Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  Devon Layne stood at the top of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacán, grasping desperately at the floppy straw hat with the wide yellow band that mingled, wind-whipped, with her bright yellow hair that fell like a shining shawl over her slim shoulders. That same wind, she told herself, had ruffled the manes of the conquistadores' horses and glanced off their bright armor as they marched on Moctezuma's Palace.

  After which Devon meets Drake, a mysterious but compelling figure. It is, of course, love at first sight.

  His arm slipped easily around her shoulders and she felt her heart constrict. The scent of the roses on her lap was almost overpowering. If he kisses me, she thought, I don't think I can stand it.

  Well, he does kiss her and she does stand it. Rather well, too. A member of the tour group Devon is with (who, incidentally, has come down with "Moctezuma's Revenge") warns her against growing too close to a man she knows so little about. But Devon ignores this advice and later, when Drake proposes, agrees to marry him. The author, like most Gothic writers of the "Had I But Known" school, is compelled to let the reader know at this point that all is not rosy in Devon's future.

  On the way back they passed a billboard advertising an airline. In the warm glow of happiness that enveloped her, the caption on the billboard did not strike her as even faintly ominous. It said, "Fly now—Pay Later."

  After Devon and Drake are married, they move into the "House in the Sky" and commence their honeymoon. (This is the first of the atypical qualities: Devon loses her virginity on her wedding night.) Later, she and Drake are chased and almost caught by two hard-looking norteamericanos; when she questions him about their identity, he admits that they are Mafia hit men who are after him because he has something the Mafia wants—but he won't tell her what it is. (This is the second atypical quality: the Mafia generally has better things to do than run amok in Gothic suspense novels, so you almost never find them in one.)

  Not only does Devon have this to worry about, but at night, Drake cries out the name of his dead first wife, Carla (one presumes not at intimate moments). And then—the unkindest cut of all—he takes to sleeping with a gun instead of Devon. Naturally she's upset and rather miffed by all this.

  On angry feet, she ran up the tile stairs. But once in the big bedroom with its tall fireplace that slanted toward the ceiling at a rakish angle, its hearth that was raised a step above but made of blue tiles exactly like the floor, its casements and its heavy carved doors—the one to the hall and the other that connected with Drake's room—she undressed quickly and crouched in bed with her arms around her knees, thinking.

  Drake gets reports that the Mafia hit men are closing in Casadel Cielo, so he decides to take Devon and flee to Mexico City, where a friend named Siggy, who works in the German embassy, will help them hide. Before they can leave, however, the hit men show up, and there is a running gun battle. (This is the third atypical quality: there is seldom anything so plebeian as a running gun battle in a Gothic novel.) Devon is sent to a bat-infested cave to wait for Drake's arrival. When he shows up, and they then leave the cave together, Devon is horrified to see that Casa del Cielo is on fire: "She stared at the pillar of flames leaping unchecked to the sky. Their honeymoon house. A leaping hatred rose up in her against the men who would do such a thing. Mafia monsters!"

  They make their escape on horseback and are soon in Mexico City, safe in Siggy's apartment. A number of other exciting things happen to Devon in the Mexican capital—she goes shopping for new clothes, for one—and matters escalate until the truth about Drake and the Mafia comes out.

  It seems that Drake met his first wife, Carla, on Capri and married her in Naples, not knowing that she was the daughter of a Mafia chieftain named Lantern Jaw Jake Barberetti. The Mafia Chieftain did not take kindly to his daughter marrying somebody named Drake Janeway, so he kidnapped his daughter and ordered Drake worked over by a couple of his—Lantern Jaw Jake's—goons.

  But Carla and Drake got back together anyway, after Lantern Jaw discovered that Drake wasn't the first to deflower his precious little girl, and they did some traveling around Europe together with a pair of Mafia bodyguards. Carla was very jealous and believed Drake had been seeing other women on the sly. (Devon reflects that jealousy is a consuming passion: "There'd been a woman back in Applewood who was so jealous, she stabbed her husband with a paring knife when he answered the phone—and it had turned out to be a wrong number.") A few of Drake's friends began having fatal accidents, which he attributed to Carla and her bodyguards, and so he fell Out of love with her and decided to take the first plane home.

