The Crime of Our Lives

by Lawrence Block

  As I said, I found Murder in E Minor unsettling. It almost felt as though Stout had written it, and the narrator almost sounded like Archie. There was one stunning glitch, in that Archie smoked a cigarette or two in the book’s course, and that was about as startling as if Lillian Jackson Braun’s Qwilleran were to whip out his pen knife and geld a cat. A few thousand readers called this to the author’s attention, and in the books that followed we heard no more of Archie and tobacco.

  But the rest, as I said, was almost right. And, naturally enough, Goldsborough improved as he went on. He became a better writer, as one is apt to do with practice, and he also became better at sounding like Stout, and at putting Wolfean words into the mouths of his characters.

  It’s my impression that members of the Wolfe Pack, that enduring sodality of ardent West 35th Street Irregulars, have varying degrees of enthusiasm for the post-mortem Wolfe books. They did bestow the Nero award on the first book, and surely read the others. The consensus seems to be that they’re glad to have these seven further adventures, but do not for a moment confuse them with the genuine article.

  I read the first, as I’ve said, and one or two others. For all I know, they may have been more suspenseful and more strongly plotted than the originals, but I’d never read Rex Stout for plot or suspense. I read, like everybody else, for the pleasure of the writing and the charm of the characters, and Robert Goldsborough was not entirely lacking in those areas. He worked very hard at sounding like Rex Stout, and at letting his narrator sound and act like Archie Goodwin.

  Rex Stout, of course, never worked at it. He didn’t have to.

  And there, I submit, is the problem. Ace Atkins is a fine writer, and at least as gifted in plot construction as Parker himself. (Here’s a Spenser plot: 1. A client brings Spenser a problem. 2. Spenser studies the situation and figures it out. 3. Spenser addresses the problem and brings it to a successful conclusion. There’s a lot of snappy dialogue and some of the best physical action anyone ever wrote, but those three sentences pretty much cover it in terms of plot.)

  I don’t know what Ace Atkins has going for him in the way of mimetic ability, but I’m willing to believe he’ll do a fine job of sounding like Parker. I gather he’s a Parker fan even as Parker was a Chandler fan, and Goldsborough a Rex Stout fan. We can assume he understands Spenser and Hawk and Susan, and will know what words to put in their mouths, and how they’ll react to the situations in which he places them.

  I can’t make all of the same assumptions about Michael Brandman, which whose writing I’m not familiar. As I understand it, his background is TV, and he worked closely with Parker on the adaptations of the Jesse Stone stories for that medium. One might infer that his strengths lie in plot and story construction, but there’s no reason he might not be able to provide a reasonable facsimile of the Parker voice.

  Here’s the thing: No matter how good a job either of these fellows do, no matter how much skill and sensitivity they bring to the table, and no matter how much thought and effort they apply, all they can attempt to provide is an imitation of a genuine original.

  I guess there’s a place for that sort of thing. Look at all the Elvis impersonators, all the tribute bands.

  You know, that’s enough already. I set out to write about Bob Parker’s style and got into a riff on the sequels.

  I alluded to this a few paragraphs back, but it can stand elaboration: Nobody ever wrote a better fight scene than Robert B. Parker. Whether the violence is hand-to-hand or includes weapons, whether it’s one-on-one or there’s a whole crowd on hand, whether it happened the day before yesterday or back in the Old West, the man always got it down brilliantly. He did so with great economy, and spared us the gore and the sadism, but you were right there while it went down, and you could see just what happened and how it happened, and, well, it was breathtaking. I’d read through one of his scenes a couple of times before going on, not because I was going to school (although I probably was) but because I didn’t want to let go of the experience.

  There’s another observation Parker made about his work that has stayed with me ever since I first came upon it. He pointed out that he was not writing realism, that he was in fact writing romance.

