The Getaway Car

by Donald E. Westlake

  Mickey Spillane. I, the Jury. An unexpectedly quiet entrance, but within a couple of pages Mike Hammer is making a speech to his murdered friend:

  “Jack, you’re dead now. You can’t hear me any more. Maybe you can. I hope so. I want you to hear what I’m about to say. You’ve known me for a long time, Jack. My word is good just as long as I live. I’m going to get the louse that killed you. He won’t sit in the chair. He won’t hang. He will die exactly as you did, with a .45 slug in the gut, just a little below the belly button. No matter who it is, Jack, I’ll get the one. Remember, no matter who it is, I promise.”

  Spillane took the plot of The Maltese Falcon, the brooding darkness of Chandler, the overstated tough talk of the second-rate hardboiled writers, wedded them all to the anxious, impatient overcharged postwar atmosphere, and came up with a winner.

  World War I had left people tired and alienated. World War II left them hopped-up, incomplete, wanting the party not to be over, but at the same time feeling lost and nostalgic for their prewar lives. The war had gone on too long, had been too brutal, had changed too many things. Nobody could go home again. Twenty years earlier, Hammett’s Continental Op had said, “Emotions are nuisances during business hours,” but for these new writers the emotions were all too strong, too insistent. Some, like Spillane, let the emotions pour out like diseased honey, giving a pulpy stickiness to their work. Some, like a lot of writers with Donald in their name—Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Donald Hamilton—permitted emotion to leach through a stiff-upper-lip impersonal facade. In either case, the ritual had been roughed up by the war, had become something stronger and harsher than it had been.

  One exception to this—and it was an exception that people loved for quite a while—was Richard S. Prather, whose Shell Scott was a private eye gone bonkers. All the other guys were glooming and brooding and not really having much fun in life, but Shell Scott loved the ritual, loved being a private eye, loved being a pulp fiction character. He started chuckling and winking and mooning at us in 1951, and here’s the start of The Wailing Frail from 1956:

  She yanked the door open with a crash and said, “Gran —” but then she stopped and stared at me. She was nude as a noodle.

  I stared right back at her.

  “Oh!” she squealed. “You’re not Grandma!”

  “No,” I said. “I’m Shell Scott, and you’re not Grandma, either.”

  She slammed the door in my face.

  Yep, I thought, this is the right house.

  What I think is my favorite opening for a private eye story comes from a 1953 Shell Scott short called “The Sleeper Caper.” Here it is:

  You take a plane from the States and head south; a few hours later and up more than seven thousand feet, where the air is thin and clear, you land at Mexico City and take a cab to the Hipodromo de las Americas, where the horses run sideways, backwards, and occasionally around the seven-furlong track, and you go out to the paddock area after the fourth race.

  You see a big, young, husky, unhandsome character with a Mexico City tan, short, prematurely white hair sticking up in the air like the head of a clipped whiskbroom, and his arms around the waists of two lovely young gals who look like Latin screen stars, and you say, “Geez, look at the slob with the two tomatoes.”

  That’s me. I am the slob with the two tomatoes, and the hell with you.

  Five days ago I’d left Los Angeles . . .

  Different as they were in other ways, Prather and Spillane were alike in being a complete political turnaround from the original Black Mask writers of the twenties, almost all of whom had been to the left of the political spectrum, favoring unions, disapproving of mine owners and other rich people, believing America had a good system which at times was corrupted by greedy people for personal gain. Mike Hammer and Shell Scott are much more to the right, their attitudes clearly influenced by the war. The true enemy is frequently foreign in one way or another, and anybody who disagrees with the status quo, who wants to offer any change, is suspect. Their only objection to things-as-they-are, in fact, is that they find the criminal justice system too lenient, and frequently feel there’s nothing for them to do but hand out justice—or something—themselves.

  This is a long way from the origins of the genre. The private eyes of the twenties weren’t vigilantes, because they weren’t devoted to a cause. Hammer and Scott and so on, in the fifties and sixties, were devoted to a cause.

