Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  She had a seventy-eight-inch bust, forty-six-inch waist, and seventy-two-inch hips—measurements that were exactly right, I thought, for her height of eleven feet, four inches.

  The scarlet bikini which had covered a minimum of those eye-popping curves lay crumpled on the floor at her feet, and my eyes focused on her ass glassily as did the dead man's. He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled.

  Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I'd ever heard of. (Take a Murder, Darling)

  The Rand Brothers Mortuary was so beautiful it almost made you want to die. (Dig That Crazy Grave)

  I was as confused as a sterile rabbit, primarily because I couldn't make up my mind where to look. The little blonde that everybody here at the party called Dot was doing an impromptu can-can, and even if she wasn't dressed for that kind of dance, she sure had the equipment for it. At the same time, over in the far corner of the living room, was a long-limbed lovely built like something designed by a sex fiend. (Way of a Wanton)

  This was a party that Cholly Knickerbocker, in tomorrow's Los Angeles Examiner, would describe as "a gathering of the Smart Set," and if this was the Smart Set I was glad I belonged to the Stupid Set. (Strip for Murder)

  Consider also such plot gimmicks as this one from Strip for Murder (1955): Scott, investigating a murder (and other things) in a nudist camp, is chased by thugs and manages to escape naked in a hot-air balloon, which then carries him on the prevailing winds over Los Angeles and smack up against City Hall, where a secretary leans out a window and recognizes him by peering at a part of his anatomy other than his face. Or this one from Way of a Wanton (1952): Scott, investigating a murder (and other things) on a movie set for a B film called Jungle Girl, is chased by thugs after a nude swim with an actress and manages to escape by swinging Tarzan-like through the trees on a vine, only to come crashing down in the middle of a hundred people who are in the process of filming a burning-at-the-stake scene; the girl tied to the stake takes one look at Scott and says "Aaaahhhh!" After which she bursts her bonds and runs away.

  And consider lastly the following scene from The Cockeyed Corpse (1964), in which Scott, investigating a murder (and other things) on a movie set for a B Western called The Wild West, disguises himself as a papier mâche rock so he can sneak up on the thugs' hideout, which is out in the middle of a desert area. Owing to circumstances beyond his control, he is armed at the time only with a rifle that shoots tranquilizer darts. (He is not, however, nude.) One of the hoods comes outside, sees the rock-draped Scott moving from one spot to another, blinks in amazement, turns around to shout for his pals inside the house, and—

  Then he bent over and put his face in his hands.

  Bent way over. And that, of course, was asking for it.

  Even using a bean-blower, from this distance I couldn't have missed the vast, magnificent target he presented—magnificent, naturally, only when considered as a target.

  I thrust my rifle through the [peep] hole, sighted quickly, and pulled the trigger. There was a little spat, and the projectile went straight and true.

  Farmer came running out, gun in his hand. "What in the hell is comin' oft'?" he yelped.

  Dodo had turned to face me and was pointing at me with a quivering finger, and with the other hand he started banging Farmer on the shoulder, in a high state of excitement. "You won't believe this," he said. "But that rock just shot me in the ass!"

  It was only natural, given the popularity of Shell Scott, that Prather, too, would have his imitators. The most notable of these is a husband-and-wife team, Skip and Gloria Fickling, who happened to be close friends of Prather's in the fifties. But the Ficklings were not merely imitators; they took their version of Shell Scott one innovative step further: they made him a woman. And they called her Honey West.

  A good many people are aware of Honey West, but not so much through the series of novels in which she is featured as through the medium of television. Honey first appeared as a character on the old Burke's Law series starring Gene Barry and later had her own show for a couple of seasons, with Anne Francis playing the title role. The reason for her modest success, both in books and on TV, was the fact that she was a female private eye. The idea of a lady op was not exactly new in 1957, when the Ficklings (whose only other claim to distinction is that they once appeared on the Groucho Marx TV quiz, You Bet Your Life) decided to become authors. A book by James Rubel called No Business for a Lady had appeared from Gold Medal (Prather's publishers) several years earlier; Carter Brown had already published, in Australia, the first few titles in his series about Mavis Seidlitz; and there had been other isolated efforts at establishing lady PIs, mainly in the pulps. But no one had a handle on how to do such a character commercially until the Ficklings came along.