  Let me capitalize that. He was writing Romance. Not, God help us, in the Harlequin/‌Silhouette sense, but in the Malory Morte d’Arthur sense. And that’s why it’s perfectly acceptable that Spenser remain the same age forever, that his shining armor remain untarnished, and that, in his affair with Susan, forever wilt he love and she be fair.

  It was Parker’s special province to write Romance in a realistic style. And that works quite wonderfully, because it tricks us into suspending disbelief to a remarkable extent. We don’t strain at gnats, but neither do we refrain from swallowing camels.

  Consider the sequence in Early Autumn, when Spenser takes Paul Giacomin off to make a man out of him. The physical routine he puts the kid through would flat-out kill him, and Spenser doesn’t even give him days off to recover. Parker would have to know as much; he was a weightlifter himself, if perhaps a less diligent one than his hero.

  But he writes it this way anyway, because this is Romance, and he makes it work. A realist would teach the kid a couple of basic exercises and start him off with two or three light sets a day of each, and progress would be a gradual thing. That might make just as good reading, but it would be a different sort of book from the one Parker wanted to write.

  And one thing he knew was that everything worked out for the best if he wrote the book he wanted to write.

  I had my troubles with Early Autumn. I’d spent enough time lifting heavy metal objects, and enough days afterward with sore muscles, to find the departure from plausibility hard to take. I’ve had my problems with Spenser and Stone and Virgil Cole, all of whom may be described as true-blue, uxorious, or pussy-whipped, as you prefer. (The three terms are hardly mutually exclusive.)

  So? I was never the Ideal Reader for Parker’s work, and God knows he got along fine without me. But I did read almost all of the books, and not because of the stories he chose to tell or the characters who peopled them.

  I just kind of liked the way they sounded.

  And I liked and respected the man. Let’s not leave that out.

  I don’t think our paths crossed more than eight or ten times, and we never came close to sitting down for a heart-to-heart. There were a couple of dinners where we were both on the dais, a couple of book biz events that threw us together.

  Once, I think at a Left Coast Crime conference in Scottsdale, Bob was doing a one-man act in a large room that was predictably packed. He said he wasn’t comfortable preparing talks, but would do a Q&A—and, not surprisingly, turned out to be very good at it.

  Somebody asked him which of his own books was his favorite. “Gee, I don’t know,” he said. “Once they’re done I never look at them.” I was all the way in the rear, but I guess he’d spotted me. “How about you, Larry?” he called out. “Do you ever read your own work?”

  “I read nothing else,” I said.

  Lord, that was satisfying. You have to love a guy who floats one belt-high across the plate like that, and does so on the one day in twenty when you’re quick enough to get your bat on it.

  I was a bad choice to write this piece, and would have passed if I felt I could. But, if my feelings for the work are mixed, those for the man are not. I was in fact honored to be invited to this particular clambake, and simply could not say no.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  * * *

  No, I never knew the man. It’s true I’ve been around a long time, but the curious little man who might be called the Father of Genre Fiction had left the scene before I appeared on it.

  Still, I feel a connection. At a Mystery Writers of America event marking the restoration of Poe’s house in the Bronx, I gave a spirited reading of “The Bells,” and few who were there will soon forget it, much as they might wish they could.

  Here, then, are three short pieces o
n the Master Himself. The first was written as the introduction of an MWA anthology, of which I was the nominal editor. (My “editing” consisted of supplying the introduction.)

  “It All Started With Poe”

  If you want to blame someone, try Edgar Allan Poe. He’s the guy who started it.

  Or did he? Maybe this would be a good place to mention Mauritz Christopher Hansen. A Norwegian writer, born 1794, died 1842. In 1827 he published “Novellen” (“The Short Story”), an armchair detective mystery concerning a case of murder and revenge. So he got there first, well ahead of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” but he wrote in Norwegian, with the result that nobody ever heard of him. Well, nobody outside of Norway. Matter of fact, you wouldn’t have heard of him either, if your Norwegian friend Nils Nordberg hadn’t told you about him.