  History is an elephant; mess with her and you could get stepped on. The Vietnam War made the opinions of Hammer and Scott seem boorish and irrelevant; their popularity slipped and has not recovered.

  If Hammett was the major figure in the first wave of hardboiled writers, and Chandler the same in the second, it’s been generally agreed that Ross Macdonald was the shining light in the third, and if so, he’s also an excellent example of the dangers inherent in ritual. Somewhere in the midpoint of his career, Macdonald began to write a novel in which the mystery was centered on a person’s parentage and the revelation of a twenty- or thirty-year-old secret was at the core of the solution to the puzzle.

  Macdonald wrote that book over and over again for about twenty years. It didn’t matter what anybody said. We could plead and beg, we could threaten, we could weep, we could hold our breath and stamp our feet on the floor, he didn’t care—he just went on writing that goddam book. You talk about hardboiled!

  Macdonald also became increasingly mannered, till finally he was nothing but mannerisms. The tortured similes, the brooding introspection, the jaundiced view of society—nobody ever has any fun in a Ross Macdonald book.

  Here are a few bits almost at random from just one novel, Black Money, of 1966.

  His front teeth glared at me like a pair of chisels.

  Under his carefully tailored Ivy League suit he wore a layer of fat like easily penetrable armor.

  She was handsome and dark, with the slightly imperious look of the only woman in a big house.

  Like Jane Eyre? Here’s a paragraph; not so much an extended metaphor as an extended groping about:

  The college was in what had recently been the country. On the scalped hills around it were a few remnants of the orange groves which had once furred them with green. The trees on the campus itself were mostly palms, and looked as if they had been brought in and planted full grown. The students gave a similar impression. [Unlike most colleges, where the students look as though they were born and raised there.—Westlake]

  One of them, a youth with a beard which made him look like a tall Toulouse-Lautrec . . .

  Just one more.

  He had a long nose, slightly curved, which appeared both self-assertive and inquisitive.

  I hope my nose is looking disbelieving.

  From time to time, a very few writers have tried to avoid the ritual and use some sort of reality instead as the framework for their writing, and I think by far the best of these mutants is Joe Gores, who arrived late in the third wave. From the late sixties on, Joe Gores took the private eye form and, in place of either some earlier reality or the standardized conventions, he wrote stories and novels reflecting his own career as a private detective in our world, rather than the world of the twenties or the forties. His novels and stories about the Dan Kearny Agency are at the same time firmly within the genre and yet alive, and his non-series novel Interface (1974) stretches the genre about as far as anybody has done.

  However, in addition to turning out some excellent and readable work, Joe Gores has inadvertently also proved again the proposition that, once a genre is dependent on ritual, it will not return to reality. The body that lives on strychnine cannot live without strychnine.

  The third wave broke on the rock of Vietnam. War is never good for the private eye, and the Vietnam War was worse. It trivialized everything. Nothing was sure anymore, nothing was true, don’t trust anybody over thirty or under thirty or thirty. The finest bit of hardboiled dialogue in the entire era was said by Eugene McCarthy at Chicago in 1968 when his pres
idential bid failed: “Six months on the road for nothing.” Frank Sinatra turned out to be the movie cop of the time, in The Detective and Tony Rome, and brutality turned out to be the entire message.

  Except for television. The real world never never never impinges on the entertainment side of television, so fully realized private eyes continued to perform their pulp kabuki all over the tube. Mannix and Cannon and all those fellows, of whom the best was by a long shot Rockford. Rockford didn’t try to break out of the rituals, but used them in a very knowing and able way. His relationships with society, with the police, with his clients, with women, were all very much in the tradition, and yet Rockford was an individual, a human being you could believe in rather than a cardboard figure in a trench coat.

