Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  Before going on to solve other riddles, the Cracksman, the Man of Forty Faces, has a final message for Count von Hetzler in the shadows outside: "Herr Count," he says from within a car that drifts by. "A positively infallible recipe for the invasion of England: Wait until the Channel freezes and then skate over. Goodnight!"

  Cleek, Raffles, Lupin, and the other early outlaws had their fair share of readers during the first two decades of the century, but the real heyday of the rogues was the period between the two world wars. Those twenty years from 1919 to 1939 saw the birth and rise of such internationally renowned rascals as Leslie Charteris's Saint, Bruce Graeme's Blackshirt, John Creasey's Toff, Berkeley Gray's Norman Conquest, even "Sapper's" Bulldog Drummond. (Drummond was not a rogue in the strict sense of the term; nor was he a cracksman, nor a rascally Robin Hood. But he did have a band of merry men and he did take it upon himself to function outside the limits of the law in his righteous struggle with the forces of evil. In The Black Gang [1922], for example, he establishes his own private island concentration camp for captured Bolshevik spies and installs as commander an ex-sergeant-major of the guards who is wont to bellow at his prisoners, "In this 'ere island there ain't no ruling classes, and there ain't no money, and there's dam' little love, so go and plant more potatoes, you lop-eared sons of Beelzebub." You can't get much more roguish than that.)

  At their best, the desperadoes of the twenties and thirties were swashbuckling, romantic types who exhibited amazing deductive abilities—all except Bulldog Drummond, that is, who was & man of action and seldom bothered to think, much less deduce—while pursuing happy resolutions to their adventures. At their worst, these rogues displayed the exact same qualities. How a particular adventure may rate in quality depends not on the antics of the outlaw but on the plot, or lack of one, and on a variety of intangible factors.

  The exploits of Norman Conquest, for instance, are always entertaining; in the fashion of the Saint stories, they succeed on the strength of pure exuberance. William Vivian Butler, in his critical history of the popular rogues, The Durable Desperadoes (1973), says that of the several thousand thrillers of all types, genres, and eras he has read during his lifetime, he has never come across any that matched "the sheer high-spirited gusto" of the first three Conquest books, Mr. Mortimer Gets the Jitters, Vultures Ltd and Miss Dynamite. The reason for this, Butler postulates, is that Conquest was the last of the major outlaws to appear (Mr. Mortimer Gets the Jitters was published in 1938, a full ten years after The Saint made his debut), and the author, whose real name was Edwy Searles Brooks and who had spent the previous nineteen years writing for the British pulp market, had channeled all his experience and energy into creating a character to compete head-to-head with the established rogues. That he succeeded is unquestionable; the Norman Conquest series lasted for more than twenty-five years and fifty novels.

  But Gray/Brooks had a tendency to revert to his pulp origins from time to time, partly because he wrote very fast and was too prolific—it is estimated that he published in excess of 36 million words in a forty-five-year career—to take much time with plotting or polishing. Further evidence of this was a cheerful tendency toward self-plagiarism; Butler points out that nearly all the Norman Conquest novels in the 1940s were thinly rewritten versions of Gray/Brooks's "Waldo the Wonder Man" novellas for the Union Jack a decade or two earlier.

  One of these forties novels is The Spot Marked X (1948), in which Conquest sets out with his wife Joy to save a friend from the clutches of a "Crooks' Union" that operates out of a country estate and deals in diamond smuggling. There is virtually no plot; scenes of action and peril are strung together, most of them improbable, until Conquest forces the Head Crook into a public confession of guilt by having a "corpse" sit up and accuse him. There are also innumerable passages of the following sort: "'If this car wasn't standing here last night, I'm a chunk of Lemna polyrhiza,' "and "'I mean that we've got half an hour to cook up a nice little cauldron of hell-brew for these gentlemen . . . half an hour of complete freedom. They won't move out of the library until the end of that time, and they'll be guzzling whisky solidly to keep their peckers up.'

