Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  Another reason they are clever is that Spencer doesn't have to spend very much time on plotting.

  There is very little plot in The Dada Caper.

  It is about a Soviet-inspired DADA conspiracy.

  DADA means Destroy America, Destroy America.

  Anyhow Spencer knew a good thing when he saw it.

  So he made Chance Perdue into a series character.

  Other novels have followed and more are to come.

  But not a lot more.

  The problem with gimmicks like this is that they tend to lose their novelty after a while.

  Pretty soon readers will start looking for a two-sentence paragraph.

  Or a set of quotation marks.

  Or a comma.

  Or a plot.

  And when they don't find any

  . . . oncet I knowed a feller throwed a book across the room - . - I heered him say that's your last chance Perdue.

  Old Dad Underwood didn't write that one.

  I wrote that one.

  It may not be an epigraph either.

  It may be an epitaph for an Eye.

  3. Cheez It, The Cops!

  "Been a long day, sir," I said briskly. "But I'm still hard at it."

  "Insulting people?" he growled. . . . "Can't you ever be polite to somebody, Wheeler? Anybody?"

  "If I'd known I was supposed to be polite," I told him, "I never would have become a cop in the first place."

  -Carter Brown, The Victim

  "You remember that Wall Street philanthropist who was killed by a can of sauerkraut thrown at his head. . . . What a pickle the police were in that day!"

  -Elsa Barker, The C.I.D. of Dexter Drake

  The policeman (cop, copper, bobbie, nabber, fuzz, pig—choose your favorite slang term) has generally been accorded more respect in Europe than in the United States. This is especially true among fiction writers, who have been inclined to venerate the actions of the professional manhunter over there and to sneer at them over here. Which is why, until the recent upsurge of interest in the American police procedural novel, far more British, French, and Scandinavian mysteries featured police detectives than did American mysteries. And why many crime stories written by Americans have had as their protagonists European police detectives. (John Dickson Carr's Henri Bencolin is just one of the more well known examples.)

  Part of the reason for this dichotomy is that the modern police agency is European in origin: the French Sûreté was formed in 1811, the London metropolitan police force was organized by Sir Robert Peel in 1829. These agencies were not only well established before similar operations were begun here but also highly romanticized in popular writings. The adventures of Francois Eugene Vidocq, the reformed thief and forger who became the first chief of the Sûreté and later wrote a much glamorized autobiography called, in the United States, Vidocq, The French Police Spy, were famous on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-1800s and had a profound influence on early writers of crime fiction, beginning with Poe himself, who more or less modeled C. Auguste Dupin on Vidocq. This influence, as Julian Symons points out in his excellent critical history, Mortal Consequences, was not because of any deductive skill on Vidocq's part; during his tenure at the Sûreté , he began a card-index system and took impressions of footprints, and made such observations as that many criminals appeared to be bowlegged; but these were the limit of his contributions to police procedural methods. "Vidocq's importance," Symons says, "rested in his nature as the archetypal ambiguous figure of the criminal who is also a hero. The interpenetrations of police with criminals, and the doubt about whether a particular character is hero or villain, is an essential feature of the crime story."

  Nonetheless, an aura of mystery is not the chief reason the European policeman became such a popular figure here and abroad in the twentieth century. The chief reason, conversely, is the European—and in particular, British—esteem for representatives of law, order, and the preservation of existing social and moral attitudes. Beginning with the rise of the middle class and the age of Dickens, such representatives, by their very election or appointment to lofty positions, were considered to possess any number of virtues, not the least of which was an acute intelligence. This attitude persisted until the general disillusionment that followed (or preceded, depending on your point of view) the Second World War in Europe. When a detective-story writer introduced a police detective, it was automatically assumed by the reader that he was a man of intellect and keen capabilities.

