Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  Robert Howard got up and walked into his room, where he typed a four-line couplet on the Underwood typewriter that had served him for ten years:

  All fled, all done,

  So lift me on the pyre.

  The feast is over

  And the lamps expire.

  He then walked out of the house and got into his 1935 Chevy. The hired cook stated later that she saw him raise his hands in prayer. Was he praying or preparing the gun? She then heard a shot, and saw Robert slump over the steering wheel. He lingered eight agonising hours before dying from the wound to his head. His mother died the next day, never having regained consciousness. They were buried alongside each other. Since his death, Howard has achieved cult status and his creations – principally Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonya – have become industrial-scale franchises. It seems unfair, somehow, that he would never know.

  FN

  Robert Ervin Howard

  MRT

  Red Nails

  Biog

  L. Sprague de Camp in collaboration with C. Crook de Camp, and J. Whittington Griffin, Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard (1983)

  191. Jim Thompson 1906–1977

  All of us that started the game with a crooked cue …

  Thompson was born in Anadarko, Oklahoma. He gives a vivid account of his first twenty years in the autobiographical Bad Boy (1953). Thompson’s father was a feckless legal accountant and erstwhile sheriff. While Jim was growing up, the family led an unsettled existence in Oklahoma, Texas and Nebraska. Thompson was largely self-taught. While still at school, he worked as a cub journalist and – most formatively – as a bellhop in a Fort Worth hotel during Prohibition and the roaring twenties. Here it was he picked up his grittily disillusioned view of life: ‘Failure, it seemed, could only be offset by ability. The “sharp” received every consideration, the dull got nothing.’ Such ‘sharpness’ is the most valued commodity in Thompson’s grim world. A second formative influence was his encounter with a confidence trickster, Allie Ivers, who inspired the character of Roy Dillon in Thompson’s best known novel, The Grifters (1963).

  At the age of eighteen Thompson came down with ‘a complete nervous collapse, pulmonary tuberculosis and delirium tremens’. On his recovery – and hotly pursued by Prohibition Officers – he took to the road. Bad Boy ends at this point with Thompson laughing ironically at his fate (‘I guess I just don’t know of anything else to do’). Faute de mieux Thompson went on to work as a journalist, but had continued problems with drink. His novel The Alcoholics (1953) ends with the hero, transparently Thompson himself, being checked into a sanatorium with little hope of his emerging a changed man. Nor did he. Thompson spent a short period at the University of Nebraska in 1929 and it was here that he began to write fiction. He married in 1931 and had three children – but he was an egregiously bad husband and father.

  From 1936 to 1938 Thompson was involved with the Oklahoma Federal Writers Project. At this stage of his life he was radically left-wing. The Depression, as with James M. Cain, darkened and hardened his view of America. After publishing two straight hardback novels with a political message in the early 1940s – neither of which made the slightest mark – Thompson (now in California) took up work as a journalist with the San Diego Journal. He wrote his subsequent fiction principally for Lion Books, a downmarket firm. The relationship was cultivated by Arnold Hano, a senior editor at Lion in the early 1950s, who encouraged Thompson to write his blacker-than-noir crime novels.

  Thompson’s fiction was marketed in paperback (with print runs as high as 200,000) as a short-life drugstore-stand product. Serious interest in Thompson as a genre genius began to generate in the 1980s. The quintessentially Thompsonesque thriller is The Killer Inside Me (1952). Lou Ford, the hero-narrator is deputy sheriff in ‘Central City’, a small town in Texas. On the surface, Ford is a good old hometown boy, but inside he is consumed by what he calls ‘the sickness’, a need to murder. His doctor father discovered early on that his son was a psychopath, and sterilised him. The novel – narrated autobiographically with a chilling charm – begins with Lou becoming involved with a new whore in town, Joyce Lakeland. She is a masochist and enjoys Lou’s violence as foreplay. But he batters her to death (as he thinks), and sets up the son of a local businessman to pay for the crime. A string of other murders ensue: Lou strangles a suspect Greek boy, who thinks Lou is his only friend (making it look like suicide) and beats his fiancée Amy to a pulp, after a particularly satisfying love-making. The novel ends in a bloody shoot-out, and Lou’s conclusion that everyone starts the game with a crooked cue.

