Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  Then Dave Donaldson's service cannon said: "Kerblam! Her-biam!" across my shoulder. ("Death Dubbed In")

  Tension jerked me around; but even as I made the move a rod barked: Ka-pow! from the doorway of the apartment stash and the ozone alongside my left ear was split by the passage of a pellet. Half an inch closer and the slug would have nicked a notch out of my favorite brain. ("Death's Blind Date")

  From a bedroom a roscoe said: "Whr-r-rang!" and a lead pill split the ozone past my noggin. ("Dark Star of Death")

  My roscoe sneezed: Ka-chee! and flashed a lethal lump at the slithering snake. ("Focus on Death")

  Then we have the blunt instrument or the blunt fist:

  "Now," she drew a bead on my tripes. "We'll see if you handcuff me."

  "Ixnay!" I caterwauled. "You can't—"

  She raised the roscoe, slapped me on the side of the noggin. For a wren who didn't look hefty, she packed a terrific wallop. I staggered, felt my knees turning to jelly. She maced me another swat that put me down for the count with bells jangling in my think-tank. ("Gun from Gotham")

  The Murphy bozo intercepted me. "Lay off her, Sherlock. This is none of your affair." Then he festooned an uppercut smack on my chinstrap. . . – It rocked my conk so far back I could count the rafters overhead. They merged into a jumble as my glimmers went cockeyed. Then Max corked me again.

  All my fuses short-circuited and I became useless.

  When I woke up, I thought I was drowning. Some dope had fetched a big red fire-bucket full of water onto the stage and was engaged in the maniacal pastime of dunking my profile like a cruller. I strangled, choked, sputtered, and snapped to my senses just as I was going down for the third time. "Hey, what the gloobsch is the idea?" ("Diamonds of Death")

  The typical scenario continues with Turner finding a corpse of one variety or another. These corpses are not merely dead; they are invariably deader than (or as defunct as) "a pork chop," "a stuffed mongoose," "fried oysters," "French fried potatoes," "George Washington's cherry tree," "year before last," "silent pictures," "a Confederate dollar," "the Petrified Forest," "Hitler's conscience," "ten cents worth of canceled postage," "an iced codfish," or "six buckets of fish bait." When the corpse is one of the beautiful women Turner has seduced, he (being a sentimentalist) sometimes feels like "tossing his biscuits" or "flinging his pancakes"; but of course he is too tough to let anything like that happen. Or to shed a tear for the dear departed. Instead he gets on the telephone to his cop pal, Dave Donaldson, to report the crime like any good citizen.

  When Dave came on the line, I said, "Turner squalling. There's been a knock-off at Ellen Ban-croft's wikiup." I gave him the address. "The victim was a Metromount ham named Joe Dunn, and kindly flag yourself out here with a meat-wagon as fast as Whozit will let you."

  Donaldson's explosive voice rattled the receiver. "The hell you yodel! Who cooled the guy?" ("Widow by Proxy")

  "Dan Turner squalling," I yeeped. "Flag your diapers to Sylvia Hempstead's igloo. There's been a croaking." ("Come Die for Me")

  "Zarah Trenwick just got blasted to hellangone in her tepee at the Gayboy. Drag your underwear over here—and bring a meat-wagon." ("Killer's Harvest")

  Sometimes, depending on the case, Turner waits for Donald-son's arrival; on other occasions, he rushes off "hellity-blip" or "hellity-larrup" or "lickety-boop" or "buckety-gallop" on his own, to confront this or that character.

  The instant my peepers focused on [the] fantastic wordage I leaped away from the desk as if it had suddenly sprouted a nest of cobras. "You crazy dim-wit!" I yeeped. "Do you realize you've dumped me in the grease up to my dimple?"

  "Why, I—wh-what do you mean?"

  "I mean these!" I screamed, brandishing the letters ferninst his abashed mush. [sic] ("Murder Has Four Letters")

  At some point hereabouts, Turner is certain to be bitten by a hunch in one fashion or another: "A hunch crawled up my slacks and nipped me under the hip pocket," or "A hunch needled me like a hornet on the asterisk," or "An idea spanked me in the chops." If Donaldson is present at the time, the two of them are likely to head straight for the "stash" of the "bump-off artist."