  En route in New York, he learned that Lantern Jaw Jake, indicted by the 1"eds, had fled to Sicily and been shot to death by somebody who didn't want him to talk. Meanwhile, a woman named Ingrid, the wife of one of Drake's friends who had died in a fatal accident engineered by Carla, showed up at Kennedy Airport and told Drake she was going to kill Carla. Drake tried to talk Ingrid out of it, but she got away from him by shouting, "Oh, no, there's one of their goons now!" and then, when he turned to look, knocking him down the escalator with her suitcase.

  It then developed that Ingrid murdered Carla in spite of her Mafia bodyguards, which made Lantern Jaw's right-hand man, Virelli, furious because Virelli was in love with Carla. Drake and Virelli had a terrific fight in Lantern Jaw's house in Cleveland (Drake had gone there to look for Ingrid because he knew the goons would have her there "burning designs on her stomach with cigarettes"). They knocked each other out, and when Drake regained consciousness, Virelli was gone. Accidentally—he was still groggy from the fight—Drake knocked over a bookcase, which in falling slid back part of the carpet, and underneath he discovered "this little hook-like thing in the floor." Knowing Lantern Jaw must have had a good reason for having a hook-like thing in the floor under the carpet, Drake tugged at it and was amazed to see a section of paneling slide back. Inside was a hidey-hole that contained four suitcases full of run-out money. Drake figured that since Carla and Lantern Jaw were both dead, he was the logical heir to all that loot. So he took it and later put it into secret-numbered Swiss bank accounts and a few well placed safe-deposit boxes.

  And that was why the Mafia was after him.

  Devon doesn't know what to say. But Drake is her man and she's determined to stick by him, even if he is a thief and an accessory to murder and has half the world's goons chasing after him. And there is all that money, of course, not that she cares very much about money. (This is the fourth atypical quality: the hero's wealth is not only ill gotten but is subsequently embraced by the heroine, which is something that is never supposed to happen in a Gothic.)

  The novel's climax is very exciting. In a surprise twist, it is revealed that Carla isn't dead after all ("Carla! Not dead, but alive! Alive and well and living in Acapulco!"). It was Ingrid who was killed in Cleveland, which means that the postcard Drake received from Stockholm, supposedly signed by Ingrid, was a phony sent by the Mafia. So it was not only Virelli and the rest of the mob that were after Drake, it was Carla, too—because she wanted to take revenge on him for running out on her and for marrying another woman after she (Carla) was alleged to be dead.

  The way Carla decides to kill both Devon and Drake is to have them jump off the terrace of a cliffside mansion into the roiling waters of Acapulco Bay below. And they do jump, just like the famed cliff divers at La Quebrada. But they aren't killed, of course; they survive the fall. Then they are almost sucked under by a riptide. They survive that, too. Then they hear a sudden roar, and a motor launch with Virelli at the wheel looms up in front of them. Also appearing, moments later, is a schooner belonging to Carla.

  Devon and Drake are once again taken captive, this time aboard the schooner. But then there is another surprise: it is revealed that Virelli, in spite of his love for Carla, has been trying to take over control of the Mafia family that was rightfully hers after the death of Lantern Jaw Jake. Furious, Carla turns her gun on Virelli.

  "No, Carla Maria! No, cara mia!" I
nstinctively Virelli brought up his own gun to shield himself. But too late. The gun in Carla's hand discharged twice, and Virelli, a shocked look on his face, suddenly doubled up, his fingers spasmodically clutching the trigger, causing his own heavy automatic to fire, and fire again, directly into that slender red-garbed figure who swayed like a reed caught in a strong wind and crumpled to the floor before he did.

  With both Carla and Virelli dead, Devon and Drake slip out through a porthole and jump into the bay again. But when they surface, they hear more gunfire and realize that another boat, a cabin cruiser, has arrived on the scene. This one is populated by good old Siggy, "who helped them aboard with one hand, his other cradling a submachine gun which raked the deck of the black-sailed motor schooner, keeping all heads down."