  Their Honey West formula is simple: tell the stories in the first person, put Honey in all sorts of oddball situations in which her virtue as well as her life is threatened, throw in plenty of sexual innuendo—but under no circumstances have her go to bed with anybody, not even Mark Storm, the cop she supposedly has a yen for. This is what is known as the Big Tease. Is Honey a closet virgin or isn't she? Will she get laid or won't she? The male reader becomes hot and bothered by such speculation, it is presumed, and therefore is more than willing to come back for more of the same in the next book. That there is some validity in this sort of "hard sell" is evident from Honey's longevity on the private-eye scene.

  Jokes, wisecracks, and bathroom humor are plentiful in Honey's adventures, of course. The Ficklings's favorite method of adding chuckles was that old Prather standby, the double entendre:

  "I was a chorus girl at the Dreamdust Hotel in Vegas," she said, a touch of triumph in her husky voice. "Mr. Lawrence took a vote of the show's director and backstage crew. Out of thirty girls they picked me as the most outstanding." (Honey in the Flesh)

  "You're going to love this party, baby," He! said. "Of course, a lot of my pictures have to be censored before they hit the magazines. You know what artists' balls are like!"

  "I can imagine." (A Gun for Honey)

  Honey gets herself embroiled in Scott-like plots, too, such as the Miss Twentieth Century Beauty Pageant (Honey in the Flesh, 1959), in which she is injected with a sex stimulant ("It's tearing me to pieces," she says, and "Have you ever sat on a hot oven until you thought your bottom would burn off?"), and for a while it looks as if the impenetrable is finally going to be penetrated. But only for a while. Then there is the case of the "kissing killer" (A Gun for Honey, 1958), in which two beautiful women have been smothered to death in bizarre circumstances. The explanation for this, unearthed by Honey, is that a third woman, who was a close friend of the two dead ones, isn't really a woman at all but a transvestite (shades of Spillane's Vengeance Is Mine) ; even though he went around masquerading as a woman, this individual was seized with normal male desires, and when he couldn't stand the pressure any longer, he "exploded from under all his makeup and mascara" and attacked his first victim, a woman named Helena. (And no wonder he picked Helena. As Mark Storm notes, she "was an exotic woman even lying on a slab.") When he grabbed Helena, and she saw him trying to pull his dress up at the same time he was trying to pull her down, she quite naturally started to scream—and so he was forced to jam his mouth over hers to cut off the noise. Presumably he also pinched her nostrils shut; in any case, he wound up kissing poor Helena until she expired. The second victim was later dispatched in the same oral fashion.

  Another notable writer of private-eye fiction who began his career in the fifties and who continues to produce novels and short stories to the present is Michael Avallone, a.k.a. "The Fastest Typewriter in the East," a.k.a. "King of the Paperbacks." These sobriquets are self-given but are nonetheless reasonably accurate. Avallone has published some 190 novels in the past four decades, nearly all of them paperback originals: P1 tales, Gothics, TV and film novelizations, juveniles, soft-core porn,
espionage thrillers. He is also the holder of unconventional opinions on any number of topics, a zealous old-movie buff, a tireless self-promoter and letter writer, and his own greatest fan. Francis M. Nevins, in his profile of Avallone in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, calls him "a true auteur, with a unique personality discernible throughout his work," and goes on to state, "Whatever else might be said about Avallone, one must say what Caspar Gutman said to Spade in The Maltese Falcon: 'By Gad, sir, you're a character, that you are!'"