  A few months ago, a friend told me about an actor who stars as a private eye in a current show based in Hawaii, who had to return to Los Angeles for eye treatments. In order to film him against all that Hawaiian sun, they had to shine so much light on this poor fellow that it’s burning his eyes, risking his sight. You want a metaphor for what’s happened to the private eye? There’s too much light on him. He can’t see anymore.

  Postwar times seem to generate new private eye waves, and I understand there’s one going on now, but I admit I don’t know much about it. I know that several people are writing exact replicas of private eye novels. I know that there is an organization called the Private Eye Writers of America, and that it has about seventy-five members, and that every member has published at least one book or story about a private eye. I think about these things, and I try to inhale, and I don’t sense any air here. The next to the last stage of the Western was the hermetically sealed story about gunfighters and ranchers and schoolmistresses, none of it reflecting any reality anywhere, some of it joky about its artificiality, like Vera Cruz. The last stage of the Western was Sergio Leone, the spaghetti Western, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, pictures made exclusively in close-up because a long shot would have shown the characters standing on a barren airless moon.

  A while ago the Mystery Writers of America joined up with a couple of overseas organizations to have a big meeting in Stockholm. The writers came from every continent. Private eye novels are being written, and published, and read, in Kenya and Zimbabwe, in Japan, in Russia. What are these books? What truth do they connect to? The brevity of the early Black Mask days is long gone. The relevance of those days is gone. The vitality of novelty is gone. The reflection of an underlying truth is gone. I’m not really sure what’s left.

  Except the books and stories that started it all. Hammett reads as smoothly and honestly today as he ever did. His contemporaries are just as lively, and not very much dated. Chandler retains his strength and his complexity. The early work of the Donalds—Ross, John D. and Hamilton—is still good and real and very evocative of that postwar time. Mike Hammer and Shell Scott are still, in their very different ways, as loonily readable as ever.

  The private eye novel may have become very strait-jacketed by ritual, but it’s certainly not dead. The hardboiled dicks are still viable, and may yet produce a Shane. It came close with Joe Gore’s Interface. In the meantime, I look forward with mixed feelings to the first spaghetti private eye.

  INTRODUCTION TO MURDEROUS SCHEMES*

  Westlake wrote this introduction for Murderous Schemes: An Anthology of Classic Detective Stories, which he coedited with J. Madison Davis for Oxford University Press in 1996.—Ed.

  The major flaw with the genre under consideration is that no one knows quite what to call it. Many people call it the “mystery story,” though that doesn’t take into account all those stories firmly within the genre which are not mysteries, such as heist novels, in which we follow the crooks before, during, and after a crime, usually a robbery: The Asphalt Jungle, for instance. “Mystery story” also leaves out all those murder stories in which the identity of the murderer is known to the reader/audience from the beginning: the Columbo series on television, as one example, or C. S. Forester’s Payment Deferred, or the charmingly self-referential “The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr.”

  “Crime story” certainly covers the possibilities, but somehow in terms of this genre the phrase “crime story” has lost its generality and has come to mean almost exclusively stories about professional criminals, leaving out all those wife murderers and greedy heirs. The British, and briefly also the Americans, tried to call our genre the “thriller,” but that never quite took, sounding more like fantasy or horror before settling where the “thriller” resides today, as a definition of a story combining spies with technology, meaning in most cases a story more than usually devoid of thrills.

  “Suspense” is also used sometimes as a name for the genre, but suspense is not a kind of story, it’s an element in all story, it’s the element that creates the desire to know what happens next, which is to say, the desire to be told the story. Suspense is the nicotine of storytelling, the drug that brings us back. Suspense began when Eve reached for that apple, which was a long, long time ago. We can’t co-opt the word for one single genre, as though to say there’s no suspense in it when the rustler cuts through the barbed wire or the paratrooper jumps out of the airplane over the combat zone.

  My own preference for a name for this genre is “detective story,” even though I personally have almost never written about detectives, and in fact most of my characters, when confronted by a detective, do their level best to blend in with the wallpaper. But I like the term “detective story,” and will use it from here on in this essay, mostly because it is a term of disparagement.

