The man had ideals, while knowing perfectly that they are a sore expense which a cop can ill afford. Being just, flexible, understanding, et cetera et cetera, toward a public incurably cowardly and egoistic, as well as generally brutish; easier said than done. The policeman’s trade is squalid and underpaid, as well as governed by a pack of regulations. In his earliest, crudest shape, Van der Valk took on consistency through these oppositions. You know that dishonesty pays, that your promotion is compromised, that inhumanity is inherent in the rules. You wish to do right?—the law forbids it. You wish to do good?—the regulation excludes it. This was his raw material. Why do you persevere? You aren’t, we hope, going to come up with a lot of clichés about the alleviation of suffering.
The next set of equations concerned power. Criminal-brigade cops possess a good deal, and abuse it. In all civilized countries there are elaborate mechanisms to protect the public from tyranny, and to bridle excess zeal. These laws and instructions are largely self-defeating, since they are largely ineffectual, while managing to stay a considerable hindrance to the cop. The courts have a tendency to be more hostile toward the cop than the criminal: the public has a shamefaced sympathy for the fellow who’s been caught … The cop represents might, and be it in civil or criminal law we know that might has always abundant means of wearying out the right. Yet any intelligent man can see the dangers of dispensing subjective brands of justice.
Van der Valk, facing these hard questions and not always taking the easiest or most entertaining way out, was never my creature. From the beginning he refused to be manipulated; bolting off in unexpected directions, ignoring the dictates of the plot, disregarding the convenience of the other characters and invariably of me. Hard on the scribbler, in perpetual need of some exciting event to keep his story moving. But the cop didn’t have it easy either, brought up sharp by trifling matters like perjury or sadism.
He had plenty of weaknesses, worst perhaps his absurd indulgence toward pretty girls, which got him into a variety of bad fixes. Still, this self-indulgence showed too a refusal of stereotyping. All literature is full of virtuous bores, but one never likes d’Artagnan better than when he stops being heroic to play that really abominable trick on Milady. Arlette’s hard-boiled eye kept Van der Valk from jumping out of the window dressed in the maid’s clothes, but only just. Getting himself shot by that tiresome and spoiled young woman Anne-Marie Marchal served him right: he should have had more sense. And he was lazy to be sure, and habitually drank too much. Still, there are more unattractive vices. He had small vanity and was rarely self-satisfied; hated petty meanness and avarice. And he punctured the self-important: no wonder so many critics detested him.
The refusal to fit into a pat little mold, to be a plastic thing that makes the motor go (like a car’s distributor cap) was of course his downfall. For a writer to pursue a character through a prolonged series without renewal is a sure sign of one thing: that his only continuing object is to make money. The result, be it Kojak or the Scarlet Pimpernel, is a butler-figure, something with about six fixed positions and attitudes, totally predictable and as alive as frozen mutton. Van der Valk refused this fate. After ten books in as many years I noticed that he was beginning to parody himself; I did not want the downhill slide to go further.
There were other considerations too, of course. I no longer lived in Holland and had no longer the everyday contact with the tissue of existence there. The backgrounds would have ceased being exact, slipping into the nonsense chambers of commerce print for handouts. As well as degenerating increasingly toward cardboard, Van der Valk, in the pattern of streets and houses that was his, would have slipped out of focus. The sort of thing that happened, in fact, to Maigret, whose Third Republic anachronisms in modern Paris became embarrassing.
By killing him off, in fact, I made sure he would stay alive … This is tricky ground, where the writer falls easily into sentimentalisms and the nauseatingly sweet attitudes of anthropomorphism. I talk to the flowers, and they confide in me: do they now. But against this, one must place the undisputed fact that for a great many people an imaginary character has vastly more life than the zombies we meet in our trivial round. It isn’t in the least surprising that people write “Frodo Lives” on the subway wall; it is more surprising, and sad, that they should find it necessary to point it out … One can test the fact anywhere: if you go down, say, to Key Biscayne you will find that ex-President Nixon is a very shadowy personage compared to Travis McGee.
To find him a successor was, again, a task I underestimated. I had not realized the strength of this character who had lived for so long in my workroom until I found myself copying his speech patterns. He lay with a paralyzing weight upon the first books in the genre that I tried next, and the streets of Amsterdam had a folklore quality I found stultifying. Only now, in fact, do I feel the indispensable sense of distancing that keeps us friends.
