by Otto Penzler
The point is, I might have been better off with a steady diet of the pulps. Certainly, I wouldn’t have been any worse. True, the pulps of the early-twentieth century will never be mistaken for proto-feminist documents. As Otto Penzler notes in his foreword, the motif of rescue is as prevalent here as it was in any Superman episode. Still, even if women seldom take the lead in these stories, there is just enough kink in these archetypes of girlfriend/hussy/sociopath to hint at broader possibilities for the female of the species.
Take Polly Knight in Randolph Barr’s “The Girl Who Knew Too Much.” She seems to be little more than a gang-girl Pocahantas, offering to sacrifice her rosy flesh—and we are frequently reminded of its pink perfection—for the sake of the newspaperman she has met by chance. Polly, as it turns out, is not quite the damsel in distress that she appears to be.
Creamy skin, along with jaw-dropping beauty, is a frequent motif in these stories, as are gray eyes, most notably in Dashiell Hammett’s “The Girl with the Silver Eyes.” Here, the Continental Op comes face to face with an old nemesis, and marvels at the effect this chameleon has on every man she meets. “Porky Grout, whose yellowness was notorious from Seattle to San Diego, standing rigidly in the path of a charging metal monster, with an inadequate pistol in each hand…. She had done that to Porky Grout, and he hadn’t even been human!” The story is vintage Hammett—and provides a lovely inside joke, the red herring of a Baltimore address only a few blocks south from where Hammett lived as a boy.
Raymond Chandler’s story here is also vintage, albeit an immature one, if you will. One doesn’t need to be a Chandler scholar to spot some very familiar elements—an unsavory book dealer with a penchant for kinky photos, a wild-eyed thumb-sucker named Carmen, and a dead chauffeur. “Killer in the Rain” should be taught in college creative writing courses, if only as an object lesson in how a disciplined writer can reshape material, deepening its themes and expanding its possibilities.
The most dynamic female in these stories, for my money, is the avenging angel in Cornell Woolrich’s “Angel Face.” Although she requires a timely rescue in the end, her resourcefulness and bravery are beyond question. For the love of her brother, she withstands torture and risks death. But, as she tells us in the story’s first para-
graph when she refers to her makeup as war paint, she’s being quite literal.
Of course, the reader inclined to pick up this volume is probably already steeped in the work of Chandler, Hammett, and Woolrich. Even for the pulp cognoscenti, there are multiple treasures to be unearthed, the style ranging from a little campy to downright classic. Your mileage may vary, as the kids say now, but I was particularly taken by Perry Paul’s Dizzy Malone in “The Jane from Hell’s Kitchen,” piloting her plane above the Atlantic Ocean and surviving a fusillade of bullets. (Take that, Amelia Earhart!) And I feel as if I found a new friend in the acerbic, absurdly competent Sarah Watson, featured in D. B. McCandless’s “He Got What He Asked For.”
Around the time that I read this anthology, the United States was titillated—there is no other word—by the story of an astronaut who drove cross-country to confront a romantic rival. Determined to make good time on the 800-mile-plus journey, the astronaut wore an adult diaper. The items packed for the trip included a BB gun, a four-inch folding buck knife, a new steel mallet, black gloves, rubber tubing, and plastic garbage bags. We may never know exactly what was planned, for the intended victim foiled the attack and the assailant was arrested and charged with attempted murder.
The big twist was that the astronaut was a woman. But then, so was the quick-thinking victim. One could argue that this is progress of a sort, women seizing the initiative and taking action, with no men at all in the climactic confrontation. Or one could conclude that feminism is still a little spotty when women decide that eliminating other women is the way to resolve a romantic triangle. All I know is that I prefer the company of the dames within these pages, who parade before us in impeccable suits, filmy negligees, torn evening dresses, and—in the memorable case of Sarah Watson—a voluminous purple kimono worn over a corset. But not a diaper, never a diaper, thank God. Even the most venal among them have more class than that.