  Some of the fifties Conquest novels are even pulpier than the rewritten pulp novellas. Conquest Goes West (1954) is one—another action-filled romp in which Conquest agrees to steal a compromising photograph of a young film starlet, instead winds up stealing one of the most valuable diamonds in Europe (diamonds figure prominently in several Conquest novels), and gets himself entangled with a gang of murderous thieves, a "haunted" house on the Cornish coast, a secret passageway that leads from the house to a hidden sea cave, and an electric motorboat, used to transport stolen goods across the Channel to France, which operates on batteries recharged by virtue of a very long electrical cord extending from the house down the passageway and into the cave.

  Conquest is his usual jovial self in both novels, defying his old police adversary, "Sweet William"; bantering with his wife (whom he calls young Pixie and old thing, among other endearments); writing his trademark number "1066" on crooks' foreheads with indelible ink; and generally engaging in all sorts of roguish behavior. His most interesting trait, though, manifest in both books, is the contemptuous way in which he talks to villains once he gets the drop on them.

  Now it is true that several British thriller writers of the twenties, thirties, and forties were fond of having their heroes bad-mouth the enemy. Sydney Horler was one of the most proficient at this, as we've already seen; another notable exponent was "Sapper," who put all sorts of slangy invective into the mouths of Bulldog Drummond and his pals. But none approached the art of name calling with more verve and scorn than Berkeley Gray and Norman Conquest, as these examples from The Spot Marked X and Conquest Goes West will demonstrate:

  "Better make up your mind, you slimy toad! Make this confession and I'll get you out of this jam."

  "If you're arrested, and the case goes for trial, you'll be booked for the gallows as sure as you're a double-crossing hellhound."

  "There are a lot of things you don't know, reptile."

  "Save it, wriggler," interrupted Conquest with such contempt in his voice that Sir Mark winced.

  "Reach, slugs!" he said calmly.

  "Less talk, Useless, and more action."

  "You, disease, are the man who was known in the early part of the late war as the Kensington Fiend."

  "It's a shame that a chunk of hellspawn like you should be one of the throng."

  "Say that again, filth, and my trigger finger will give a very nasty jerk."

  "I enjoy mucking about with the law, I confess, but I make a point of having no truck with vultures and buzzards. It's not my business to hand vermin over to the cops, but you're different."

  "I've told you before, foulness, that I don't make deals with buzzards of your type."

  The gay, free-spirited life-style of the twenties and thirties came to an abrupt end with the advent of World War II, and along with everyone else, the gentlemen rogues were forced to adopt a more serious demeanor for the duration. Some of that sobersidedness carried over into the postwar years; none of the desperadoes was ever quite the same jolly, devil-may-care character he was in his salad days. But his popularity, in every case, nonetheless continued unchecked through the ensuing decades, partly because of film and television incarnations, partly because of nostalgia, partly because of a faithful readership and the talents of the individual author—and still continues today in the case of The Saint, who has already passed his golden anniversary and who remains the titular king of the rogues.

  Despite the ongoing popularity of the gentleman rascal, however, a different kind of outlaw began to develop in the fifties: the antihero, the avenging angel who works outside the law because he considers it to be weak and ineffectual, and who dispenses his own brand of deadly justice; the Mike Hammer syndrome. For a decade after Mickey Spillane's meteoric rise, rogue private eyes, rogue cops, and rogue amateurs bulled their way through countless blood-
spattered pages, killing black-hearted gangsters and other evildoers with guns, knives, bombs, bare hands, automobiles, and impunity. And always, of course, in as much graphic detail as possible. The postwar public, especially in the United States, had a taste for blood and violence, and Spillane and his imitators were only too eager to pander to it.