  The same is not true in this country. Rampant police corruption in the cities, Western peace officers of the Wyatt Earp ilk who were little better than outlaws themselves, the pioneer spirit of self-reliance and personal rather than public code of ethics, and story weeklies and dime novels that mostly painted law-enforcement officers in unfavorable colors all combined in the late nineteenth century to create a wholly different police image in American minds. By the time the twentieth century arrived, the police were symbols of authority to be feared, scorned, or at best tolerated, but seldom to be revered. Mystery writers, naturally, reflected this attitude in their work; private investigators and gifted amateurs were much preferred to hardworking, honest cops as detective heroes. It became standard practice to depict the police as bumbling comic figures or as sadistic halfwits whose primary function was to be outsmarted and made fools of by the private individual. To some extent, the stereotypical dumb cop, with his penchant for ungrammatical sentences and the third degree, has survived in mystery fiction to the present.

  Most bad mysteries treat the police in this fashion—sometimes unconsciously, in those books in which a cop is supposed to be the hero. The authors, by their very ineptitude, imbue their police detectives with all the negative and/or chuckle-some traits of those who are treated as anti- or nonheroes in other mysteries and thus achieve the exact same effect of ridicule.

  A case in point is Cortland Fitzsimmons's 70,000 Witnesses (1931), which features a cop named Kethridge. Fitzsimmons wrote a number of sports mysteries in the thirties and forties, utilizing hockey, baseball, and football, among other sports, as background; 70,000 Witnesses is the first of these. It deals with college football as it was played in 1930, a markedly different variety of football from the one we know a half-century later. Teams quick-kicked on first down, for example, even with good field position; they also received the kickoff after scoring a touchdown. Even more interesting are behind-the-scenes differences: coaches admitting to paying for the services of some players and seeming proud of the fact; players openly gambling on the outcome of games, sometimes even betting on their opponents to win, without anybody becoming upset or even wondering if these players might not decide purposely to miss a tackle of two or maybe commit a convenient fumble if the score got too close. Fitzsimmons implies that no one is concerned about the gambling because "college boys will be college boys," and besides, none of America's fine young manhood would dream of doing anything illegal on or off the field.

  The action centers around a showdown match between two undefeated teams, University and State, whose campuses are twenty-five miles apart in an unnamed but presumably small state. A twenty-two-page radio broadcast opens the novel, most of it play-by-play of the first half of the game, with color commentary, a half-time "analysis" by a sports writer, and station breaks included, all for verisimilitude. Here are two examples of this stirring reportage:

  "The University band is coming out now. They are a snappy-looking bunch of boys and they can play too. Hear them? They are playing 'University Forever.' University's mascot is an old goat lovingly called 'American Can' but I don't see him. It is just possible that the University boys were afraid State would get their goat."

  "The timekeeper is ready, the gun is in the air. There it goes. Did you hear it? The game is on. Oh my! Butch Schupe's toe has driven the pigskin deep into University's territory. What a kick! For a moment it looked as if it had taken off permanently. It's down now. Number twenty-nine, that's Jorgenson, has taken the ova
l and has cut in following his interference which has begun to function quickly and efficiently. Look at him go. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty-five. They've got him. He's down but it was a good run back. The referee has dived into that swirling mass of legs and arms and is pulling them off. I might say I've never seen a referee go at a pile of men the way Collins gets into them."

  So much for Verisimilitude.

  At the start of the second half, State's star player, an all-American boy named Walter Demuth, takes a single-wing snap and breaks through the line on a long run down the sidelines. There is no one near him as he approaches the goal line; but then he staggers and slows down as if suddenly exhausted, stumbles on the five-yard stripe, and collapses just after he crosses into the end zone for a touchdown.

  The narrative switches to the third person at this point, and we learn that Demuth is dead of what may or may not be a heart attack. Both coaches decide that the game must go on in spite of the tragedy, because, as one of them says, "If we call the game, we will have to make some explanation. We can't say that he was killed, that might start a panic and a panic out there would be pretty terrible. You never know what 70,000 people will do under such circumstances. They have had a very exciting afternoon with a great play of emotion. They are curious now and upset. They are wondering what has happened and pretty soon they will begin to churn. They might go loco. It wouldn't need more than three or four screaming, fainting women to start something pretty bad."