  Well, yes, it is. I can no longer count the times I have been at a cocktail party and heard someone say, “I never have any time for serious/good/real novels any more. When I want to unwind, I just go to bed with a detective story.” That is the context in which the phrase “detective story” is now used, and right now, at this exact moment when you are reading this sentence, the phrase “detective story” is being spoken in exactly that same familiar, easy, disparaging way at least forty times somewhere on the planet.

  Who are these speakers? They are intelligent, they are educated, they are usually in the professions (though sometimes in the arts). They are precisely the people any writer would be delighted to count among his readership, and I am delighted, and I am willing to accept the barb that comes with it.

  Because I know what they really mean, and they don’t. Consider: When it comes time for them to unwind, do they unwind by fooling with the Etch-a-Sketch? No. Do they unwind by watching I Love Lucy reruns on cable television? No. They don’t even unwind with western stories or biographies. Every reader I’ve ever heard speak in this fashion unwinds with “detective stories.”

  What they are seeming to say, these people, when they assure us they “just” read detective stories, is that they unwind by insulting their own intelligence. Their brains and educations and wide-ranging intellects, they would like us to know, better fit them for better books, the serious, praiseworthy novels they would certainly be reading if they hadn’t tired themselves out at the office.

  The mistake is that too many people are confused about what reading fiction is for. They believe you’re supposed to read novels to be improved, to be present at the clash of great ideas, to be challenged by new and profound ways to look at life. And then it turns out, they’re too tired.

  Oh, they buy the books, the serious award winners, described by publisher and critic alike as important, ground-breaking, even deeply disturbing. They pay their dues. But when the moment comes, once again they fail. Just for now, just as a stopgap, sheepishly they slink off, inadvertently to read fiction for the right reason: Because it’s fun. Just for now, they’ll read detective stories.

  What are these detective stories, that so enthrall people who should be spending their time on more worthy pursuits? What is this drug anyway?

  The purpose of this anthology, assembled and annotated with J. Madison Davis, is to answer that question by showing it has many answe
rs, that the sundry schemes and proliferating variations have been the norm in detective stories from the beginning. Whether examining psychological coercion in the category I Confess! or exploring the undeniable attraction of evil in Come Into My Parlor, the detective story is protean, adapting itself to the manifold purposes of its practitioners, so that to define it is a slippery prospect at best.

  Which is why we have chosen something better than definition. We have chosen to describe the detective story in terms of its categories, and to let the categories themselves spread as they will. And when we do that, we see that nitty-gritty realism belongs in the detective story, and formal puzzles do, and comedy does (I’m happy to say), and social commentary, and regional realism, and just about anything you can think of in fiction of any kind at all. About the only constant in every detective story is crime; they all contain some sort of crime.

  Why is that? Why is the element of crime so useful to the storyteller and such a magnet to the reader? I’d like to try to answer that by borrowing from the classical description of theater: One character on a stage is a speech, two characters an argument, three characters drama. The variant I would propose begins with society. When you have only society, you have predictability and order; life in an anthill. When you have society and the individual, you have conflict, because the greater good of society is never exactly the same as the greater good of any one individual within it. When you have society and a crime, you have a rent in the fabric, a distortion away from predictability and order; but to no effect, it’s merely disordered. When you have all three, society and the individual and a crime, you have all the multiple possibilities of drama, plus all the multiple possibilities of free will; that is, life. Society and crime are in unending opposition, but the individual is in a shifting relationship to the other two, depending on how this individual feels about this crime in this society.

  That’s why there are detective stories about cops, but also detective stories about robbers; detective stories in which virtue is triumphant, and detective stories in which virtue is trampled in the dust; detective stories hinged on professional expertise, and detective stories hinged on amateur brilliance; detective stories in which we root for the hero, and detective stories in which we root for the villain.