Gun in Cheek
By Bill Pronzini
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
© 1982 - Digital Edition © 2011 Bill Pronzini
First published 1982 by Mysterious Press
Cover Design By: David Dodd
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Acknowledgments
For their help and encouragement on this project, the author would like to thank the following writers, critics, and aficionados: Jeffrey Wallmann, Jon L. Breen, Francis M. Nevins, Douglas Greene, Ellen Nehr, Bill Blackbeard, Angelo Panagos, Art Scott, and Bruce Taylor.
Special thanks, for their faith and perseverance, to Clyde Taylor of Curtis Brown, Ltd., and Bill Thompson of Coward, McCann & Geoghegan.
For all those who love a mystery
Contents
Introduction by Ed McBain
Without Malice, A Forethought
1. "Wanna Wo-woo?"
2. "The Eyes Have It
3. Cheez It, The Cops!
4. The Saga of the Risen Phoenix
5. The Goonbarrow and Other Jolly Old Corpses
6. Dogs, Swine, Skunks, and Assorted Asses
7. "C-H-I-N-K-S!"
8. The Vanishing Cracksman, the Norman Conquest, and the Death Merchant
9. "In the Name of God – Whose Hand?"
10. The Idiot Heroine in the Attic
11. "Don't Tell Me You've Got a Heater in Your Girdle," Madam!"
12. Ante-Bellem Days; or, "My Roscoe Sneezed: Ka-chee!"
13. A Postmortem
14. Bibliography
Introduction
I think I know why Bill Pronzini asked me write an introduction to a book that really needs none. He knows. Not only does he know how to write good mystery novels, he also knows where to find all the bad ones, those he will soon define for you as "alternative classics." But more than that, he has an encyclopedic memory of the entire genre, and surely a man such as this knows that I myself wrote a few of these alternative classics, way back then when I was still struggling to learn my trade. Frankly, I feel a bit offended that some of my early masterpieces were passed over for consideration.
Who, for example, among any of the entrants Mr. Pronzini has chosen to include in his wonderful book could ever have written an exchange like:
"You're cute, "she said. She was slightly looped, he thought, and her voice sounded deep and throaty even when she spoke. "I noticed you while I was singing, and I said to myself, He's cute. I was right."
She looked better close up, much better than she did on the bandstand. She had her hair pulled back tight over her ears, clipped at the back of her neck with an amber clasp, fanning out over her shoulders. The blouse she wore had a deep V sweeping down from her shoulders, terminating in a shadowed cleft between high breasts. He remembered staring at the soft whiteness of her skin as she leaned over the table.
"You're very cute," she repeated, and he said, "You're not bad yourself."
She blew smoke across the table. "Sparkling dialogue," she said dryly. "Refugees from a Grade-B stinkeroo."
"Pardon me. I'm not dressed for repartee."
I wrote those priceless lines. Yes, Mr. Pronzini.
Moreover, they were published.
But did this scrupulous scholar consider them worthy of inclusion in his otherwise impeccably researched and wittily informative book? I should say not. Or how about this?
And then I was falling.
I don't know what I thought as I fell. I know it seemed to take a long time, seemed to take forever, seemed never to end. I saw the ledge and the struggling figures on it, and the figures came closer, and below them I saw the twisted rocks of Hokus Pokus, waiting I kept dropping and there was a tight nausea in my throat, and a scream that never found voice. I closed my eyes, and I forced moisture from them, and I felt the wind ripping at me, and I was aware of the rope around my waist and the rush of air as I fell.
I hit. I hit with a wrenching pain that shot up the length of my leg. My body crushed onto my twisted foot, and a flash of yellow exploded inside my head. I heard someone scream, a hoarse curse that shattered the stillness of the mountain, an anguished cry of sheer, raw pain. And then I realized that my mouth was open, and the scream was coming from my own throat.
I wrote that, too.
And it, too, was published, Mr. Pronzini.
Or how about:
She snatched the knife from the table, and then she took a lithe step toward my chair, gripping my hair in one hand, pulling my head back, and then lifting the knife high over my throat, a tight grin on her face.
"Aren't you, darling?" she said through clenched teeth. "Aren't you quite helpless?"
Tarrance stood frozen. Yoshi, on the other side of the tea cart, had gone suddenly pale. I sat in the chair and looked up at the tip of the carving knife, and then Adrienne began laughing shrilly, tossing the knife down onto the terrace. Yoshi picked it up.
"My wife has a keen sense of humor," I said coldly.
Now surely, if Mr. Pronzini had a decent bone in his body, he would have included at least this fine example of breathless suspense among those he winnowed out for honors. What else did one have to write to be considered a nominee? Was he looking for something a bit more literary? In which case, I offer the following:
The sky hung overhead like a moth-eaten gray shawl, and the flakes spilled down from it like a loose dandruff at first, lazy and slow.