  Avallone's fictional "eye," Ed Noon, has appeared in more than thirty novels since his first recorded case in 1953. On the one hand, Noon is a standard tough, wisecracking op with a taste for copious bloodletting and a Spillane-type hatred of Communists, dissidents, hippies, pacifists, militant blacks, liberated women, and anyone or anything else of a liberal cant. On the other hand, he is a distinctly if eccentrically drawn character who loves baseball, old movies, and dumb jokes, and who gets himself mixed up with some of the most improbable individuals ever committed to paper. For instance, a 6-foot-4-inch ex-circus performer named Tall Dolores, "the Shapliest Amazon in the World"—"a Glamazon, a regular Empire State Building of female feminine dame. And all woman besides" (The Tall Dolores). And a 440-pound female mattress tester, who leads him into mayhem and a Chinese restaurant that dispenses "wanton soup," among other savory items (The Case of the Bouncing Betty). And a gold-toothed, beret-wearing villain named Dean, who is on the trail of a statue called the Violent Virgin, "The Number One Nude," and who says things like "Your precipitous exodus from serene sanctuary propels me toward Brobdingnagian measures. Spider and I mourn for your misdemeanors but your palpitating perignations [sic] induce no termination of our grief" (The Case of the Violent Virgin).

  Noon's wildest caper, though, is probably Shoot It Again, Sam! (1972), which Francis Nevins, the compleat Noon-watcher, sums up as follows in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers: "The President [of the United States, for whom Noon is working at the time as a special investigator] orders Noon to accompany a dead Hollywood star's body on a transcontinental train ride. While the 'corpse' sits up in its coffin, Chinese agents raid the train, kidnap Noon, and use brainwashers made up to look like Gable, Cagney, and Lorre to convince Noon that he is none other than Sam Spade (as portrayed by Bogart of course). It's all part of the screwiest assassination plot ever concocted by a movie maniac."

  But, as is the case with so many writers of alternative masterpieces, it is Avallone's lurid, ungrammatical, and often hilarious prose style that distinguishes him and Ed Noon. Nevins again: "[Avallone] makes the language do flipflops, mangles the metaphors like a trash compactor." Noonisms, as they have come to be called among discerning aficionados, abound in each and every Noon title; indeed, in each and every Avallone title. One of these days, it is to be hoped, someone will publish a collection of Noonisms; there are certainly enough to fill a substantial volume. But until that happens, a sampling here of the more memorable will have to suffice.

  The next day dawned bright and clear on my empty stomach. (Meanwhile Back at the Morgue)

  The whites of his eyes came up in their sockets like moons over an oasis lined with palm trees. (The Voodoo Murders)

  My body felt as abnormal as a tuxedo in a hobo jungle. (The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse)

  His thin mustache was neatly placed between a peaked nose and two eyes like black marbles. (Assassins Don't Die in Bed)

  My stunned intellect, the one that found death in his own backyard with him standing only feet away, hard to swallow in a hurry, found the answer. (The Horrible Man)

  The door chimes were still disturbing Beethoven in his grave when I rushed to meet him. (The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse)

  His freshest laurel wreath was his recent interpretation of such tough aces like Stravinsky and Shostakovich; rendering their works on violin strings was like pushing peanuts up Mount Everest with your nose. (Killer on the Keys)

  Her hips were beautifully arched and her breasts were like proud flags waving triumphantly. She carried them high and mighty. (The Case of the Violent Virgin)

  She . . . unearthed one of her fantastic breasts from the folds of her sheath skirt. (The Horrible Man)

  Her breasts and hips would put a scenic railway to shame. Or maybe make an artist drown himself in his fixative. (The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse)

  Holly Hill's figure didn't take your breath away. It just never gave it back. . . . Her breasts weren't only round and full. They pulsed and throbbed like living perfections. The deep well of her stomach fell away to the superb convex leading gracefully to strong, starkly rendered thighs that were as firm and full as sixteen-inch guns. (The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse)

