The Crime of Our Lives

by Lawrence Block

  It repeats much of the previous piece, and I’ve thought about leaving it out, but here it is. If it has a virtue, it’s brevity:

  The Edgar and I

  Well, I always wanted one.

  Back in 1960, my good friend Don Westlake published his first novel, The Mercenaries, and the following spring it was nominated for an Edgar. He and his then-wife attended the awards dinner, and I and my then-wife helped fill out the table. All four of us—Don most of all—were disheartened when someone else won, and I went home thinking how nice it would be some day to win one of those things myself.

  In 1975, Fawcett published The Topless Tulip Caper, with Chip Harrison serving as the lead character and putative author. The book was dedicated quite shamelessly “to Barbara Bannon, John Dickson Carr, Newgate Callendar, and the Edgar Awards Committee of the Mystery Writers of America.” At the time, Barbara Bannon provided the greater portion of Publishers Weekly’s fiction reviews, while Messrs. Carr and Callendar reviewed for EQMM and the New York Times Book Review respectively. The dedication did induce Harold Schonberg (aka Newgate Callendar) to mention the book, but Carr and Bannon were able to resist, and so was MWA.

  But in 1977 Dell published Time to Murder and Create, and in the spring of 1978 I found myself up for an Edgar for Best Paperback Mystery. I went to the dinner, and for some inexplicable reason I just knew I was going to win. I don’t know what had me convinced. I can’t remember what other books were nominated, but know I’d never read any of them, so what made me assume the judges would like my book better? Never mind. All I know is I sat through the first few courses running through my acceptance remarks in my mind, trying to strike a balance between the confidence of an established artist and the humility of a saint.

  Then they read somebody else’s name, and gave this usurper the little statue. I couldn’t believe it. How the hell did that happen?

  A couple of years later I was up for best novel, with Eight Million Ways to Die. I figured I had a chance, but knew I was bucking stiff competition, including Westlake’s Kahawa and Dutch Leonard’s LaBrava. Well, I didn’t win that year, and neither did Don or Dutch.

  I was nominated again a few years later for a short story, “By the Dawn’s Early Light.” By this time I’d taken to referring to the evening as the Always-A-Bridesmaid Dinner. But this time, remarkably, Edgar went home with me.

  And he’s done so four times since then—twice for short stories, once for Best Novel, and once when MWA, beaten into submission by my stubborn persistence, made me a Grand Master. So there’s a little grouping on a shelf, the Poe Quints, if you will, and it brightens my spirits to see them.

  And how have they changed my life?

  Well, that’s hard to say. It has, to be sure, assuaged the bitter disappointment that not winning had engendered. “It’s satisfying enough merely to be nominated” is something everybody says, and maybe someone has spoken these words and meant every one of them, but I wouldn’t count on it. Being nominated is thrilling in prospect, when it hasn’t happened to you, but once you’ve been nominated then winning is all that seems to matter.

  “It’s enough merely to play in the World Series.” (Or the Super Bowl, or the finals in the local shuffleboard tournament.) “Winning’s not all that important.” Did anyone ever say that? I didn’t think so.

  What I’ve come to realize, though, is that while being nominated is never enough, the work itself is enough—with or without awards or nominations. When all is said and done, or even when it isn’t, the work alone is the only thing that really matters.

  That said, it’s hard to say how the Edgar has made a difference for me. In recent years publishers have come to regard it as important, and worth trumpeting on covers and in press releases. (It was not ever thus, incidentally. Half a century ago, when perhaps a hundred people showed up for MWA’s annual awards dinner, an Edgar didn’t mean much outside the literary backwater of mystery fiction. All in all, Rodney Dangerfield got more respect.)

  So I don’t really know how my Edgars have changed my life. Have they brought me more dollars? More readers? More respect? Have they led reviewers and store buyers to take my work more seriously?

  Well, I can’t see how they’ve hurt.

  And have they perhaps made me more conscious of my potential to produce good work, and thus induced me to dig deeper and work harder?

  I suppose that’s possible.

  But there they stand on the shelf, all five of them, looking for all the world like an overgrown barbershop quartet, about to break into “Sweet Adeline.”

  Gosh. Don’t they look fine?

  Spider Robinson

  * * *

  I wrote this as the introduction to a collection of Spider Robinson’s essays. Several years later he wrote the most remarkable introduction to a limited edition of my novel, Random Walk. Man, did I ever come out ahead on that one—and in my intro, you’ll notice, I talk about another time I came out ahead of the game.

  If memory serves (and, increasingly, it only stands and waits) I first met Spider Robinson somewhere in cyberspace in 1999. He emailed me to find out if I’d provide a blurb for a book of his, and I emailed back to say that I wouldn’t.

  That probably doesn’t sound like much of a foundation on which to build a friendship. Well, a lot you know.

  Spider prefaced his request with an apology for making it, and I explained my refusal as a matter of policy, and we said a number of nice things about each other’s work, and placed one another on our respective mailing lists. And, let me tell you, I came out way ahead on that deal. What Spider got was a slew of tour schedules, book offers, and other drivel from the LB Institute for Perpetual Self-Promotion. What I got was an advance peek at each of Spider’s columns, always accompanied by a note advising me to let him know if I wanted to be spared further installments thereof.