I have many more reasons for gratitude toward him. Over those ten years I served my apprenticeship as a writer, and it was Van der Valk that kept my family and myself fed and clothed. He was a constant and unselfish companion. He had the agreeable habit of seeing the funny side to domestic catastrophe, and was a powerful defense against invasion by vanities or pretensions. Toward the soapy sales talk of Mr. Buy-and-Sell he brought sharp points that punctured, and better still a sense of true values that must be defended at all cost. For the skipping antics of politicians he had always a mocking eye and a scathing tongue, and for parish-pump thinking (a disease that does not flourish only in Holland) he had a good-humored contempt that brought oxygen into our lives in moments of great disillusion and discouragement.
My gratitude to him will last as long as my life.
Bibliography and Filmography
Roderick Alleyn
Books:
1938 Artists in Crime (Furman)
1938 Death in a White Tie (Furman)
1939 Overture to Death (Furman)
1940 Vintage Murder (Sheridan)
1940 Death at the Bar (Little, Brown)
1940 Death of a Peer (Little, Brown; British title: Surfeit of Lampreys)
1941 Death in Ecstasy (Sheridan)
1941 Death and the Dancing Footman (Little, Brown)
1941 Enter a Murderer (Pocket Books)
1941 The Nursing Home Murder (Sheridan in collaboration with Dr. Henry Jellett)
1942 A Man Lay Dead (Sheridan)
1943 Colour Scheme (Little, Brown)
1945 Died in the Wool (Little, Brown)
1947 Final Curtain (Little, Brown)
1949 A Wreath for Rivera (Little, Brown; British title: Swing, Brother, Swing)
1951 Night at the Vulcan (Little, Brown; British title: Opening Night)
1953 Spinsters in Jeopardy (Little, Brown)
1955 Scales of Justice (Little, Brown)
1956 Death of a Fool (Little, Brown; British title: Off with His Head)
1958 Singing in the Shrouds (Little, Brown)
1959 False Scent (Little, Brown)
1962 Hand in Glove (Little, Brown)
1963 Dead Water (Little, Brown)
1966 Killer Dolphin (Little, Brown; British title: Death at the Dolphin)
1969 Clutch of Constables (Little, Brown)
1971 When in Rome (Little, Brown)
1972 Tied Up in Tinsel (Little, Brown)
1974 Black as He’s Painted (Little, Brown) 1977 last Ditch (Little, Brown)
John Appleby
Books:
1937 Seven Suspects (Dodd, Mead; British title: Death at the President’s Lodging)
1937 Hamlet, Revenge! (Dodd, Mead)
1938 Lament for a Maker (Dodd, Mead)
1939 The Spider Strikes (Dodd, Mead; British title: Stop Press)
1940 A Comedy of Terrors (Dodd, Mead; British title: There Came Both Mist and Snow)
1941 The Secret Vanguard (Dodd, Mead)
1941 Appleby on Ararat (Dodd, Mead)
1942 The Daffodil Affair (Dodd, Mead)
&nb
sp; 1943 The Weight of Evidence (Dodd, Mead)
1945 Appleby’s End (Dodd, Mead)
1947 A Night of Errors (Dodd, Mead)
1951 The Paper Thunderbolt (Dodd, Mead; British title: Operation Pax)
1952 One Man Show (Dodd, Mead; British title: A Private View)
1954 Dead Man’s Shoes (Dodd, Mead; British title: Appleby Talking; 23 short stories)
1957 Appleby Talks Again (Dodd, Mead; 18 short stories)
1957 Death on a Quiet Day (Dodd, Mead; British title: Appleby Plays Chicken)
1958 The Long Farewell (Dodd, Mead)
1959 Hare Sitting Up (Dodd, Mead)
1961 Silence Observed (Dodd, Mead)
1962 The Crabtree Affair (Dodd, Mead; British title: A Connoisseur's Case)
1966 The Bloody Wood (Dodd, Mead)
1968 Death by Water (Dodd, Mead; British title: Appleby at Allington)
1969 Picture of Guilt (Dodd, Mead; British title: A Family Affair)