  Her breasts were twin mounds of female muscle that quivered and hung and quivered and hung again. The pale red of her nipples were two twinkling eyes that said Go, Man, Go. (The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse)

  If her eyes were like baseballs, her breasts took you from sporting goods to something like ripe cantaloupes. (The Case of the Violent Virgin)

  "I've done a stupid thing, Ed," Opal Trace musicaled. (The Case of the Violent Virgin)

  "Opal . . ." she hoarsed. (The Case of the Violent Virgin)

  "Obviously!" she crackled, laying a whip across me and then turning with a sexy flounce she vanished through the glass doors, dragging her hatbox and portmanteau behind her. And my mind. (Shoot It Again, Sam!)

  I looked at the knife. . . . One half the blade was soaked with drying blood. Benny's blood. It was red, like anybody else's blood. (The Voodoo Murders)

  Dolores came around the bed with the speed of a big ape. . . . She descended on me like a tree full of the same apes she looked like. (The Tall Dolores)

  It had been a journey into the absurd. A trip into Darkness.

  And maybe a one-way ticket to Hell. And whatever lays [sic] beyond that. (Shoot It Again, Sam!)

  In the sixties and seventies, the plots of private-detective novels began to grow increasingly sophisticated. To be sure, there were – and still are – a few around with Ed Noonish premises; but a number of serious (and pretentious) writers began to emulate what Ross Macdonald had been doing for years: using the PI novel as a vehicle for salient commentary on all sorts of social, political, racial, sexual, ecological, and psychological topics. A certain percentage of these writers have achieved critical acclaim and widespread popularity—despite the fact that, almost to a man, they are unabashed imitators of one or all of the so-called Big Three of Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald. Their books are riddled with conventional cops, conventional wisecracks, conventional toughness, conventional violence, and conventional relationships with conventional female characters. They take their detectives as seriously as they take their subject matter, never admitting for a moment that what they are writing is pure and simple pastiche. They have, in short, brought nothing new to the form, the mystique, the Eye.

  Only one writer has brought anything new to the Eye in the past thirty years.

  His name is Ross H. Spencer.

  His detective's name is Chance Perdue.

  The first Chance Perdue novel was published in 1978. Under the title The Dada Caper.

  It is full of wisecracks and other conventions.

  But it is still unique.

  It is unique because Spencer has a gimmick.

  Or rather three gimmicks.

  His first gimmick is that every sentence is a separate paragraph.

  His second gimmick is that he doesn't use quotation marks or commas.

  Betsy said did she drink a lot?

  I said was Hitler a Nazi a lot?

  That is how Spencer writes dialogue.

  It is supposed to be funny dialogue

  Sometimes it is.

  The Dada Caper is supposed to be a spoof.

  Sometimes it is.

  She said why you lying cheating philandering Casanova Romeo gigolo any old port in the storm man about town.

  That is how Spencer writes sentences without using commas not even t
o set off clauses like this one or long strings of pithy pointed keen witted right on target adjectives.

  His third gimmick is that each chapter begins with an epigraph after the fashion of Mark Twain in Pudd'nhead Wilson.

  These epigraphs are supposedly written by Monroe D. Underwood.

  Who is also known as Old Dad Underwood.

  Some of Old Dad Underwood's epigraphs are funny.

  . . .going to bed with a good woman can relax a man . . . going to bed with a bad woman can relax a man twicet . . . iffen he is a good man. . .

  That's a funny one.

  But some of Old Dad Underwood's epigraphs are not funny.

  . . .oncet I knowed a feller what smuggled a ham into a synagogue . . . only man whatever got circumcized twentytwo times . . .

  That's not a funny one.

  All three of Spencer's gimmicks are clever.

  One reason they are clever is that they allow him to write a complete novel in less than twenty-five thousand words.

  Most writers need a minimum of fifty thousand words to write a novel.