  Why on earth would I want to get off that list? I have never for one moment entertained such a notion. Au contraire, mon frere. What I did almost immediately was open a Spider Robinson folder and save each column as soon as I’d finished reading it. I didn’t want to let go of them. Now I suppose I could delete the folder, as I’ve got the columns (including a couple I somehow missed) right here in book form. But I think I’ll let them have hard-drive space as well.

  The man’s entertaining, provocative, and of a wholly original turn of mind and phrase. Moreover, he’s evidently incapable of writing an awkward sentence. (Oh, I suppose he could do it if he tried. But not if he didn’t.)

  But you know all that.

  And there’s the real challenge in writing this introduction. I am, inevitably, preaching to the choir, because who else is going to show up? However heroic an effort the publisher might make (and, for a small press, every effort is heroic), the likelihood of the book being plucked off the shelf by someone unacquainted with Spider’s work is as remote as Tierra del Fuego and as unlikely as Michael Jackson. (Yes, I know, people do get to TdF—I’ve been there myself—and MJ does exist, albeit in a parallel universe.)

  In point of fact, the members of this volume’s audience are very likely better versed and more deeply steeped than I in the man’s work. I’ve read (and have now reread) the columns, and I’ve read a couple of the Callahan books, but many of you have read ALL of the Callahan books, and read them over and over and over, and can (and, alas, do) quote them verbatim, and at some length, upon the slightest provocation.

  All things considered (well, at least as many of them as I can think of), I can’t flatter myself into believing that anything I can write here will induce anyone to buy the book, or render the experience of owning and reading it one whit more pleasurable than it would be without my participation. Saying things about the columns is pointless. They’re not “The Waste Land,” for God’s sake. You don’t have to tunnel like a badger to root out their hidden meanings. And a good thing, too.

  We don’t need no steenkin’ badgers.

  Still, I have to say something. I am, after all, get
ting paid for these words, so it’s my job to furnish a reasonable number of them. Pointing out the excellent qualities of the man and his work does seem beside the point, but what else am I qualified to do?

  Let me see. I’ve only met the man once, if you rule out encounters through the email ether, and the no less intimate contact two human beings achieve through sympathetic reading of one another’s work. In July of 2001, my wife and I flew to Vancouver, where we were to embark on a two-week Alaska cruise on the World Discoverer. Spider and his wife met us, and we walked around downtown Vancouver a bit, and had lunch somewhere, and found that we liked each other as well face to face as we had at a distance.

  Later, we found we had an interesting friend in common, a dear man and brilliant writer named Larry Janifer. I had known Larry back in the late ’50s, and lost touch with him for years; Spider knew him later in life. Larry moved to Australia, where I was curiously unable to see him because his phone was always busy because he was always on-line. Every few hours he would phone and leave a message at my hotel, and I would call back, and his line would be busy again.

  Then health problems led Larry to move back to the States, where he died. And, now that I think about it, I’m not sure just what that has to do with anything, but Larry played a formative role in my career and, I gather, in Spider’s, and he’s too little remembered these days, so I figured this was a good place to mention him.

  I tried to dedicate a book to Spider once.

  The book was Tanner’s Tiger, and it hadn’t borne any dedication when Gold Medal published it in 1968. A few years ago Subterranean Press brought out a handsome hardcover first edition, and I seized the opportunity to dedicate it to someone, and picked Spider, because the book takes place in Canada, and so, generally, does Spider.

  When my author’s copies arrived, I plucked one off the stack, ready to inscribe it to the dedicatee.

  No dedication.

  Well, these things happen. As far as I’m concerned, Tanner’s Tiger is dedicated to Spider Robinson, whether it says so or not.

  And that, Dear Reader, is as much as you need to hear from me. Turn your attention, I entreat you, to the essays that follow. And if you can get past the “My crows . . .” groaner in the first chapter, you can handle anything.

  Mickey Spillane

  * * *

  When Dutton reissued some novels of Mickey Spillane’s in a pair of omnibus volumes, I was asked to write an introduction for one of them. I liked Mickey, and the year MWA made him a Grand Master was also the year I wore a Roman collar to the Edgar dinner. (I don’t remember why, but a lot of doormen were more respectful than usual to me that night.) Mickey loved my outfit, and we took a picture together.

  Here’s what I wrote about him:

  I don’t know what the hell Mickey Spillane needs with an introduction. He certainly didn’t get one when the first Dutton hardcovers and Signet paperbacks appeared half a century ago. There were no prefatory remarks by the author, no back cover blurbs by admiring colleagues, no pithy extracts from rave reviews. (There may have been some admiring colleagues around, but, as I recall, there weren’t a whole lot of rave reviews.)

  Nobody had to introduce you to Mike Hammer. You picked up a book and opened it, and he introduced himself.

  Like this, in One Lonely Night:

  “Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog-like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy yellow lights off in the distance.