  So much for logic.

  The game continues, and University wins, 27-13. And the following day, the coroner determines that Demuth died of an "explosion of the brain," in which all the small blood vessels were destroyed in the manner of apoplexy. But he suspects foul play nonetheless and calls in the homicide boys. Enter Kethridge.

  Kethridge is the quintessential thirties detective: taciturn, hard-boiled, prone to the wisecrack and the sharp retort. He is also about as realistically portrayed as Fleming Stone and not half as intelligent.

  He questions Demuth's sister Dorothy and Demuth's best friend Ranny, who is in love with Dorothy, and manages to find out that Demuth died on his twenty-first birthday, after having inherited a rather large fortune; Kethridge also finds out that Demuth willed half of this fortune to Ranny, because the two of them were such close chums. (The reader has known all this for some time before Kethridge learns it; Fitzsimmons was fond of imparting relevant information to the reader first, perhaps as a courtesy. It may also be through courtesy that the reader is allowed to guess the identity of the murderer on page 15, despite there being twenty-one other suspects. But that is of little import; the real joy of 70,000 Witnesses is in trying to figure out how Demuth was killed—and in watching Kethridge make a fool of himself.) He also questions Harry Collins, the referee in the big game, who was once Demuth's tutor and who, like Ranny, is in love with Dorothy. And he questions various members of the State team, some of whom have minor motives for wanting Demuth out of the way, as well as selected members of the University team.

  But does he have the State locker room searched for possible poisonous or otherwise deadly agents? He does not. Does he have the field searched for similar agents, or question grounds keepers, ushers, or the other officials? He does not. Does he think to investigate the uniform Demuth was wearing at the time of his demise? Yes, but only after the youth's clothes are stolen and, we later learn, destroyed by the murderer.

  While Kethridge continues his bumbling investigation, Dorothy is forced to choose between Ranny and Harry when Ran-fly impulsively proposes to her.

  "What about these women you get in messes with? Walter isn't here now to protect you or me."

  A fleeting smile passed across Ranny's-face. "You dear, adorable, wonderful girl, that was over a year ago and was just a mad thing that I got into and wanted to get out of and didn't know how. . . . It didn't mean anything and there has been no girl and never will be any other girl but you. You must believe me. Don't you?" he teased. "Say you love me," he went on. "Please say it. Repeat after me, 'Ranny, I love you."

  Her head dropped down on his shoulder and she started to cry broken-heartedly.

  "Oh, my darling, please. There, there, sweetheart. I didn't want to make you cry." He crooned over her and his own eyes glistened.

  "I—I—" she snuggled closer, burrowing her face into his neck so that her words were smothered. "I do, Ranny, I do and I am happy but I don't feel happy."

  "I know, dear, and I feel the same way."

  Ranny feels even less happy when O'Brien, a uniform cop assigned to the State campus beat and Kethridge's nominal partner in the murder investigation, finds part of Demuth's missing uniform—a torn stocking—among Ranny's effects. Kethridge asks Ranny some more questions, after first advising him of his rights. (" 'You need not speak if you prefer to keep still as I must warn you that anything you say can and will be used against you.' Kethridge smiled as he repeated the trite phrase so common in criminal circles.") But he doesn't learn much; Ranny claims not to know how the stocking came to be among his belongings.

  Dorothy is then recruited to pretend to believe Ranny is guilty, a ploy which Kethridge tells her might prove the boy's guilt or innocence. It does neither; all it does is upset Dorothy and Ranny both. So Kethridge then takes Ranny to a showing of newsreel footage of Demuth's fatal touchdown run. Neither he nor the reader learns much from that, either. Nevertheless, Kethridge decides he has enough of a case against Ranny to confine him to jail for the night, and this is done. Ranny takes his incarceration manfully. Of course, he does lie awake most of the night, tossing and turning, asking himself rhetorical questions; but then "because sleep had been a habit with him for so many years he finally slept and forgot."

