The Crime of Our Lives

by Lawrence Block

  There was a shop on Eighth Avenue and 43rd Street that sold back-date magazines, with a huge stock of Manhunt and its imitators priced at 2 for 25¢. Even on my wages I could afford to buy every copy I could find, and I took them home and read them cover to cover. I bought used paperbacks, too, and whenever I discovered a writer I liked I would read my way through his works.

  I suppose what I was doing was analytical, but I wasn’t consciously taking the stories and novels apart to see what made them tick. I was just reading—and by so doing, I suspect I was unconsciously synthesizing all of what I read, so that I could know intuitively what did or didn’t make a story.

  It might seem like a busman’s holiday—read unpublishable crap all day, then read published fiction nights and weekends. But while my reading was not without purpose, there was nothing dogged about it. The writers I enjoyed—too many to mention, or even to recall, but I know that I worked my way through all of Fredric Brown and David Alexander, and a good five years of Manhunt stories—were the ones I kept reading. I quit reading the writers I didn’t care for.

  And, unlike our fee clients, I didn’t have to write them a letter when I was done.

  When it came to finding new authors to read, all I had to do was pay attention. The office was a small and gossipy place, with half a dozen of us seated at desks. Scott and Sid were in their private offices, and I worked there for several months before I even caught a glimpse of Scott, but plenty of business got done in my hearing. The conversation in the room—and at lunch—was about the business, and about books and writers.

  It was an education.

  And it was also an apprenticeship, because when I wasn’t reading I was apt to be writing. Sid had signed me to an agency contract, and whenever I wrote a story I passed it up to Henry Morrison or Jim Bohan, and with few exceptions the stories I wrote were submitted to magazines. Manhunt was hard to hit, but W. W. Scott bought a batch of stories from me for his alternating bimonthlies, Trapped and Guilty. He paid a cent and a half a word, and the stories he passed on went to Pontiac Publications, where the rate was a cent a word. Just about everything sold sooner or later, and a night’s work would bring me $25 or $35 or $50. Many of the pulp stories reissued a few years ago as One Night Stands & Lost Weekends were written during those very nights and weekends.

  And then there were the assignments. Now and then an editor would call our office; he was up against a deadline and had unfilled pages in his next issue. Or he had an idea and needed someone to write it for him. Could one of Scott’s clients deliver the goods, and do so in a hurry?

  There was rarely any need to interrupt some client with a phone call, not with a couple of eager writers sitting there in the office. Could I write two thousand words about a really bad Nazi for Ted Hecht at Stanley Publications? A couple of hours in the library and a stint at the typewriter yielded “Reinhard Heydrich, Blond Beast of the SS.” That brought $75, and got Sheldon Lord a byline, as I didn’t feel a need to put my own name on the thing.

  I went on to write another six or eight pieces for Ted Hecht. They ran in magazines with titles like All Man and Real Men’s Stories and Man’s Bloody Guts, and sometimes got reprinted a year or two later in another of the company’s magazines. Sometimes Hecht called with an idea, which is how I came to write a piece on the 1934 wreck of the SS Morro Castle. Sometimes the idea was mine, and that led to “She Doesn’t Want You” (about lesbian prostitutes) and “Let’s Legalize Marijuana!” (about, duh, legalizing marijuana).

  One article I wrote was purportedly a personal experience piece, “by C. O. Jones as told to Sheldon Lord.” It became “C. C. Jones” by the time it got into print, suggesting that Hecht or one of his cohorts knew as much gutter Spanish as I did.

  One of the more curious assignments came from W. W. Scott, of Trapped and Guilty. (The magazines were identical, with the same writers producing the same kinds of stories, and the same cover art. Yet Guilty consistently outsold its stable mate. Go know.)

  W. W. Scott also edited another pair of alternating bimonthlies, True Medic Stories and Real Medic Stories. These were essentially confession magazines with a medical orientation, and most of the stories involved nurses, even as the magazine’s audience was presumed to consist of nurses and nurse wannabes. But at least one story in each issue was told from the point of view of a male doctor, and he wasn’t getting enough of those. An assignment came in, and the sum on offer, as I recall, was $200, which was a whole lot better than a cent and a half a word. I grabbed it.