  The Killer Inside Me is, like Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a prime example of 1950s, Cold War paranoia. You can trust no one – not even the smalltown lovable sheriff. Thompson’s novel also indicates the greater freedoms of pulp fiction at this period where sexual reference is concerned. While middle America was recoiling at the ‘frankness’, so-called, of novels like Peyton Place, Thompson could create scenes such as that in which Lou’s fiancée Amy, who has guessed during oral sex (by his ‘smell’) that he has earlier made love to Joyce, turns on him with: ‘You screwed her. You’ve been doing it all along. You’ve been putting her dirty insides inside of me, smearing me with her.’ Lou responds by beating her to death.

  When Hano left Lion in 1954, and the imprint gave up paperback originals with the collapse of the ANC-based wholesaling system, the most creative phase of Thompson’s life came to an end. His career then took a new turn with a new patron. Stanley Kubrick was an admirer, and contracted Thompson to do the screenplays for The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957), an anti-war film, set in the First World War, which is more savagely radical than anything else the director did. Less gloriously, Thompson did script work for the TV series Ironside. His late and posthumous popularity was boosted by films made of his own work, notably the Steve McQueen-starring The Getaway and Stephen Frears’s Oscar-winning adaptation of The Grifters (1989). Women, whisky, and hard living had long done for Thompson who once told his wife Alberta (the woman who cannily managed his posthumous estate) that he would have to wait ten years after his death until he was famous. So it was.

  FN

  James Myers Thompson (‘Jim’)

  MRT

  The Killer Inside Me

  Biog

  R. Polito, Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (1995)

  192. Leslie Charteris 1907–1993

  Everything I write is designed to be milked to the last drop of revenue.

  Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin in Singapore, the son of an English mother and a Chinese surgeon father. Mandarin was his first language. On the break-up of his parents’ marriage in 1919, he left Singapore with his mother, to be educated at public school in England. He qualifies – though no one has actually awarded him the title – as his adopted country’s first post-colonial novelist, or America’s, depending how you look at it.

  Yin left King’s College, Cambridge, degreeless, in order to write. He had sold his first story while still in his teens. Xenophobia may have played a part in his abandoning university. The word ‘half-breed’ would haunt him and doubtless play into the ultra-occidental style of his most famous fictional character, Simon Templar. His father disowned him, as a ne’er-do-well. In 1926, Yin disowned his father, in a sense, by changing his name by deed poll to Leslie Charles Bowyer Charteris Ian. It was ostensibly a tribute to the founder of the Hellfire Club, Colonel Francis Charteris. Other accounts suggest the name was plucked from a telephone directory for its overt Englishness. Pseudonymy, masquerade and disguised identity would be central in Charteris’s later thrillers.

  For a few years, Charteris ‘hoboed’ in classic thriller-writer apprentice-style. He picked up knowledge of the ‘real’ world – as a bartender, seaman, gold-prospector and professional bridge player. He lived in Paris for some time, toying with a career in art. The only extant filmed interview with him is conducted in fluent French. His debut nove
l X Esquire was published in 1927 and featured the first of his many ‘gentleman avenger’ heroes, who saves England from a dastardly plot to flood the country with lethal ciggies. It sold well. Simon Templar, the ‘Saint’, was introduced in Charteris’s third novel, Meet the Tiger (1928). A gentleman of means, in his early thirties, Templar is tall, dark, Savile Row-suited, ultra-English and impeccably looked after by his ‘man’ ’Orace. He was to remain unchangingly young for three decades.