  "Hell's hinges and hot buttered popcorn, goose this chariot!" I bleated in his ear. ("Come Die With Me!")

  If Turner is alone in his pursuit, he'll wait until arrival at the murderer's "wikiup" before he starts to talk tough.

  "A while ago you mentioned my hardboiled rep. You said I'm considered a dangerous hombre to monkey with. Okay, you're right. Now will you come along willingly or do I bunt you over the crumpet till your sneezer leaks buttermilk?" ("Murder Has Four Letters")

  This is where Turner usually reveals the nature of his hunch; that is, how he arrived at the identity of the guilty party. The revelation is always in italics, lest the reader skip right over it to a bare whatchacallem or a sneezing roscoe.

  ". . . It hooked up with something Velma said in my stash when she first gandered the bauble. At the time, I thought she was exclaiming that's a rock. Instead her words were the excited start of the phrase that's-a Rocco's ring!" ("Killer's Clue")

  Either before or after the explanations, the murderer is removed from the scene in one of three ways: more or less docilely by the police or Turner himself; feet first, having pulled a rod and having had his or her tripes punctured by a pill from Dave Donaldson's service .38 or Turner's own gat; or in irons, after having put up a terrific struggle in hand-to-hand combat with Turner.

  My knees turned to boiled noodles and I felt myself sliding into a tailspin. That would never do. I straightened up, reached out and grabbed the beefy beezark. . . . I got my lunchhooks on his rugged mush and shoved. I tried to feel for his eyeballs so I could gouge them.

  I missed and found his mouth instead.

  He bit me. His grinders crunched down on my fingers and the pain crawled all the way up my arm, into my shoulder. Somehow, before he gnawed my flipper off, I yanked it free. .

  Be a detective and get trounced every hour. Learn the snooping trade and win a badge, a license and lumps. Scar tissue thrown in for free. ("Come Die for Me!")

  There is one last point that should be made about Dan Turner, private skulk. In addition to being a male chauvinist and a literal ladykiller, he is also a cheefully outspoken racist. His adventures are sprinkled with "wops," "spicks," and other ethnic characters. Bellem's favorite appears to have been "chinks," either Chinese or Japanese (neither he nor Turner seemed able to tell the difference). This is how lovable old Dan treated Orientals:

  I drove over to Argyle; parked in front of Fane Trenwick's modest stash. . . . I thumbed the bell. The door opened. A Chink houseboy gave me the slant-eyed focus. "Missa Tienwick, him sleep. You go way, come tomollow. Too late fo' vlisito'."

  I said: "Nerts to you, Confucius," and gave him a shove on the beezer. ("Killer's Harvest")

  When Bellem was not chronicling the capers of Dan Turner, he turned out hundreds of nonseries detective, weird mystery, and adventure stories for the other Culture Publications pulps as well as for Leo Margulies's Thrilling group. These tended not to be half so colloquial in style and somewhat less formularized in plotting. Which is not to say that they were any less melodramatic. Or, during the Spicy years, any less titillating. Sex and sadism reached no loftier pulp heights than in the 1934 to 1938 issues of Spicy Mystery, one of the leading "shudder" or "weird menace" magazines that featured both exotic and erotic methods of torture and homicide.

  A representative example of Bellem's work for Spicy Mystery is a story called "Mesa of Madness," which appeared in February 1937. Set at an isolated archeological dig in the "Damnation Range" of Arizona—a supposedly haunted area known as Red Ghost Mesa, where the shades of ancient Indian medicine men are said to "visit weird death on interlopers"—the story features one John Brent, who comes looking for a missing archeologist named Shafter and who soon finds himself enmeshed with Shafter's beautiful daughter Margo, the naked corpse of an Indian girl, a "shining ghost" (a.k.a. "the phosphoresc
ent specter"), and a fiendish plot to steal a deposit of radium-bearing pitchblende.

  After a near sexual encounter with Margo and during a thunderstorm, Brent finds the missing archeologist in a scene that culminates with one of the unforgettable lines of pulpdom—a Bellem masterstroke to rival anything in the Dan Turner ouevre.