  “Some place over there I had left my car and started walking, burying my head in the collar of my raincoat, with the night pulled in around me like a blanket. I walked and I smoked and I flipped the butts ahead of me and watched them arch to the pavement and fizzle out with one last wink. If there was life behind the windows of the buildings on either side of me, I didn’t notice it. The street was mine, all mine. They gave it to me gladly and wondered why I wanted it so nice and all alone.”

  Or, if that’s too hard to get into, try The Big Kill:

  “Two drunks with a nickel between them were arguing over what to play on the juke box until a tomato in a dress that was too tight a year ago pushed the key that started off something noisy and hot. One of the drunks wanted to dance and she gave him a shove. So he danced with the other drunk.

  “She saw me sitting there with my stool tipped back against the cigarette machine and change of a fin on the bar, decided I could afford a wet evening for two and walked over with her hips waving hello.

  “ ‘You’re new around here, ain’t ya?’

  “ ‘Nah. I’ve been here since six o’clock.’

  “ ‘Buy me a drink?’ She crowded in next to me, seeing how much of herself she could plaster against my legs.

  “ ‘No.’ It caught her by surprise and she quit rubbing.

  “ ‘Don’t gentlemen usually buy ladies a drink?’

  “ ‘I’m not a gentleman, kid.’

  “ ‘I ain’t a lady either so buy me a drink.’

  “So I bought her a drink . . .”

  Here’s how he does it in Kiss Me, Deadly:

  “All I saw was the dame standing there in the glare of the headlights waving her arms like a huge puppet and the curse I spit out filled the car and my own ears. I wrenched the wheel over, felt the rear end start to slide, brought it out with a splash of power and almost ran up the side of the cliff as the car fishtailed. The brakes bit in, gouging a furrow in the shoulder, then jumped to the pavement and held.

  “Somehow I had managed a sweeping curve around the babe. For a few seconds she had been living on stolen time because instead of getting out of the way she had tried to stay in the beam of the headlights. I sat there and let myself shake. The butt that had fallen out of my mouth had burned a hole in the leg of my pants and I flipped it out the window. The stink of burned rubber and brake lining hung in the air like smoke and I was thinking of every damn thing I ever wanted to say to a harebrained woman so I could have it ready when I got my hands on her.

  “That was as far as I got. She was there in the car beside me, the door slammed shut and she said, ‘Thanks, mister.’ ”

  You see what I mean? What you want to do now is keep reading, not sit around while some clown explains why what you just read was gripping. I have to write this crap—I’m getting paid, and I have to give the people something for their money—but you don’t have to read it, and I don’t see why you would want to. Skip past these ill-chosen words of mine, shake hands with Mike Hammer, and enjoy yourself.

  Still with me, eh? Oh, well. Have it your own way.

  Hammett and Hemingway and plain-spoken, hardboiled fiction were born in the Prohibition Era in the aftermath of the First World War. Twenty years and another war later, Mickey Spillane wrote a series of books that grabbed a new generation of readers. Spillane was a vet, and it was vets and their kid brothers who constituted his eager audience.

  Spillane’s books were different, though no one could tell you exactly how. The action was slam-bang, but that was true of pulp fiction written thirty years earlier. His hero was blunt and violent, given to taking the law into his own hands, but no more so than Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams, to mention one of many. There was sexual content, too, but it’s hard nowadays to imagine that the decorous erotic episodes in these books could have inflamed a generation of adolescent males. There were people who denounced Spillane for writing pornography, and you’ve got to wonder what they were thinking of.

  If I were an academic I could spin out a hundred thousand words in an attempt to explain what makes Spillane Spillane, but I’m not, and we can all be thankful for that. I’ll boil it all down to two words:

  Comic books.

  Before he wrote novels, Mickey Spillane wrote for the comic books. His first prose fiction consisted of a slew of one- and tw
o-page stories for the comics, and his hero, Mike Hammer, was originally intended as a comic-strip hero. The fast cuts, the in-your-face immediacy, and the clear-cut, no-shades-of-gray, good v. evil story lines of the Mike Hammer books come straight out of the comic book world.

  Mickey Spillane was writing something new—comic books for grown-ups.

  The new generation of readers who embraced Spillane had read comic books before they read novels. They were used to the pace, the frame-by-frame rhythm. And they took to Mike Hammer like a duck to a pool of dark red blood shimmering in the sickly yellow light of the streetlamp . . .

  Sorry. I got carried away there for a moment.

  * * *

  Mickey died in 2006, and a few years later I wrote about him for my “Murders in Memory Lane” column in Mystery Scene.

  He was born Frank Morrison Spillane in Brooklyn, New York, on March 9, 1918, and grew up across the river in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He went to college briefly (and, I have to say, improbably) in Hays, Kansas, and worked as a lifeguard and a circus trampoline artist, among other things, before enlisting in the Army Air Corps the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  But you don’t need me to tell you that. You can do what I did and find it on Wikipedia.

  And therein lies my present dilemma. I began writing these columns in order to share some personal recollections of writer friends who had passed on, stories which were mine—and sometimes mine alone—to tell. I haven’t been doing this all that long, and already I find myself running out of dead friends.