  Memo: Email Nils, suggest he translate Hansen for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Either “Novellen” or his short novel, “Mordet paa Maskinbygger Roolfsen” (“The Murder of Engineer Roolfsen”).

  Still, what did Hansen start? If a tree falls in a forest, and only Norwegians can hear it, it’s not exactly the shot heard round the world, is it? Poe started it, but who cares? I mean, how many lame introductions have already trotted out poor old Poe?

  Think of something else, will you?

  It’s a rare pleasure to introduce Blood on Their Hands, the latest collection of stories by members of Mystery Writers of America. MWA, as its name implies, is an organization of American mystery writers who . . .

  Duh. Who write American mysteries, and they hammer them out one inspired word at a time, even as you are attempting to pound out this introduction. Do you really want to bore everybody with the history of the organization, explaining how a handful of hacks and drunks banded together, adopted the motto “Crime Does Not Pay . . . Enough!” and, when they weren’t busy hacking and drinking, got on with the serious business of giving one another awards. You can fill space this way, but do you want to?

  It’s a fine organization, MWA, and virtually every crime writer of distinction is proud to be a member of it. But everybody knows that, so why waste their time telling them?

  Start over.

  The stories you are about to read . . .

  . . . are guaranteed to cure cancer, ensure world peace, and solve once and for all the problem of global warming. They’re excellent stories, as it happens, but what can you say about them that will make them any more of a treat than they already are?

  It’s my great pleasure . . .

  Yeah, I can tell. You know something? You’ve done too many introductions, my friend, and you’re getting worse at it, and you were never that good in the first place. You always used to start out by decrying the whole idea of an introduction, urging readers to get on with it and read the stories themselves, and now you seem determined to prove how dopey an introduction can be by mumbling and stammering and generally behaving like an idiot.

  You promised them an intro. Write it, will you? Just spit it out!

  It all started with Poe.

  Great, just brilliant. “It all started with Poe.” And here’s where it stops.

  * * *

  In 2008, Michael Connelly invited me to contribute an essay on Poe to In the Shadow of the Master, an MWA-sponsored volume which would combine a selection of the man’s tales with a group of new pieces about the man, all to be published the following year in celebration of the bicentennial of Poe’s birth.

  Thus the following:

  The Curse of Amontillado

  I knew I wanted an Edgar Allan Poe award back in 1961, when my good friend Don Westlake failed to win one.

  He’d just published The Mercenaries, and it was nominated for an Edgar for best first mystery. Someone else took home the statuette (for what was in fact a first mystery by a veteran science-fiction writer, which made it eligible under the letter if not the spirit of the rule) and we all assured Don that it was honor enough to be nominated, and he pretended to believe us. We don’t need to feel sorry for the man; he has a whole shelf full of those porcelain busts, plus a sheaf of nominations. Anyway, this isn’t about him.

  It’s about me.

  I began publishing paperback original crime novels in 1961, and hardcovers a few years later. And, while I can’t say I was obsessed with the idea of winning an Edgar, I had my hopes. One book I published in the mid-’70s, under a pen name (Chip Harrison) which was also the name of the book’s narrator, was dedicated “To Barbara Bonham, Newgate Callendar, John Dickson Carr, and the Edgar Awards Committee of the Mystery Writers of America.”

  Barbara Bonham was the chief fiction reviewer for Publishers Weekly. Newgate Callendar was music critic Harold Schonberg’s pen name for his Crime column in the New York Times Book Review. And John Dickson Carr, master of the locked room, reviewed mysteries for EQMM.

  I was shameless, and to no avail. Well, not much avail, anyway. The book got a mention in the Callendar column, where its dedication was quoted and its literary merits overlooked. Carr and Bonham paid no attention, and when Edgar time rolled around, Chip Harrison was out in the cold.

  But a year or so later one of my Matthew Scudder novels, Time to Murder and Create, picked up a nomination for Best Paperback Original. I went to the dinner somehow convinced I was going to win, and I didn’t. Someone else did. I sat there stunned, barely able to assure people that it was honor enough merely to be nominated.