  Charteris’s career was boosted by his association with the Amalgamated Press’s weekly magazine, The Thriller, launched in 1929. In 1930, the Saint patented his haloed matchstick man as his calling card. Other stock ingredients, honed over the decades, were Templar’s Scotland Yard contact, Chief Inspector Teal, and his female accomplice, Patricia Holm, whom the Saint never quite gets around to marrying. Charteris himself made four marriages and was divorced three times. Encouraged by his American sales, he removed himself (and the Saint) to the US in 1932 and stayed there many years. There was lingering ‘yellow peril’ phobia (specifically the vicious Chinese Exclusion Act) which denied him citizenship for ten years. He eventually got it – Americans loved him, even if America didn’t. The Saint in New York (1935) was hugely successful, especially after the 1938 film and its successors, starring the suave expatriate English actor, George Sanders. Were it not for his oriental features, Charteris was good-looking enough to have played the role himself.

  Edgar Wallace had died in 1933 and the creator of Simon Templar succeeded him as ‘King of the Thrillers’. The Saint was further popularised by a radio series (starring Vincent Price – like Sanders, another career smoothie), which ran from 1945 to 1951 in America. There was also a Saint comic strip, The Saint Mystery Magazine and, most long-runningly, a TV series launched in 1961, starring Roger Moore. The fiftieth Saint book came out in 1983. A big budget Hollywood film, starring Val Kilmer (no Sanders, he), came out in 1997. The formula was simple and repetitive. A crime is committed requiring redress from a modern Robin Hood. Templar steps in to do what the flat-footed police cannot. Templar’s vigilantism, for all its suavity, is fuelled by right-wing political sentiment and snobbery – the persistent failing of British thrillers. Villains (sinners?) are typically lower-class or foreign.

  Charteris married the beautiful film star, Audrey Long, fifteen years his junior, in 1952. He was now wealthy – enriched by multi-media subsidiary rights. The couple returned to England, where Charteris lived the good life (he enjoyed five-star restaurants and the sport of kings), and died leaving a fortune. Extraordinarily intelligent (he was a founder member of Mensa) and intellectually curious, Charteris also invented a pictorial sign language called Paleneo.

  FN

  Leslie Charles Bowyer Charteris Ian (born Yin)

  MRT

  The Saint Omnibus (1939)

  Biog

  http://www.lesliecharteris.com/

  193. James A. Michener 1907–1997

  I am a damned good writer.

  Although he did not begin writing until he was forty, Michener made a literary form distinctively his own. The ‘epic’ deals, typically, with the evolution of some great entity – an American state, such as Texas, the birth of a nation, or one of mankind’s ‘great steps’, such as the conquest of space. His choice of subject was always astute. Centennial (1974), his biggest bestseller, for example, was timed so that its millions-selling paperback form would appear in the bicentennial year, 1976. The hallmark of the Michener novel is girth. If not the Great American Novel, he certainly wrote the bulkiest. ‘I have two pieces of advice,’ one critic wrote of Michener’s latest effort: ‘first, don’t buy it. Second, if you do, don’t drop it on your foot.’ Latterly his books would be prefaced with the names of armies of researchers. Generations of American journalism students must have worked their way through college, subsidised by the Michener hourly rate for leg-work.

  James Albert Michener was born (the exact day is unrecorded), probably in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, possibly in New York. His mother, Mabel Michener, was a widow of Quaker descent. When he was nineteen, and a freshman in college, James learned that his ‘father’ had in fact died some five years before his birth. Michener never knew who his father was or, if he knew, never told. He told many lies on the subject. It was, the novelist recalled, a hard childhood: ‘we were evicted six times because my mother couldn’t pay the rent.’ An industrious schoolboy, Michener won a scholarship to Swarthmore College in 1925. In later life it pleased him to pretend it had been an athletic scholarship. He also liked to claim, with as little plausibility, that he was a ‘troublemaker’ and had been expelled – ‘even though they knew I was probably the brightest kid on the block’. In point of fact, he was a dutiful, weedy undergraduate of middling academic attainment, regarded as wholly inoffensive, if ‘moody’, by his fellow students. He graduated in the ominous year of 1929, and took up teaching work in Pennsylvania schools. In 1935 he made the first of his three marriages. The couple had little in common, apparently, beyond tennis.