  Brent realized that he was dealing with a madman, not a ghost, when he watched the way Shafter cud-died that feminine form. He knew his theory had been correct: that George Shafter, instead of dying on the mesa last year, had gone insane and had hidden from the searching party. Ever since then, the archeologist must have wandered the region, bathed in phosphorescent muck-glow and giving rise to weird superstitions about ghosts haunting the plateau. -

  But it was not this knowledge that sent a great gout of relief surging through Brent's soul. It was something else; it was the realization that Margot was not the girl in the madman's clutch. Not Margot, but the dead Indian woman whose corpse had been spread-eagled on a knoll earlier tonight!

  In horrid mockery, Shafter cuddled the body closer. Daubed with glutinous mud, the corpse emitted an eerie glow that matched Shafter's own hellish halo. Revulsion shuddered through John Brent's marrow. He lunged at the wizened maniac.

  "Drop that corpse, you fool!"

  One other pulp detective worth mentioning is pint-size but tough-minded Cash Wale, the hero of a series of long novelettes by Peter Paige in Dime Detective in the late forties. The Wale stories are a mixture of Bellem and Carroll John Daly—hardboiled, violent, slangy, brash, and full of outrageous humor. (In one, Wale is being hounded—as usual—by his nemesis, New York Homicide Inspector Anthony J. Quinn, who wants to question him about a murder. When Wale telephones Quinn to tell his side of things, Quinn orders him to give himself up immediately; otherwise, he says, he'll have every cop in the city take part in the manhunt. "Take it easy," Wale tells him soothingly. "Don't get your bulls in an uproar.") What is unique about the series, though, is that one "massacre" for which Wale and his punch-drunk, ex-pug partner Sailor Duffy are framed is not resolved in a way that proves their innocence; thus they are forced to flee New York City and become fugitives constantly on the run. At least half the stories in the saga are related in the form of "letters" from Wale to the author, Paige, and involve narrow escapes from Quinn and various local police as well as standard "kill circuses." The misadventures of Cash Wale may not have inspired the creation of the popular sixties TV show The Fugitive, starring David Janssen, but there is a certain similarity.

  The most notable Wale caper is an early one, "When a Man Murders" (Dime Detective, March 1947), in which he and Sailor Duffy are on the trail of a fortune in missing diamonds and run afoul of such disparate types as Filipino freedom fighters, the denizens of a mental hospital, and a Caspar Gutman-type fat man named Mr. Manilla. Quinn and his police "goons" keep trying to pin the killing of a man called Morton H. Wolson on Wale, as in this exchange in the little shamus's office:

  He growled some words at me that I had to take.

  "O.K.," I told him when his words ran out, "I'm a rat, a louse, my feet stink and you won't play marbles with me anymore. All I want to know is, where's your warrant?"

  "In the morgue, Shrimp."

  "Who?"

  "Wolson."

  I whistled softly. My unbidden guests eyed me hungrily. I could envision the meal for which their eyes drooled—grilled Wale a la Ossining.

  The villain of the piece is Wolson, despite the fact that he is murdered in the first chapter. He is depicted as "a fleshy man in a wrinkled blue Suit. His features were coarse and flaccid. Wisps of dirty blond hair sprouted from his pink scalp. Ye!-lowed teeth showed in a gaping mouth." He is also depicted as thoroughly evil: a murderer, a thief, a lunatic. When Mr. Manilla tells Wale that Wolson murdered two patriotic Filipinos with a knife fashioned from a spoon, Wale says, "That sounds like the Wolson I knew."

  The amusing thing about all of this is that Peter Paige's real name was Morton H. Wolson.

  Mystery writers, it is true, are fond of inside jokes; a considerable number have been perpetrated over the years, including a couple on the typewriter with which these words 'are being written. But if there is another story (or novel) in which an author put tongue in cheek and made himself the villain, and such a nasty villain at that, I'm not aware of it.