  Nowadays, in the world of Google and Wikipedia, I could have done the whole thing without enlisting a partner. But an Antioch friend, Duck Buchanan, was working in the field of medical research, so I proposed that he help me develop a storyline in return for a fourth of the proceeds. Together we dreamed up a plot in which an arrogant surgeon almost loses a patient by overlooking some phenomenon outside his area of expertise.

  I don’t remember the details, but it seems to me the operation in question was a sigmoid resection, whatever that is. I do recall, word for word, the opening line: “My name is Brad Havilland. I’m forty-two years old, and I’m the best bowel surgeon in the state.”

  Makes you want to keep reading, doesn’t it?

  W. W. Scott liked it just fine. I’m not sure which magazine it wound up in, Real or True. Nor do I recall what title it bore. Duck and I always referred to it as “Pain in the Ass.”

  I started working for Scott Meredith in August of 1957, and stayed through the following May. Sometime that spring I’d decided to return to Antioch in the fall, and was in fact appointed to edit the college newspaper.

  (I’m pretty sure my return owed less to a desire for a degree, or the intellectual stimulation of the classroom, than for fear that I’d be drafted into the army. The same desire to maintain my deferment had already led me to enroll as a matriculated student at Columbia University’s School of General Studies, where I signed up for three writing courses—a workshop in the novel, an advanced non-fiction class, and a radio and TV writing course.

  (I must have been out of my mind. I stopped going to the radio-TV class almost immediately, when I realized that the textbook would have us following a format—audio on one side of the page, video on the other—that nobody had used in ten or fifteen years. I went to the novel workshop long enough to write thirty pages of a mystery that owed a lot to Fredric Brown’s The Fabulous Clipjoint, and to realize I didn’t know what I was doing, and was well advised to stop doing it. The non-fiction class was written by a terribly nice old fellow who wrote biographies of composers published by Louisiana University Press, and I actually went to that class and turned in work, because it was work I was doing anyway—those “Lemmings Ate My Sister” articles I was knocking out for Ted Hecht. “This is really good work,” the professor would say, “but I don’t see how you can expect to market it.” I was careful not to tell him he’d erred twice in a single sentence; the stuff wasn’t good, and I’d already gotten paid for it.

  (Wonderful. All day long I read amateur crap at the office, and a couple of nights a week I went up to Columbia and sat there while people read amateur crap out loud. What was I thinking?)

  Never mind. For nine or ten months I spent five days a week on the 18th floor at 580 Fifth Avenue, and by the time I left I was a professional writer.

  Before I close this installment, I need to offer a correction. Some months ago I attributed “Rattlesnake Cave,” the error-ridden story created as a test for job applicants, to the late science fiction writer Lester Del Rey. The byline, transparent enough it would seem, was “Ray D. Lester,” and it was common knowledge in the office that Del Rey, an agency client and former employee, had written the piece.

  Kate Stine was good enough to point me to an interview Ed Gorman had done with Stephen Marlowe, shortly before Marlowe’s death; in it, Marlowe claimed authorship of “Rattlesnake Cave.” Did I want to amend my column accordingly?

  No, I said. I was sure it was Del Rey, everyone
had always known it was Del Rey, and I’d had enough experience with people misremembering the remote past to believe Marlowe had done just that.

  So the piece stayed as I wrote it, and when it appeared my friend Barry Malzberg (who knows more about the workings and history of that agency than anyone else ever did, not excepting Scott) put me straight. Steve Marlowe did indeed write it, and the byline was his way of giving Del Rey one in the eye.

  I stand corrected. And it may seem a small point, but the damn story has been read by thousands upon thousands of people, including many leading lights of the publishing world. Might as well get it right . . .