  In 1941 Michener accepted a post as editor in Macmillan’s textbook division, a post which brought him to New York just as war broke out. Aged thrity-five, he was among the oldest American males to be drafted. He was commissioned into the US Navy in 1943. His country required no great sacrifice from Lieutenant Michener. His duties, as a supplies officer, were those of a ‘superclerk’, but his service, momentously, took him to the South Pacific. Out of this experience would emerge his first book, Tales of the South Pacific (1947). The tales were picked up by the Saturday Evening Post and by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the musical, South Pacific. The book, to the amazement of intellectual New York, won a Pulitzer.

  Michener had drifted apart from his wife (she was, he drily put it, ‘a war casualty’), and divorced and remarried in 1948. In 1952, he formed a long connection with Reader’s Digest, giving him a direct line to middle America. Sayonara (1954) dealt, Madame Butterfly style, with the interracial love of an American officer and a Japanese woman and was filmed, starring Marlon Brando. A better book, which produced a better film, was The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953), a sensitive study of the stressful last mission of an American fighter-bomber pilot in the Korean War. Out of his association with Reader’s Digest Michener developed a crossover genre later known as ‘faction’. It was to be the foundation of his first ‘epic’, the massive ‘soul of a nation’ narrative, Hawaii (1959). The story starts with geology and ends with American statehood.

  The book’s ‘melting pot’ optimism was to the taste of the American reading public. Politically Michener had been Republican but in the 1960s he campaigned for Kennedy and himself stood unsuccessfully for Congress. His failure to win a seat was, he claimed, one of three great disappointments in his life. The others were never winning the Nobel Prize (like Proust, he would modestly point out) and the childlessness of his marriages. The last was not for want of trying. Michener divorced again in 1955 and again promptly remarried, remaining with his third wife, Mari Toriko Sabusawa until her death in 1994.

  He had at last found his groove as a novelist. Blockbuster (literally, in his case, the size of building blocks) followed blockbuster: The Source (1965) – Israel, Chesapeake (1978) – from first migrating goose to Watergate, The Covenant (1980) – South Africa), Space (1982). A man of frugal habit, Michener would, it was said, haggle over the price of a newspaper. None the less he made major donations to good causes – including $2 million to his alma mater, Swarthmore. His one recorded vice was overwork. He produced a book (typically a big book) every year between 1947 and 1977. After a massive heart attack in 1965, he took better care of himself physically. Well into his sixties he would jog every day. Although he was convinced that malnourishment in his Depression childhood had damaged his constitution, he lived to a great and honoured, if un-Nobelised, age. Courageously, he resolved to end his life by refusing dialysis.

  FN

  James Albert Michener

  MRT

  Hawaii

 
Biog

  John P. Hayes, James A. Michener: A Biography (1984)

  194. John Creasey 1908–1973

  When he founded the Crime Writers’ Association in 1953, he [Creasey] and his noms de plume outnumbered the total membership. Keith Miles

  The most fecund of British crime fiction writers, Creasey has some 560 known titles to his credit, written under scores of pseudonyms. The truth is, no one has ever precisely been able to count his oeuvre. He was ruefully proud of his 743 rejection slips – authors tend to be precise about those sad scraps of paper. Creasey was born in Southfields, London, one of nine children of a working-class coach-builder. His family circumstances were straitened and as a child he was afflicted by polio, having to relearn how to walk at the age of six. His school education ended at fourteen and he tried, it is recorded, some twenty-eight different lines of work: none of them turned out well. He was already writing by night and submitting pieces to the two-penny thriller-papers which were popular between the wars. Some were published (the first in 1925), but most were not. Other hopefuls would have conceded defeat in the face of such repeated rejection, but his tenth novel, Seven Times Seven (a Four Just Men knock-off), was finally accepted, published and well received in 1932. Thereafter, Creasey stepped up his writing to factory pace, averaging 6,000 words a day, a full-length novel in six days, fifteen novels a year. He had found his groove.