  A couple of years later, I was nominated again, this time for Eight Million Ways to Die, shortlisted for Best novel. “Honor enough to be nominated,” I muttered, and went home.

  It took years for me to realize what was holding me back. It was, quite simply, a curse.

  The curse of Amontillado.

  I realized the precise dimensions of this only recently, when Charles Ardai was editing an early pseudonymous book of mine for his Hard Case Crime imprint. He pointed out that I’d referred to “The Cask of Amontillado” as having been written by Robert Louis Stevenson. Gently he asked if my attributing Poe’s story to Stevenson was deliberate, indicating something subtle about the character who’d made the error.

  The mistake, I replied, was not the character’s but my own, and he should by all means correct it.

  And not a moment too soon. Because it was clearly responsible for a long train of misfortunes.

  This misattribution, I must confess, was not an isolated slip-of-the-keyboard confined to a single forgettable book. While that may have been the only time I publicly handed Poe’s classic tale to Stevenson, I’d been confused about its authorship ever since I read the story. Which, if memory serves (and you can already tell what ill service it tends to provide), came about in the seventh grade, some fifty-seven years ago.

  One of our textbooks in English class was a small blue volume of short stories, and one of the stories was “The Cask of Amontillado,” and one was something by Stevenson. (I seemed to recall the title of the Stevenson story as “The Master of Ballantrae,” but that’s impossible, because it’s a novel. So I don’t know what the Stevenson story may have been, and, God forgive me, I don’t care, either.)

  I don’t know what else I may have retained from the seventh grade, but one thing I held onto was that story, “The Cask of Amontillado.”

  “For the love of God, Montresor!”

  “Yes,” I said, “for the love of God.”

  They don’t write ’em like that anymore, and I knew that even then. But somehow I got it into my head that the author’s initials were R.L.S., not E.A.P. Now and then it would come up in conversation, and someone would say I meant Poe, didn’t I? And I’d say yes, of course, and stand corrected—but not for long, because my memory remained inexplicably loyal to Stevenson.

  Well, really. Where did I get off looking to win an Edgar? If the Red Sox could go that long without a World Series win, just because their cheapjack owner let go of Babe Ruth, well, really, what did I expect?

  And then, of course, everything changed.

 
Because I started keeping company with a young woman named Lynne Wood.

  And why, you may ask, should that serve to lift the curse of Amontillado? Perhaps the answer will begin to become clear when I tell you that the maiden name of Ms. Wood’s mother was Emilie Poe.

  She was not the first person I’d met with that surname. Back in the eighth grade, a mere year after I’d read about Montresor and the ill-named Fortunato, I had a classmate named William Poe. His family had just moved north from Alabama, and that made him an exotic creature indeed at P.S. 66 in Buffalo, New York. We teased him relentlessly about his accent—and I wouldn’t be surprised if that helped reinforce the curse, now that I think about it. I don’t know that anyone asked if he was related to the Poe, but he very likely would have answered that he was, because they all are. The Poes, that is.

  Of course none of them are direct descendants of Edgar Allan, because the poor fellow had no living issue. But he has plenty of collateral descendants, and one of them was named Emilie, and she had a daughter named Lynne.

  Reader, I married her.

  And within the year my short story, “By the Dawn’s Early Light,” was nominated for an Edgar. Lynne and I attended what I’d come to term the Always-A-Bridesmaid dinner, and this time I went home with a porcelain bust of my bride’s great-great-great-etc. uncle.

  It has, I blush to admit, been joined by others in the years that followed. Coincidence?

  I don’t think so.

  * * *

  That might well be enough, but a couple of years later the editor of the MWA Annual, to be distributed at the Edgar Awards Banquet, asked for a piece on what the ways in which winning an Edgar had changed my life. (Several of us were asked to write on this woefully self-congratulatory topic. I didn’t read the others’ efforts, and can only hope they didn’t read mine.)