  When I started writing about my time at SMLA, I saw soon enough that it was going to spill over into two columns. It’s now filled three, and there’s material I wouldn’t want to leave out. Tune in next issue for what I promise you will be the last walk down this particular stretch of Memory Lane.

  * * *

  That’s how I concluded the third installment , but I never did get around to the promised fourth. It seemed to me that I’d written all I needed to write about Scott.

  Here, though, is a story I can’t resist telling. At one point late in the day, Sidney Meredith retired and moved to Florida. After a year or two he came back and paid a call on his brother. Golf wasn’t doing it for him, he reported, and you could get sick of all that goddam sunshine, and he’d worked all his life and missed it. So he’d decided to go back to work.

  Oh? And what did he plan to do?

  “Well, I only did one thing my whole life, so what else do I know? I’m gonna open up shop at a literary agent.”

  “If that’s your decision,” Scott said, “I don’t suppose I can stop you. But I’ll tell you one thing right now. You use the name ‘Meredith’ and I’ll fucking sue you.”

  His own brother, his partner for what, 40 years? A man who’s gone through life saddled with a name Scott chose for him, and God help him if he tries to use it professionally.

  Good grief . . .

  Not that many friendships develop late in life, but it’s been my good fortune to become close in recent years with Barry Malzberg, who spent years in Scott’s employ and who wrote brilliantly about him in “Tripping With the Alchemist.” (Google will lead you to the essay easily enough, and it’s certainly worth your time.)

  Barry and I have lunch a couple of times a year, generally at a kosher deli a few blocks from Penn Station, and most of our conversations—like most of our future—is largely in the past. Those Scott Meredith days are a frequent subject. And on one such recent occasion Barry talked at some length on just how bad a human being and how negative a force in the publishing world Scott was.

  “And yet,” he said, his voice softening, “we owe him everything, you and I. Everything!”

  Remembering Al Nussbaum

  * * *

  And now we return to Mystery Scene for another installment of “The Murders in Memory Lane.” If Dashiell Hammett prepared for his literary career as a Pinkerton op, and Joe Wambaugh as a cop, Al Nussbaum paid his dues on the other side of the street:

  Sometime in the early eighties Al Nussbaum reported, with a mixture of disgust and incredulity, that someone had tried to mug him on his way home the previous night.

  “This clown sticks a gun in my face,” he said. “I said, ‘Get out of my way, you moron. I just got out of the joint.’ ”

  Al pushed past him, leaving the fellow to go find a more acquiescent victim. It’s not surprising that his performance was effective; even in the retelling, his gentle voice hardened and took on an edge that brooked no argument.

  And he came by it honestly. While he wasn’t fresh out of prison, it couldn’t have been more than ten years or so since he’d been paroled from Leavenworth after serving eight years of a forty-year sentence for bank robbery and homicide.

  A good number of cops develop literary ambitions, and there was a time a few years ago when you couldn’t get arrested in this town without hearing about your new acquaintance’s novel in progress. (Now it’s screenplays, and TV pitches.)

  Few of those books got past the talking stage, and fewer still got finished, and not many were published. But some of them were very good indeed, and if the list began with Joe Wambaugh, it certainly hasn’t ended there. And why should we be surprised? Law enforcement, it turns out, is great preparation for a career in crime fiction; as one cop-turned-novelist remarked, the crime part’s what you see in the streets, and the fiction’s what goes in your case reports.

  You would think that a lifetime on the other side of the law would be just as likely to equip one for a second life as a mystery writer. And, to be sure, some powerful crime fiction has been written by chaps with just that sort of firsthand experience. Malcolm Braly’s On the Yard is arguably the best prison novel ever written, and it wouldn’t exist but for the author’s having spent half of his first forty years in confinement.

  Writing workshops are popular in prison, and if most of the output isn’t publishable, well, that’s no less true on the outside. On either side of the walls, the writing seems to serve a substantial therapeutic function. And now and then a genuine writer does emerge, and he and we are better for it.