  In the sixties, still another type of antihero evolved—a combination of Mike Hammer and an updated and downgraded A. J. Raffles; the true outlaw, the professional thief and professional killer. The most successful of these characters was Parker, the laconic and coldblooded gunman who appears in some fifteen novels by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) published between 1962 and 1974. Parker and others of his type are hardly Robin Hood figures; they steal for personal gain and would ridicule (or shoot) any of their number who suggested giving all or part of the spoils to someone else. Their only redeeming quality is that they seldom steal from or murder anyone in the mainstream of society; that is, their victims are for the most part other criminals, usually of a much nastier variety than they. They have a certain code and they operate within its boundaries. The crooks they plunder and destroy have no code at all and are in fact the same type of vicious cutthroats that Mike Hammer was bent on eliminating.

  One of the more interesting Parker imitations is a man also known only by his last name—Sand, the protagonist of a number of novels by Ennis Willie. An ex-Organization man, Sand spends most of his time traveling around the country murdering hoods and avenging past wrongs—an odyssey Don Pendleton and others would make highly fashionable a decade later. Sand's escapades are short, tersely written, full of sex and graphic violence, and would probably have won him a legion of fans if Willie had not chosen to publish his books with a Chicago-based soft-core-porn outfit called Camerarts, whose chief claim to fame was an erratic distribution network. For the most part, Willie's prose has a certain rough lyric quality ("He had been many places many times, and he had never been a tourist"). Plots, however, were not Willie's long suit. It may even be said that plots were not his short suit.

  To illustrate, we have The Case of the Loaded Garter Holster (1964). Sand embarks on a trip to Miami to avenge the death of a Cuban woman named Carmen Sanchez, who has died of a brain hemorrhage. But Sand suspects (and rightly so) that the hemorrhage was induced by outside forces. When he finally determines what those forces were, we are given what may be the most unique, not to mention most bizarre, murder method in the history of the genre:

  ". . .The guy who killed Carmen Sanchez is a very clever fellow, diabolically speaking."

  "You know how—"

  "The fire extinguishers. There are two of them on the floor. They stuck a gag in her mouth to keep her from screaming, stuck a nozzle in each ear while they held her down and turned the extinguishers on. The report called it a massive brain hemorrhage induced by some outside force. Well, there's your outside force and that's just what it would induce."

  True enough. But one is left wondering why the police and/ or coroner failed to notice that Carmen's ears were full of either dry chemicals or foam. Or, if the tire extinguishers contained carbon dioxide, why there were no traces of frostbite. Or, even if the hoods cleaned out the ears, why no traces of any kind showed up under forensic scrutiny. But Sand doesn't seem to worry about this, so why should we?

  The antihero of the seventies, it may be said, took a somewhat regressive and deviant turn into the realm of sadistic violence for the sake of sadistic violence. The Mike Hammer syndrome allowed for plenty of sadism, to be sure, but in small doses and with sex receiving equal, if not greater, consideration. The new, supermacho style is to eliminate, or at least to sublimate, the sexual aspects and concentrate on unabashed bloodletting and general mangling of human tissue. The outlaws of this ilk are not private or police detectives, nor are they professional criminals; they are one-man armies, soldiers-of-fortune-cum-fanatics embarked on a personal crusade to destroy the Mafia, the "Communist conspiracy," or similar organizations/ideologies in the name of justice and/or democracy, and by whatever means necessary.

  The pioneer rogue of this type is Mack Bolan, the Executioner, who was born in the typewriter of Don Pendleton and the publishing offices of Pinnacle Books in 1969. Bolan's one-man war is against the Mafia, a local branch of which has murdered several members of his family; in more than thirty novels, he travels all over the United States (often in a 26-foot GMC motor home known as the Warwagon and outfitted with electronic intelligence-gathering equipment and a variety of "firepower"), and through most of Europe as well, slaughtering hundreds of Mafia criminals and somehow managing to elude law-enforcement agencies of every sort.

  The amazing success of the Executioner series (several million copies sold) naturally spawned the usual bunch of imitators, some of whom enjoyed a certain dubious success of their own. The standout among them is Richard Camellion, the Death Merchant, created by Joseph Rosenberger and also published by Pinnacle Books. Camellion is a sort of rogues' version of James Bond, in that he is primarily occupied in eradicating threats to the free world arranged by Communist forces or members of an organization called Spider. He, too, travels all over the world; the only difference between Camellion and Bolan is that the folks he slaughters are usually foreign "boobs" of one nationality or another.