  The next morning Ranny is released, reunited with Dorothy, and subsequently taken to the football stadium. The reason for this is that Kethridge has had another brainstorm: he has ordered that Demuth's fatal run be restaged, along with several of the plays leading up to it, by the teams from State and University. By doing this, he says with dubious logic, maybe a new clue will come to light.

  Before the re-creation begins, we are privy to several exchanges of dialogue among State's players in their locker room. It becomes obvious that two players, Cannero and Greenwood, have been withholding information from the police for reasons of their own. Greenwood is asked to play the part of Demuth in the restaging, but he refuses on the grounds that the same thing will happen to him that happened to Demuth. Cannero is given the role instead.

  And to everyone's surprise (except the reader's), the same thing happens to him that happened to Demuth when the fateful touchdown run is re-created.

  There is a good deal of anguish and confusion after that.

  Greenwood, who is not your typical football player, swoons. The team doctor pronounces Cannero dead. Kethridge, baffled, asks several ineffectual questions and finally orders the corpse taken back to the State locker room. The doctor and the State coach do the honors; but once inside, they accidentally drop Cannero on the table instead of setting him down in a gentler fashion. The result is a tremendous explosion: "the blanket-covered body rose abruptly from the table and seemed to hang in mid air for a moment." Then there is a second explosion, which turns everyone topsy-turvy and topples the long row of lockers. No one is seriously hurt in these blowups except for Greenwood, who is found pinned and near death underneath the lockers. But he hasn't been crushed or injured by flying objects; he is near death because the same thing that happened to Demuth and Cannero has happened to him, after all.

  Blamed by both his chief and the newspapers for this latest carnage (rightfully so), Kethridge at last begins to ask the right questions. He learns from Ranny that Greenwood was a chemistry nut, always trying experiments, and that an explosion the previous year had almost wrecked a laboratory he had set up in a rented shack. Kethridge then goes to Greenwood's chemistry professor, from whom the answer to the puzzle is forthcoming.

  It seems that one of Greenwood's experiments was
the manufacture of nitroglycerin. And nitroglycerin, as the professor tells him, "in small doses has a powerful heart reaction. Men, particularly when they are new at making it, often have severe reactions. They are seized with terrific headaches and often keel over." People get it on their hands and clothes, we then learn, and take it into their systems by absorption.

  As for the explosion—well, everyone knows that nitroglycerin is a volatile substance and can explode at any time. When the body of Cannero was dropped on the locker-room table . . . boom! The second explosion was of a vial of nitro hidden away in one of the lockers, touched off by the concussion of the first blast.

  How did the nitro get inside the uniforms of Demuth, Cannero, and Greenwood? Kethridge deduces that none of the football players could have carried it onto the field in a hidden vial, because football is a contact sport and the first time a vial-carrying player smacked into the line - . . boom! Who else was on the field? Why, the officials, of course. And which official was not only in love with Dorothy but had made a ten thousand-dollar bet against State and regularly dived into pileups and pulled the players apart? Why, the referee, Harry Collins, of course. He had the vial of nitro inside his shirt, having gotten it from Greenwood, who turns out to have been his nephew. (The cowardly Greenwood knew too much, which is why he had to die. Cannero had seen Collins destroying Demuth's uniform; that was why he had to die.) And even though twenty-two football players and five other officials were in close proximity, not to mention seventy thousand other witnesses during the big game and eagle-eye Kethridge at the re-creation, Collins managed somehow to pull out the vial surreptitiously and empty the contents down each of the murdered players' backs. He did this, it is inferred, during the play before the long touchdown runs—though how he knew beforehand that Demuth was going to break away for a long touchdown run is never explained. For if Demuth had been piled up at the line of scrimmage . . . boom! No more line of scrimmage.