  Siggy is a pretty cool customer, all right. In short order, he fires several flares at the schooner, and soon the whole boat is aflame. There are cries of pain and horror from the Mafia goons still trapped aboard, but Siggy is unmoved.

  "Men hate to die," observed Siggy. "Even those who enjoy killing." He pelted several more flares at the schooner, which was now a mass of flames. "And the virtue of phosphorous," he added as someone with his shirt on fire plummeted into the water, "is that it burns quite nicely under water."

  (This is the fifth atypical quality: not only are two running gun battles unheard of in Gothics, but so is such coldbloodedness on the part of a supposedly sympathetic character. Even Devon tacitly condones it.)

  The novel ends with Devon and Drake on their way to Argentina, where they will live off his stolen Mafia money. Devon is aware that "she might have to renew her wedding vows in many countries under a variety of aliases," but that's aces with her. "As long as Drake was hers, her world would sing. . . ."

  This is the sixth, final, and most amazing atypical quality of all—the one thing, more than any other, which makes Bride of Terror the tour de force it is.

  Devon does not get Casa del Cielo, or any other casa.

  The heroine does not get a house!

  11. "Don't Tell Me You've

  Got a Heater in Your

  Girdle, Madam!"

  Do you believe that those who live violently rarely die in bed? Is it true that he who takes the sword ends with it?

  You've never given it much thought? I didn't, either, until the day Fate hung a delayed fuse on me and blasted my little world into a million pieces.

  —William L. Rohde,

  Help Wanted—for Murder

  Twice I heard the swish of that sap and one of those times it cracked my shoulder. The arm appended thereto, as they say in court, became as useless as a sarong in Siberia. . . . A purple comet with a fiery, lashing tail zoomed around the periphery of my skull and I seemed to fall from a great height . . . a floating downward into a tar pit that had been excavated to a depth just short of Hell itself.

  —Chester Warwick,

  My Pal, the Killer

  The paperback original was born in the United States, along with a lot of other "illegitimate" infants, during the Second World War. It only achieved legitimacy several years later, while in its teens, after a prosperous but much-maligned childhood that may or may not have left it permanently traumatized. And it was in its twenties before it threw off the onus of "second-class citizen." But by then it had already taken heinous revenge by fathering a couple of little bastards of its own, not the least of which were the soft-core and hard-core sex paperbacks of the sixties and seventies.

  Until 1944, all book-length fiction first appeared between hard covers or as serials in magazines. (Dime novels, which flourished in the 1800s and in the early years of this century, were never books so much as pulp magazines in book form.) A large number of the more successful hard-back mysteries, Westerns, and general novels from 1920 onward were gobbled up by the budding paperback industry during the war. But none of these soft-cover publishers seemed willing to gamble on originals. It took an enterprising—and ultimately failed—New York City outfit called Green Publishing Company to break the ice.

  The first of Green's line of originals, Vulcan Books, began in 1944; the second, Five-Star Mystery, commenced in 1945. A total of twenty novels was published under these two imprints before the company's demise in 1946. Each was approximately 45,000 words in length, of digest size, written by an unknown or, in the case of Kendall Foster Crossen (who later wrote the Milo March novels under his pseudonym of M. E. Chaber), on assignment, and usually of dubious merit.

  Outstanding among them, from an alternative point of view, is You'll Die Laughing, an "impossible crime" tale by Bruce Elliott, amateur magician, free-lance writer, and men's magazine editor. Picture, if you will, a weekend house party in the mansion of a wealthy individual who likes to play practical jokes on his guests—a place called the House of Jokes. One night the guests hear a clap of thunder, then a gunshot from inside the host's bedroom, one of three adjoining bedrooms on the second floor; when they investigate, they find the room empty of habitation, the bed gone, the rug rolled against one wall, and the chairs smashed. A few moments later, they hear a noise in the second of the three rooms, and one of the guests comes out holding his head and complaining that he has been drugged. And a few moments after that, in the third room, they find the body of the host, Jesse Grimsby, shot to death. How did the body get from the first room to the third? How did the murderer disappear, and where did he go?