Angel Face
Cornell Woolrich
IN 1935, CORNELL WOOLRICH (1903-1968) submitted a story titled “Angel Face” to Dime Detective, which published it as “Murder in Wax” in its March 1, 1935, issue. A couple of years later, he sold a similar story about an avenging angel to Black Mask, who published it as “Face Work.” This story has been reprinted often as the title Woolrich clearly wanted for it, “Angel Face,” finally given to it by Frederic Dannay when he reprinted it in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for December 1946. While it has the usual number of plot inconsistencies one expects from the great poet of darkness, it is quintessential Woolrich in all its noir glory. Both “Face Work” and “Murder in Wax” were the basis for one of the seven great novels in his memorable “Black” series, The Black Angel (1943).
In addition to its frequent reprints, “Face Work” enjoyed other incarnations. It was bought for the movies soon after publication—the first of numerous Woolrich stories to be filmed. Columbia made it into a weak fifty-eight-minute B movie titled Convicted in 1938. Although it starred a young Rita Hayworth and meticulously followed the story, even lifting much of the original dialogue, it is neither a noir film nor a memorable one. Twelve years later, it was aired as “Angel Face” on radio’s famous Suspense series (May 18, 1950) with Claire Trevor as the good-hearted stripper who tries to save her brother from being convicted of a murder.
“Face Work” was first published in the October 1937 issue of Black Mask.
Angel Face
Cornell Woolrich
Beauty plus brains makes a deadly weapon
HAD ON my best hat and my warpaint when I dug into her bell. You’ve heard make-up called that a thousand times, but this is one time it rated it; it was just that—warpaint. I caught Ruby Rose Reading at breakfast time—hers, not mine. Quarter to three in the afternoon. Breakfast was a pink soda-fountain mess, a tomato-and-lettuce, both untouched, and an empty glass of Bromo Seltzer, which had evidently had first claim on her. There were a pair of swell ski slides under her eyes; she was reading Gladys Glad’s beauty column to try to figure out how to get rid of them before she went out that night and got a couple more. A Negro maid had opened the door, and given me a yellowed optic.
“Yes ma’am, who do you wish to see?” “I see her already,” I said, “so skip the Morse Code.” I went in up to Ruby Rose’s ten-yard line. “Wheeler’s the name,” I said. “Does it mean anything to you?”
“Should it?” She was dark and Salome-ish. She was mean. She was bad medicine. I could see his finish right there, in her eyes. And it hadn’t been any fun to dance at Texas Guinan’s or Larry Fay’s when I was sixteen, to keep him out of the orphan asylum or the reformatory. I hadn’t spent most of my young girlhood in a tinseled G-string to have her take apart what I’d built up, just to see what made him tick.
I said, “I don’t mind coming right out with it in front of your maid—if you don’t.”
But evidently she did. Maybe Mandy was on a few other payrolls besides her own. She hit her with the tomato-and-lettuce in the left eye as preamble to the request: “Whaddo I pay you for, anyway? Take Foo-Too around the block a couple of times!”
“I tuk him once already, and he was a good boy,” was the weather report she got on this.
“Well, take him again. Maybe you can kid him it’s tomorrow already.”
Mandy fastened something that looked like the business-end of a floor mop to a leash, went out shaking her head. “You sho didn’t enjoy yo’self last night. That Sto’k Club never do agree with you.”
As soon as the gallery was out of the way I said, “You lay off my brother!”
She lit a cigarette, nosed the smoke at me. “Well, Gracie Allen, you’ve come to the wrong place looking for your brother. And, just for the reco
rd, what am I supposed to have done to him, cured him of wiping his nose on his sleeve or something?”
“He’s been spending dough like wild, dough that doesn’t come out of his salary.”
“Then where does it come from?” she asked.
“I haven’t found out. I hope his firm never does, either.” I shifted gears, went into low— like when I used to sing “Poor Butterfly” for the customers—but money couldn’t have dragged this performance out of me, it came from the heart, without pay. “There’s a little girl on our street, oh not much to look at, thinks twelve o’clock’s the middle of the night and storks leave babies, but she’s ready to take up where I leave off, pinch pennies and squeeze nickels along with him, build him into something, get him somewhere, not spread him all over the landscape. He’s just a man, doesn’t know what’s good for him, doesn’t know his bass from his oboe. I can’t stand by and watch her chew her heart up. Give her a break, and him, and me. Pick on someone your size, someone that can take it. Have your fun and more power to you— but not with all I’ve got!”