I could go on. And on. (Oh, how I did go on and on in those days.) The point, of course, is that Mr. Pronzini surely knew about these gems when he was preparing his brief. He has obviously read and digested everything ever written in the genre by anyone anywhere. But even giving him the benefit of the doubt, even assuming he somehow missed these published morsels, doesn't the man ever go to the movies? Didn't he see the film The Birds, for which I wrote the screenplay? Does he truly not remember (or is his forgetfulness just a clever ploy to avoid giving me my rightful due?) the birthday party scene? Where all the birds swoop down and break balloons and knock over tables and whatnot? Did Mr. Pronzini truly not witness the touching scene afterward, in which the hero expresses his concern for the heroine? A scene Hitch desperately tried to excise from the film but couldn't because the camera was in tight on his stars talking, and he had no covering footage? Has Mr. Pronzini honestly forgotten those immortal lines?
MITCH: Look, do you have to go back to Annie's?
MELANIE: No, I have my things in the car.
MITCH: Then stay and have something to eat before you start back. I'd feel a lot better.
I rest my case.
Mr. Pronzini asked me to write this introduction only because he knew samples of my work should have been included in this book and weren't. As simple as that. I am properly insulted.
So I'll leave now.
—Ed McBain (Evan Hunter)
Without Malice,
A Forethought
In recent years, those of us who love the mystery have been pleased to note the publication of an increasing number of critical works devoted to the genre
and its writers. These include general histories (Julian Symons's Mortal Consequences); social histories (Cohn Watson's Snobbery With Violence); biographies (Frank McShane's The Life of Raymond Chandler, John McAieer's Rex Stout: A Biography); collections of critical essays and commentary (Barzun and Taylor's A Catalogue of Crime); appreciations (Leroy Panek's Watteau Shepherds, Robert Barnard's A Talent to Deceive); and bibliographic and encyclopedic reference works (Allen Hubin's The Bibliography of Crime Fiction, 1749-1975, Otto Penzler's and Chris Steinbrunner's The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, and the recent Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John Reilly).
Without exception, these and other critical works have focused on the positive side of crime fiction. That is, they dwell on its technical and/or artistic qualities. They offer in-depth studies of its best writers, its best books. They laud, applaud, dissect, gently chastise, and sometimes canonize the great and the near-great of mysterydom.
Which is all fine, of course; no one could be more delighted than I at this passionate interest in the field in which I publish the bulk of my fiction. And yet the absolute emphasis on the good strikes me as unfair. The good mystery gets all the credit, all the attention. So does the good writer.
But what about the bad mystery?
What about the bad writer?
The amount of (critically) inferior crime fiction published during this century far exceeds that of the superior, after all; there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of works of all types and description. Most of these are of average badness, to be sure. Yet several stand out as unique and in their own way are every bit as memorable as any of the classic good ones. Or would be if enough people knew of their existence.
The "alternative classics" and their authors, however, have been neglected to the point of invisibility. Much has been written about the contributions of Doyle, Christie, Hammett, Chandler, Stout. But how many readers—indeed, how many aficionados—are aware of the contributions of Michael Morgan, Tom Roan, Eric Heath, James O'Hanlon, Sydney Horler, Michael Avallone, Robert Leslie Bellem, Milton M. Raison, and Joseph Rosenberger? Everyone has heard of The Hound of the Baskerviles, The Maltese Falcon, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Big Sleep. But how many know the joys to be found in Decoy, The Dragon Strikes Back, Murder of a Mystery Writer, Murder at Horsethief, Lord of Terror, Bride of Terror, and The Bat?
The purpose of this book is threefold: first, to rectify the neglect of these writers and their works, to give them the critical attention they deserve; second, to provide a different historical perspective on crime fiction—its detectives, its sub-genres, its publishers—and on the social attitudes it reflects (which are often more pronounced in the bad mystery than in the good one); and third, to add a few chuckles—perhaps even a guffaw or two—to the heretofore sobersided field of mystery criticism. It is all well and good to take the genre seriously; as a mystery writer, I take it (and this book) rather seriously myself. But it is not hallowed ground, as some would have us believe. Nor should it be so snooty in its newfound position as a "legitimate" literary art form to want to bury its so-called black sheep or refuse to give itself an old-fashioned horse laugh now and then. * The ability to laugh at one's self, it has been said, is the sign of a healthy organism. And the mystery, one hopes, is a very healthy organism.
As to my qualifications for undertaking such a project, I submit the following credentials: mystery novelist, short-story writer, anthologist, and essayist; collector and student of mystery criticism, biography, bibliography, history, and ephemera; owner of several thousand mystery novels, collections, anthologies, and pulp and digest magazines, a good many of which are quite bad. I also submit the following sentence from my novel, The Stalker: "When would this phantasmagoria that was all too real reality end? he asked himself."
Can there be anyone better suited to write a tribute to the alternative classics of crime fiction than the author of that immortal line?
*Academics consider it "legitimate" nowadays, anyhow. The self-styled 'literary establishment" considers any prose that has a plot, makes a linear kind of sense throughout, and does not involve suburban sexual angst to be trash, or at best subliterary.
1. "Wanna Woo-woo?"
