knife gleamed in her hand as it flashed downward and buried itself in her heart.

  More than a century and a half since those words were uttered by a beautiful Indian slave to Peter Trenton, adventurer. . . .

  But now, after five generations, Sir Peter Trenton was found under Westminster Bridge, brutally murdered, a gold mohur tightly tied around his neck.

  Sir Derek Balliol had guessed the significance of the series of murders—but he was killed before he could speak! Only Verrey was left . . . and against him were pitted the cunning powers behind the newly-awakened race consciousness of the East.

  The petard that hoists another breed of blurb writer is the desire to be too clever, too avant-garde, in his or her approach. Coherency suffers in this type of blurb, too. Not to mention accuracy. The following is a perfect example.

  The discovery of a lost plane

  Heads the action in this

  Exciting new mystery.

  Starring Zebulion Buck and Jim Dunn,

  Experts, in disguise, in the study of

  Avalanches, the

  Story concerns the theft

  Of a large sum of money and murder of a

  Nosy prospector.

  Fortunately Dunn and Buck are

  On the spot to assist in

  Rounding up suspects—not to

  Mention fighting forest fires.

  Uncovering local intrigue, or contracting

  Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

  Deeds of derring-do provide high

  Entertainment for all.

  Read it for fun

  Right: the novel’s title is The Season for Murder. (The author is Hugh Lawrence Nelson, the publisher Rinehart, the year 1952.) But anyone who reads it won’t find Zebulion Buck or Jim
Dunn expertly studying any avalanches (they’re Denver private eyes), nor will they find either man assisting anybody in the contracting of Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

  Still other blurb manufacturers like to emulate the style of the novel they’re writing about, especially if that novel happens to be told in a slangy sort of prose. Not being true fictioneers, however, they sometimes fail to get the patois just right, so that their similes and metaphors come out slightly skewed. That is what happened to the poor soul who wrote the come-on for Paul Haggard’s Death Talks Shop (Hillman-Curl, 1938):

  A murder mystery which roars along on all cylinders to a breath-taking denouement; characters who live, love, rob and kill under the shadow of impending disaster; dialogue as hard as icy pavements, as real as a sock on the jaw; cascading, tumultuous humor as brash and brazen as tomorrow’s tabloid—these are the guts of this top-flight, daffy, memorable thriller.

  Who rubbed out Perry Hammett, tycoon and man about town? Who deposited a good-night slug in Richard Tobias? Who snuffed out Peg Lamont, a gal who knew all the answers? These are some of the riddles which acid-mouthed, genial Mike Warlock, star reporter of the Daily Globe sets out to solve.

  Here’s another in the same vein, from the jacket of a 1952 Dutton “Guilt-Edged Mystery” by Sam S. Taylor, which features the sleuthing activities of hard-boiled private eye Neal Cotten:

  Investigations, of whatever kind, often lead to murder, as well as vice versa, and slot machines sometimes turn up more than merely lemons. The proof of these adages is offered, with dividends, in No Head for Her Pillow, a fast, exciting mystery that is almost as tough as a forty-cent steak.