1970 Death at the Chase (Dodd, Mead)
1971 An Awkward Lie (Dodd, Mead)
1972 The Open House (Dodd, Mead)
1973 Appleby’s Answer (Dodd, Mead)
1974 Appleby’s Other Story (Dodd, Mead)
1976 The Appleby File (Dodd, Mead; 18 short stories)
1977 The Gay Phoenix (Dodd, Mead)
Lew Archer
Books:
1949 The Moving Target (Knopf)
1950 The Drowning Pool (Knopf)
1951 The Way Some People Die (Knopf)
1952 The Ivory Grin (Knopf)
1954 Find a Victim (Knopf)
1955 The Name Is Archer (Bantam; 7 stories)
1956 The Barbarous Coast (Knopf)
1958 The Doomsters (Knopf)
1959 The Galton Case (Knopf)
1961 The Wycherly Woman (Knopf)
1962 The Zebra-Striped Hearse (Knopf)
1964 The Chill (Knopf)
1965 The Far Side of the Dollar (Knopf)
1966 Black Money (Knopf)
1968 The Instant Enemy (Knopf)
1969 The Goodbye Look (Knopf)
1971 The Underground Man (Knopf)
1973 Sleeping Beauty (Knopf)
1976 The Blue Hammer (Knopf)
1977 Lew Archer, Private Investigator (The Mysterious Press; 9 stories)
Films:
1966 Harper (Warner Brothers), with Paul Newman
1974 The Underground Man (Paramount TV), with Peter Graves
1975 The Drowning Pool (Warner Brothers), with Paul Newman
Father Bredder
Books:
1959 The Saint Maker (Dodd, Mead)
1960 A Pact with Satan (Dodd, Mead)
1961 The Secret of the Doubting Saint (Dodd, Mead)
1963 Deliver Us from Wolves (Dodd, Mead)
1964 Flowers by Request (Dodd, Mead)
1966 Out of the Depths (Dodd, Mead)
1968 A Touch of Jonah (Dodd, Mead)
1970 A Problem in Angels (Dodd, Mead)
1972 The Mirror of Hell (Dodd, Mead)
1973 The Devil to Play (Dodd, Mead)
1977 A Corner of Paradise (St. Martin’s Press)
Flash Casey
Books:
1942 Silent Are the Dead (Knopf)
1943 Murder for Two (Knopf)
1946 Flash Casey, Detective (Avon; 4 novelettes)
1961 Error of Judgment (Knopf)
1962 The Man Who Died Too Soon (Knopf)
1964 Deadly Image (Knopf)
Films:
1936 Women Are Trouble (M-G-M), with Stuart Erwin
1937 Here’s Flash Casey (Grand National), with Eric Linden
Pierre Chambrun
Books:
1962 The Cannibal Who Overate (Dodd, Mead)
1964 The Shape of Fear (Dodd, Mead)
1966 The Evil That Men Do (Dodd, Mead)
1967 The Golden Trap (Dodd, Mead)
1968 The Gilded Nightmare (Dodd, Mead)
1969 The Girl Watcher’s Funeral (Dodd, Mead)
1971 The Deadly Joke (Dodd, Mead)
1972 Birthday, Deathday (Dodd, Mead)
1973 Walking Dead Man (Dodd, Mead)
1974 Bargain with Death (Dodd, Mead)
1975 Time of Terror (Dodd, Mead)
1976 The Fourteen Dilemma (Dodd, Mead)
Inspector Cockrill
Books:
1941 Heads You Lose (Dodd, Mead)
1944 Green for Danger (Dodd, Mead)
1946 The Crooked Wreath (Dodd, Mead; British title: Suddenly at His Residence)
1948 Death of Jezebel (Dodd, Mead)
1953 Fog of Doubt (Scribner; British title: London Particular, 1952)
1955 Tour de Force (Scribner)
1968 What Dread Hand (London: Michael Joseph; no American edition; 15 stories of which 3 are about Cockrill)
Films:
1946 Green for Danger (Independent Producers), with Alastair Sim
Captain José Da Silva
Books:
1962 The Fugitive (Simon & Schuster)
1963 Isle of the Snakes (Simon & Schuster)
1963 The Shrunken Head (Simon & Schuster)
1965 The Diamond Bubble (Simon & Schuster)
1965 Brazilian Sleigh Ride (Simon & Schuster)
1967 Always Kill a Stranger (Putnam)
1968 The Bridge That Went Nowhere (Putnam)
1969 The Xavier Affair (Putnam)
1971 The Green Hell Treasure (Putnam)
1975 Trouble in Paradise (Doubleday)
Nancy Drew
Books:
1930 The Secret of the Old Clock (Grosset & Dunlap)
1930 The Hidden Staircase (Grosset & Dunlap)
1930 The Bungalow Mystery (Grosset & Dunlap)