" . . . I have a plot for a book that I intend to write some day that I believe gets over the perfect murder most adequately. . . . In that book I shall show that the police and detectives are utterly baffled and that at last the murderer himself has to come forward and tell how he committed the crime. I will have him to do this out of a pure sense of bravado and love of the dramatic, or possibly motivate it by showing that he is suffering from an incurable disease and is going to die soon anyway."
"Sounds like a lot of baloney to me," snorted Lang.
—Eric Heath,
Murder of a Mystery Writer
"Fire's a damned sight worse," he muttered. "Cripes, my head's like a pumpkin! It's always at the back of my mind."
—Ellery Queen,
The Siamese Twin Mystery
The amateur detective, or AD as he is affectionately known to insiders, is the most popular crime-solving creation among the writers of detective fiction. Beginning with Jacques Futrelle's Professor F. X. Van Duesen, "The Thinking Machine," in this country, and, somewhat later, Chesterton's Father Brown in England, the AD has seen more bloodletting, faced more peril, and unraveled more mysteries than all professional detectives, public and private, combined.
The AD can be of either sex, of any age; can possess any quirk or specialized knowledge and be of any profession (or no profession at all). The AD roster includes doctors, lawyers, merchants, thieves; little old ladies with a homicidal eye and fusty professors with very large brains; bored young men of wealth and breeding, and derelicts on Skid Row; newspaper reporters, poets, playwrights, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, unpublished writers, songwriters, and insurance underwriters; salesmen, bankers, Indians, artists, magicians, priests, nuns, gamblers, teachers, scientists, sports figures, photographers, publicans—and a hundred more. The AD can be hard-boiled, soft-boiled, half-baked, well-pickled, or sugar-coated. He/she can use fists, guns, wits, half-wits, innocence, guile, luck, pluck, deduction, guesswork, or any combination of these to solve a case and bring an evildoer to justice.
What the most enduring of the amateur detectives seem to have in common is an abiding interest in criminology, an encyclopedic knowledge of trivial and/or esoteric facts, a Sherlockian intelligence, a penchant for withholding evidence from the police (but never from the reader, no matter how obliquely it is couched), and such endearing qualities as the enigmatic smile, the gimlet eye, the curled lip, the disarming grin, the sharp retort, the clever pun, the cryptic remark, and the perfect squelch. Consider the great ADs of mystery fiction: Father Brown, Dr. Fell, Ellery Queen, Lord Peter Wimsey, Reggie Fortune, The Great Merlini, Miss Marple, Perry Mason, John J. Malone, "The Old Man in the Corner," Mr. and Mrs. North, Miss Hildegarde Withers. When these ladies and gentlemen embark on a case, it is bound to be a memorable one.
The same is true of the great ADs on the other side of the qualitative coin.
The earliest of these is Joseph Rouletabille, a Parisian reporter who solves a number of cases in the early 1900s narrated by his Watson, Sainclair, and created by French writer Gaston Leroux. The first, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907), is well known and also considered by some – John Dickson Carr, the grand master of the "impossible crime" story, was one—to be among the finest "locked-room" mysteries ever penned. This may be true, if one reckons solely on ingenuity of plot; but if one takes into account stilted writing, nonexistent characterization, incredible coincidences, and a welter of disguises, aliases, and red herrings—plus such other implausibilities as the fact that Roületabille, already a successful journalist, is not much older than sixteen when he solves the mystery of the yellow room—Leroux might seem better placed, or at least equally well placed, at the opposite end of the mystery spectrum.
From this standpoint, his
most (or least) accomplished work is the second of the Rouletabille cases, The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1909). Chief among its noteworthy aspects is a preposterous plot in which the villain of The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a brilliant former detective named Frédéric Larsan, who was supposedly killed off in that book, returns alive and in disguise (a la Sherlock Holmes) to commit a new locked-room murder, this one involving the use of false-face and a tricked-up wardrobe. There are also more aliases, red herrings, and coincidences, some crudely worked out motivations, a final "revelation" that Rouletabille is the illegitimate son of Larsan, and such artful prose as:
He rushed to the canal, sobbing, and, with a prayer, uttered as much to the Lady in Black as to God Himself, threw himself into the water. Happily, in his despair, the poor child had forgotten that he knew how to swim.
He had mocked her, even while the tears had streamed down his cheeks. I could never have believed that Rouletabille could have been so cruel or so heartless—or, even, so ill-bred!
The first of the notable ADs on the American front is Professor Herman Brierly, who appears in four novels by Will Levinrew published in the late twenties and early thirties. Brierly is an elderly research scientist of the following description: "small, exquisitely formed body, not over five feet tall; tiny hands and feet, bushy, snow-white hair, bushy black brows over dark blue eyes so deeply sunken in their sockets as to seem jet black; high, fresh complexion rarely found except in infancy." Brierly is also a superintellect of a crabby, somewhat egotistical nature that puts him in a class with his obvious role model, Philo Vance. His stock-in-trade is solving crimes through "scientific deduction," which is a masking euphemism for the fact that he unravels the most convoluted, Van Dineish plots with a minimum of detection and a maximum of obscure textbook science and pathology.
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