  Al was in print and out of the joint by the time I met him in the mid-’70s, but our paths could have crossed earlier. We were both born and raised in Buffalo. He was born four years earlier than I, in 1934, and he left town early enough to get arrested in California in the late 1950s on a weapons charge. That landed him in prison in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he met Bobby Wilcoxson, who’d be his partner in a string of bank robberies.

  Al was always a bright guy with a wide range of interests. He played in chess tournaments by mail while locked up in Ohio, and filled his jail time with correspondence courses in locksmithing, gunsmithing, and chemistry. (One wonders at the wisdom of encouraging felons to pursue these interests.) He had some other skills as well; he was a draftsman and a welder, and could both fly and service an airplane.

  So he was the brains to Wilcoxson’s brawn, and they robbed a batch of banks together. Their last bank job was in Brooklyn, where Wilcoxson shot the bank guard dead.

  That was the end of Al’s criminal career. And, happily, the beginning of his new life as a writer.

  Al was on the lam, and went to ground in Philadelphia. (That’s how I heard it, but it may have been somewhere else.) He got a room or small apartment and took care to blend in with his surroundings.

  But he didn’t have a job to go to, and he worried that this might strike his new neighbors as curious. So he looked for a cover occupation that could explain his presence or absence at all hours. A writer, he thought. I’ll pretend to be a writer.

  So he went out and bought a typewriter, and now and then during the day he’d pound away at its keys—even as you and I. But that got old in a hurry, and he was resourceful enough to go out and buy himself a tape recorder. Then he made a loop tape of himself typing, and played it whenever he wanted writerly sound effects to seep through his door.

  But he felt there might be more to playing a writer than just sounding like one. He needed some tips from an old hand at the game. So one evening he picked up the phone.

  Al didn’t know any writers. But he’d been a reader for years, and was sufficiently impressed by one book to feel a kinship to its author. The book was The Name of the Game is Death, by Dan J. Marlowe, and features a tough and unrepentant professional criminal named Earl Drake. Al was in a position to identify with Drake, and could tell that Marlowe had gotten the character and milieu down right.

  He traced Marlowe through his publishers, and called him at home in Royal Oak, Michigan, enthusing over Marlowe’s novel and passing himself off as a wannabe writer looking for tips. There were more calls over the weeks and months, and the two men became friends—although Dan didn’t yet know Al’s real name, or that he was in fact a real-life Earl Drake high up on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.

  He found out after Al was arrested. That came abo
ut back home in Buffalo; Al was visiting his wife and infant daughter, and his mother-in-law ratted him out. (He was captured in the Statler Hilton parking lot after a high-speed chase, and no, I’m not making this up.) The FBI, walking back the cat to make their case, found where Al had been hiding out, checked the phone records, and discovered all these calls to some guy in Michigan. They turned up on Dan Marlowe’s doorstep wanting to know why he’d spent so much time on the phone with Al Nussbaum, and Dan didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. He’d been helping some young writer who was a big fan of his, he said. And who exactly was this fellow Nussbaum? Dan had to answer a lot of questions before they decided to leave him alone.

  A little while later Al got in touch again—this time by mail. By now he’d pled guilty to seven bank robberies and the murder of the bank guard, and was serving forty years in Leavenworth. He wouldn’t be eligible for parole until 1971. And he had some time on his hands, and was thinking of trying his hand at something new.

  While he served his sentence, Al worked on short fiction. As I heard it, he sent Marlowe his manuscripts, kiting them out of prison; Marlowe wrote back with suggestions for revision, and eventually sent one of Al’s stories to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

  The relationship wasn’t entirely one-sided. Dan had resumed writing about Earl Drake, at Al’s suggestion and with his assistance; the expertise he was able to supply didn’t hurt a bit. (He’d come by it honestly, is what I was about to write, but on second thought . . .)

  After a few books, Dan changed the series; Drake was still Drake, but now he was on the side of the angels, plying his bad-guy skills in the service of the federal government. Some sources indicate that this was Fawcett’s idea, that they’d taken over the Parker series (by Donald E. Westlake as Richard Stark) and figured one unrepentant heist man was enough.