1930 Mystery at Lilac Inn (Grosset & Dunlap)
1931 The Secret of Shadow Ranch (Grosset & Dunlap)
1931 The Secret of Red Gate Farm (Grosset & Dunlap)
1932 The Clue in the Diary (Grosset & Dunlap)
1932 Nancy’s Mysterious Letter (Grosset & Dunlap)
1933 The Sign of the Twisted Candles (Grosset & Dunlap)
1933 Password to Larkspur Lane (Grosset & Dunlap)
1934 The Clue of the Broken Locket (Grosset & Dunlap)
1935 The Message in the Hollow Oak (Grosset & Dunlap)
1936 Mystery of the Ivory Charm (Grosset & Dunlap)
1937 The Whispering Statue (Grosset & Dunlap)
1937 The Haunted Bridge (Grosset & Dunlap)
1939 The Clue of the Tapping Heels (Grosset & Dunlap)
1940 The Mystery of the Brass Bound Trunk (Grosset & Dunlap)
1941 Mystery at the Moss-Covered Mansion (Grosset & Dunlap)
1942 The Quest of the Missing Map (Grosset & Dunlap)
1943 The Clue in the Jewel Box (Grosset & Dunlap)
1944 The Secret in the Old Attic (Grosset & Dunlap)
1945 The Clue in the Crumbling Wall (Grosset & Dunlap)
1946 Mystery of the Tolling Bell (Grosset & Dunlap)
1947 The Clue in the Old Album (Grosset & Dunlap)
1948 The Ghost of Blackwood Hall (Grosset & Dunlap)
1949 The Clue of the Leaning Chimney (Grosset & Dunlap)
1950 The Secret of the Wooden Lady (Grosset & Dunlap)
1951 The Clue of the Black Keys (Grosset & Dunlap)
1952 Mystery at the Ski Jump (Grosset & Dunlap)
1953 The Clue of the Velvet Mask (Grosset & Dunlap)
1953 The Ringmaster’s Secret (Grosset & Dunlap)
1954 The Scarlet Slipper Mystery (Grosset & Dunlap)
1955 The Witch Tree Symbol (Grosset & Dunlap)
1956 The Hidden Window Mystery (Grosset & Dunlap)
1957 The Haunted Showboat (Grosset & Dunlap)
1959 The Secret of the Golden Pavilion (Grosset & Dunlap)
1960 The Clue in the Old Stagecoach (Grosset & Dunlap)
1961 The Mystery of the Fire Dragon (Grosset & Dunlap)
1962 The Clue of the Dancing Puppet (Grosset & Dunlap)
/> 1963 The Moonstone Castle Mystery (Grosset & Dunlap)
1964 The Clue of the Whistling Bagpipes (Grosset & Dunlap)
1965 The Phantom of Pine Hill (Grosset & Dunlap)
1966 The Mystery of the 99 Steps (Grosset & Dunlap)
1967 The Clue in the Crossword Cipher (Grosset & Dunlap)
1968 The Spider Sapphire Mystery (Grosset & Dunlap)
1969 The Invisible Intruder (Grosset & Dunlap)
1970 The Mysterious Mannequin (Grosset & Dunlap)
1971 The Crooked Banister (Grosset & Dunlap)
1972 The Secret of Mirror Bay (Grosset & Dunlap)
1973 The Double Jinx Mystery (Grosset & Dunlap)
1974 Mystery of the Glowing Eye (Grosset & Dunlap)
1975 The Secret of the Forgotten City (Grosset & Dunlap)
1976 The Sky Phantom (Grosset & Dunlap)
1977 The Strange Message in the Parchment (Grosset & Dunlap)
1978 Mystery of Crocodile Island (Grossett & Dunlap)
Films:
1938 Nancy Drew, Detective (Warner Brothers), with Bonita Granville
1939 Nancy Drew, Reporter (Warner Brothers), with Bonita Granville
1939 Nancy Drew, Trouble Shooter (Warner Brothers), with Bonita Granville
1939 Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (Warner Brothers), with Bonita Granville
The 87th Precinct
Books:
1956 Cop Hater (Permabooks)
1956 The Mugger (Permabooks)
1956 The Pusher (Permabooks)
1957 The Con Man (Permabooks)
1957 Killer’s Choice (Permabooks)
1958 Killer’s Payoff (Permabooks)
1958 Lady Killer (Permabooks)
1959 Killer’s Wedge (Simon & Schuster)
1959 ’Til Death (Simon & Schuster)
1959 King’s Ransom (Simon & Schuster)
1960 Give the Boys a Great Big Hand (Simon & Schuster)
The Great Detectives Page 20