  With the decline of the pulps in the early fifties, the criminous short story graduated, for the most part, to the digest magazines that flourished during that decade. Between 1953 and 1956, the biggest seller was a hardboiled magazine called Manhunt—a showcase for tough, downbeat, violent stories "of the seamier side of life" and for the work of such important writers as James M. Cain, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Erie Stanley Gardner, Evan Hunter, Erskine Caldwell, Ray Bradbury, and Fredric Brown. Manhunt's initial success spawned a host of imitators: Accused, Hunted, Pursuit, Guilty, Trapped, Two-Fisted, Off Beat, Saturn Web, Justice, Mystery Tales, and four from Manhunt's own publishing company, Verdict, Menace, Murder! and Mantrap. Only a few of this proliferation of minor titles survived the decade, and those few had all disappeared by the end of 1962.

  These publications were a showcase for the work of such important alternative writers as Mickey Spillane, Michael Avallone, Richard S. Prather, and Erie Basinsky. A good many bad stories appeared in their pages, to be sure—and in the pages of such higher quality digests as Mystery Digest, The Saint Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Some, such as "Lust Be My Destiny" by Art Crockett and "Soft Arms Mean Slaughter!" by Don Unatin, both of which appeared in Two-Fisted in 1959, come close to being classics. Yet none quite has that special stamp of greatness that would elevate it into the Robert Leslie Bellem class.

  Television, paperback books, rising printing costs, mismanagement, and inflation forced all but a handful of crime fiction magazines into extinction before 1970. Manhunt expired in 1967, as did The Saint; the only major survivors were Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine—the dean of crime digests, having first begun publication in 1941, and also the best by a good margin—Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. A few new periodicals emerged in the late sixties, here and there throughout the seventies and in the early eighties, but nearly all these were of mediocre quality and ceased publication after only a handful of issues. At the time of this writing, only EQMM, AHMM, and MSMM remain active; they have persevered on the (relative) quality of their stories, for the most part.

  Inevitably, however, an alternative classic was bound to show up sooner or later, even in one of these august publications. This happened in 1978, when Robert Twohy's story "Slime" oozed into print in the June issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

  The reason for the unusual title is that the protagonist's name is Slime. Slime, you see, is a private detective. And "Slime" is a spoof of private-eye stories. At least, this is what "Slime" appears to be. Given Twohy's penchant for writing strange (and quite often very good) satirical crime tales, one supposes that a spoof is what he had in mind.

  The story opens with Slime sitting in his office in a "drab building in a low-grade business neighborhood in San Francisco." We know it is Slime's office because the door glass has the word "Slime" on it. Slime has been sitting there in his office for a long time; he has, in fact, been sitting there for twenty-two days, waiting for a client, because "if a man isn't in his office clients who come looking for him won't find him, because he isn't in his office."

  Then the door opens and three men come in. One of them is wearing a rubber goose mask and brandishing a .45. The other two are wearing grocery bags over their heads, with eyeholes cut out of the paper; they are brandishing .22s. The goose-headed one, who is known as the Fowl, tells Slime that he and his henchmen are the kidnappers of Mortimer Feekwood (also known as Sonnyboy and Laddykins), son of "renowed [sic] San Francisco tycoon" Phineas Feekwood. It seems Mortimer was abducted the previous Friday on his way home from school—"a school
set up by the court system for habitual drunken drivers. Mortimer was fifty-two years old. Some years before he had been in the papers, accused by the parents of numerous local debutantes of trying to establish a white-slave empire, but the jury had decided that he was misunderstood and really only paying compliments to the girls."

  Slime tells the Fowl to put away the guns, he doesn't talk to clients who point guns at him. The Fowl tells Slime that he's going to act as a go-between to collect a two-million-dollar ransom for Mortimer Feakwood. Slime tells the Fowl to put away the guns, he deoesn't talk to clients who point guns at him. The Fowl and his henchmen decide Slime is a very cool character—too cool—and so they're going to finish him off because he won't agree to their demands. Slime asks the Fowl and his henchmen to have a drink with him. The Fowl says he can't drink with his goose-head mask on. One of the henchmen says he's reformed, living a much better life now, with friends and a sense of purpose; he advises Slime to give up drinking. The other henchman says he promised his mother he wouldn't use alcohol. The Fowl tells Slime to drink his drink by himself and to hurry it up.