She banged her cigarette to death against a tray. “O.K., is the screen test about over? Now, will you get out of here, you ham-actress, and lemme get my massage?” She went over and got the door ready for me. Gave a traffic-cop signal over her shoulder with one thumb. “I’ve heard of wives pulling this act, and even mothers, and in a pitcher I saw only lately, Camilly it was called, it was the old man. Now it’s a sister!” She gave the ceiling the once-over. “What’ll they think of next? Send grandma around tomorrow—next week East Lynne. Come on, make it snappy!” she invited, and hitched her elbow at me. If she’d touched me, I think I’d have murdered her.
“If you feel I’m poison, why don’t you put it up to your brother?” she signed off. And very low, just before she walloped the door after me: “And see how far you get!”
She was right. I said, “Chick, you’re not going to chuck your job, you’re not going to Chicago with that dame, are you?”
He looked at me funny and he said, “How did you know?”
“I saw your valise all packed, when I wanted to send one of your suits to the cleaners.”
“You ought to be a detective,” he said, and he wasn’t pally. “O.K.,” he said, “now that you mention it,” and he went in and he got it to show me—the back of it going out the door. But I got over there to the door before he did, and pulled a Custer’s Last Stand. I skipped the verse and went into the patter chorus. And boy did I sell it, without a spot and without a muted trumpet solo either! At the El-Fay in the old days they would have all been crying into their gin and wiring home to mother.
“I’m not asking anything for myself. I’m older than you, Chick, and when a girl says that you’ve got her down to bedrock. I’ve been around plenty, and ‘around’ wasn’t pretty. Maybe you think it was fun wrestling my way home each morning at five, and no holds barred, just so— so…. Oh, I didn’t know why myself sometimes; just so you wouldn’t turn out to be another corner lizard, a sharpshooter, a bum like the rest of them. Chick, you’re just a punk of twenty-four, but as far as I’m concerned the sun rises and sets across your shoulders. Me and little Mary Allen, we’ve been rooting for you all along; what’s the matter with her, Chick? Just because her face don’t come out of boxes and she doesn’t know the right grips, don’t pass her by for something that ought to be shampooed out of your hair with gasoline.”
But he didn’t have an ear for music; the siren song had got to him like Ulysses. And once they hear that…. “Get away from the door,” he said, way down low. “I never raised a hand to you in my life, I don’t want to now.”
The last I saw of him he was passing the back of his hand slowly up and down his side, like he was ashamed of it; the valise was in the other one. I picked myself up from the opposite side of the foyer where he’d sent me, the place all buckling around me like seen through a sheet of water. I called out after him through the open door: “Don’t go, Chick! You’re heading straight for the eight-ball! Don’t go to her, Chick!” The acoustics were swell. Every door in the hall opened to get an earful.
He just stood there a split-second without looking back at me, yellow light gushing out at him through the port-hole of the elevator.
He straightened his hat, which my chin against his duke had dislodged—and no more Chick.
At about four that morning I was still snivelling into the gin he’d left behind him, and talking to him across the table from me—without getting any answer—when the door-bell rang. I thought it was him for a minute, but it was two other guys. They didn’t ask if they could come in, they just went ‘way around to the other side of me and then showed me a couple of tin-heeled palms. So I did the coming-in—after them; I lived there, after all.
They looked the place over like they were prospective tenants being shown an apartment. I didn’t go for that; detectives belong in the books you read in bed, not in your apartment at four bells, big as life. “Three closets,” I mentioned, “and you get a month’s concession. I’m not keeping you gentlemen up, am I?”
One of them was kind of pash looking; I mean he’d washed his face lately, and if he’d been the last man in the world, well, all right, maybe I could have overlooked the fact he was a bloodhound on two legs. The other one had a face like one of those cobblestones they dug up off Eighth Avenue when they removed the trolley tracks.