  The answers, which are doped out by Lieutenant Brissk of the New York Homicide Squad, are based on the principle of a magician's three-compartment trick box. The box contains only two compartments, not three, which can be slid back and forth within the box's frame, thereby forming a third compartment at either end If the two movable compartments are pushed all the way over to the left, you have the third compartment on the right; if the movable compartments are pushed all the way over to the right, the third compartment is on the left.

  Now you can determine how the murder was done. The killer committed his crime in one of the movable rooms, shifted himself and the body by means of a sliding mechanism, and thus made Grimsby's "bedroom" seem empty. The chairs were broken and the rug rolled up for the following reason: "The outer box, or the house, as in our problem upstairs, had to be a trifle bigger. That leaves a space between the real wall of the house and the wall of the inner sliding rooms. In that space, the killer stuffed as much of the furniture as was possible! That's why the chairs had to be smashed! When the inner rooms were moved, the carpet and chairs fell out of their hiding place and onto the floor. You see, the outer wall of the inner room is at this moment the wall between the first and second rooms!"

  As to the raison d'être for the sliding rooms, the device exists in the house because of Jesse Grimsby's penchant for practical jokes; at one time, he liked to shuttle his guests back and forth in the night, in order to disorient them. None of the current guests knew about this, we're told, except for the murderer—this in spite of the fact that a couple of the current guests are relatives of the deceased jokester. And as for the clap of thunder, it wasn't thunder at all; it was the noise of "the two inner rooms sliding across the real floor to its new and seemingly impossible position!"

  One wonders what John Dickson Carr would have made of all this.

  Elliott's character motivation is in the same league with his plotting. So is his dialogue.

  She said slowly, working it out as she spoke, "Then you were right and my nymphomania is psychical and not physiological as I thought. . . - I'm a fool.

  I've been riding the whirlwind and I've reaped—nothing. But now—the compulsion is gone. It's been seventy hours since I've drugged myself and I'm still sane. My mind hasn't cracked as I always thought it would. Bread pills! Bread pills! And they did the work just as well, because I believed they were my nirvana. If belief can do that, belief can also mean the end of my bondage."

  Poor distribution, as well as disinterest on the part of the reading public, put an end to Green Publishing's ambitions. But other publishers were s
oon ready to take up the gamble of doing originals in the postwar boom. The most successful, begun in 1949, was Gold Medal Books (Fawcett Publications), which claimed dozens of million-seller titles during the ensuing decade. Others had varying degrees of success; they included Pyramid, Lion, Handi-Books (which had been doing reprints since 1942), Croydon, Falcon Books, and Uni-Books (the publisher of, among other items, a science-fictional mystery by David V. Reed called The Thing That Made Love). Among the short-lived shoestring operations was an outfit known as Farrell Publishing Company, the perpetrator of three originals in 1951 under the "Suspense Novel" imprint. (They also published a moribund jack-of-all-fiction magazine, Suspense, "inspired" by the radio and TV show of the same title, which lasted five issues in 1951 and 1952.)

  The last of the Suspense Novels is Naked Villainy, by Carl G. Hodges, and is worthy of consideration here for two reasons. One is that it is of minor historical interest: Naked Villainy is the first novel to use real members of the Mystery Writers of America organization as characters, predating Brett Halliday's She Woke to Darkness by three years and Edward D. Hoch's The Shattered Raven by eighteen. One of the book's fictitious characters is a writer of pulp whodunits, a fact that leads the narrator, police lieutenant Wick Davis, to a meeting of the Chicago chapter of MWA. Among the more recognizable names mentioned—recognizable, that is, to anyone who reads and collects old paperback originals—are Milton K. Ozaki, W. T. Brannon, and Paul Fairman. (Hodges, himself a writer of pulp whodunits, was also a member of the Chicago chapter in the early fifties.)