  It has been said that the Death Merchant series is of such style and quality that it is not pastiche but parody and that Rosenberger has unappreciated comic talents. There is no internal (or external) evidence to support this theory. The truth would appear to be that the Death Merchant is pure pastiche, and that Rosenberger, after his own fashion and by intent if not always by effect, is a "serious" rather than a comic writer.

  This is how he puts words and sentences together to create his own inimitable style:

  Vende looked sicker than a Bible salesman on a cheap shot to nowhere when he found himself staring into the big blackness of an Auto Mag muzzle. The Indian's face twisted like a pretzel! Camellion could see that he was sorting through the metal junkpile of his mind, desperately searching for the right answers.

  "Drop the HK and pretend you're trying to grab a couple of clouds from the sky," Camellion said lazily. "NOW!"

  Surprise and confusion flickered over the faces of the other men. Dr. Panduhabaya looked as depressed as a sailor who had hoped for love but had been forced to settle for a pint of cheap booze and mechanical sex with a cheap slut. (The Death Merchant #20: Hell in Hindu Land)

  Keeping in a low crouch, Richard ran to the end of a row of boxes marked "Musical Panda Dolls" and peeked around the corner. Thirty feet away was the door that led to the outside. There was more than that! The gate guard had heard the gunfire and now was looking around the edge of the doorframe. He didn't like what he saw! Seeing Camellion with a pistol in his hand, the guard snapped off a shot with his 1VIAB auto, then slammed the door. The slug missed Richard and whizzed into one of the crates, striking one of the panda dolls and somehow setting off the mechanism that controlled the music. Immediately, the tinny tune of the "Marseillaise" began issuing from the toy panda.

  The Death Merchant shook his head in disgust.

  The vicissitudes of a capricious fate are indeed inconsistent and incommensurable! Damn it! (The Death Merchant #6: The Albanian Connection; italics Pendleton's)

  Richard slammed one in the face with a Magnum barrel, chuckling when he heard the breaking teeth and jawbone, almost laughing out loud as, dodging a knife thrust, he twist-kicked the imbecile in the balls. The man let out a great "Owwwwwwwwwwww!" and sank to his knees, while the third barmy-brained boob resorted to a trench knife underhanded belly thrust which Camellion swept aside with a Korean karate sidesweep. Even in the almost darkness, he could see the look of absolute horror on the blockhead's face as he finished him off with a middle knife-hand spear-thrust to the solar plexus. (The Death Merchant #9: The Laser War)

  Camellion is a master of karate, and one of his favorite moves is the "twist-kick" just mentioned—otherwise known as the "Goju-
Ryu karate ball-of-the-foot koga geri groin kick," which he uses whenever he is engaged in hand-to-hand combat. There are several references to "killers with inflamed balls" through-Out the series.

  As can also be seen from the last quoted passage, Rosenberger takes a jovial pleasure in describing breaking bones and teeth (spurting blood, too). But it should be noted that he is not lacking a certain sense of humor, despite the serious intent of his work, and that he likes to sprinkle his narratives with jokes. Here is one such rib-tickler, from The Laser War:

  "The Republicans are thinking of changing the Republican Party emblem from an elephant to a condom, because it stands for inflation, halts production, and gives a false sense of security while one is being screwed!"

  The rise of the Death Merchant—as with the Executioner, over thirty titles have been published to date—inspired Rosenberger to begin another series in the early seventies, chronicling the adventures of the Murder Master. This one failed after only a few titles, perhaps because of poor distribution by the publisher, Manor Books. A second series for Manor, featuring a kung-fu expert and written under the pen name of Lee Chang, fared somewhat better; the following excerpts from Kung-Fu: The Year of the Tiger (1973) again demonstrate the distinctive Rosenberger touch.