“You’re Jerry Wheeler, aren’t you?” the first one told me.
“I’ve known that for twenty-seven years,” I said. “What brought the subject up?”
Cobblestone-face said, “Chick Wheeler’s sister, that right?”
“I’ve got a brother and I call him Chick,” I consented. “Any ordinance against that?”
The younger one said, “Don’t be so hard to handle. You’re going to talk to us and like it.” He sat down in a chair, cushioned his hands behind his dome. He said, “What time’d he leave here this evening?”
Something warned me, “don’t answer that.” I said, “I really couldn’t say. I’m not a train-despatcher.”
“He was going to Chicago with a dame named Ruby Rose Reading; you knew that, didn’t you?”
I thought, “I hit the nail on the head, he did help himself to his firm’s money. Wonder how much he took? Well, I guess I’ll have to go back to work again at one of the hotspots; maybe I can square it for him, pay back a little each week.” I kept my face steady. I said, “Now, why would he go anywhere with anyone with a name like that? It sounds like it came off a bottle of nail-polish. Come to the point, gentlemen. What’s he supposed to have done?”
“There’s no supposition about what he’s done. He went to the Alcazar Arms at eight-fifteen tonight and throttled Ruby Rose Reading to death, Angel Face.”
And that was the first time I heard myself called that. I also heard the good-looking one remonstrate: “Aw, don’t give it to her that sudden, Coley, she’s a girl after all,” but it came from ‘way far away. I was down around their feet somewhere sniffling into the carpet.
The good-looking one picked me up and straightened me out in a chair. Cobblestone said, “Don’t let her fool you, Burnsie, they all pull that collapsible concertina act when they wanna get out of answering questions.” He went into the bedroom and I could hear him pulling out bureau drawers and rummaging around.
I got up on one elbow. I said, “Burns, he didn’t do it! Please, he didn’t do it! All right, I did know about her. He was sold on her. That’s why he couldn’t have done it. Don’t you see, you don’t kill the thing you love?”
He just kind of looked at me. “You go to bat for the thing you love too,” he murmured. He said, “I’ve been on the squad eight years now. We never in all that time caught a guy as dead to rights as your brother. He showed up with his valise in the foyer of the Alcazar at exactly twelve minutes past eight tonight. He said to the doorman, “What time is it? Did Miss Reading send her baggage down yet? We’ve got to make a train.” Well, she had sent her baggag
e down and then she’d changed her mind, she’d had it all taken back upstairs again. There’s your motive right there. The doorman rang her apartment and said through the announcer, ‘Mr. Wheeler’s here.’ And she gave a dirty laugh and sang out, ‘I can hardly wait.’
“So at thirteen past eight she was still alive. He went up, and he’d no sooner got there than her apartment began to signal the doorman frantically. No one answered his hail over the announcer, so he chased up, and he found your brother crouched over her, shaking her, and she was dead. At fifteen minutes past eight o’clock. Is that a case or is that a case?”
I said, “How do you know somebody else wasn’t in that apartment and strangled her just before Chick showed up? It’s got to be that!”
He said, “What d’you suppose they’re paying that door-man seventy-five a month for? The only other caller she had that whole day was you yourself, at three that afternoon, five full hours before. And she’d only been dead fifteen to twenty minutes by the time the assistant medical examiner got to her.”
I said, “Does Chick say he did it?”
“When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you’d have their heads examined if any of them ever admitted doing anything. Oh, no-o, of course he didn’t do it. He says he was crouched over her, shaking her, trying to restore her!”
I took a deep breath. I said, “Gimme a swallow of that gin. Thanks.” I put the tumbler down again. I looked him right in the eye. “All right, I did it! Now how d’ye like that? I begged him not to throw his life away on her. When he walked out anyway, I beat him up to her place in a taxi, got there first, gave her one last chance to lay off him. She wouldn’t take it. She was all soft and squashy and I just took a grip and pushed hard.”