Son of Gun in Cheek

by Bill Pronzini

  If you think none of this makes any sense whatsoever, you’re right—it doesn’t. And that, of course, is why Three Short Biers is a perfect Alternative Hall of Fame novel.

  Still and all, I can’t help feeling that Starr missed a bet—the crowning touch—in having Hogarth be Madame ZigZag’s partner-in-crime. A much better choice, not only as casket-stealer but as the actual murderer of the midgets, would have been Moe Silverstein, the studio boss. From an aesthetic point of view, he’d have been absolutely ideal.

  I mean, who better to dispose of Ena, Meena, and Mina than Moe?

  Nine More Lives, MICHAEL MORGAN (1947)

  Several years ago, in an article for The Armchair Detective, I made the somewhat rash statement that Michael Morgan’s second novel, Decoy (1953), was “the worst mystery of all time.” Three or four alternative classics that have come to light since offer powerful challenges to the preeminence of Decoy. Nevertheless, that marvelous paperback original is certainly one of the great alternative novels—and its authors are indisputably among the very first rank of exalted purveyors of alternative prose.

  “Michael Morgan,” as noted earlier in these pages, was the collaborative pseudonym of C. E. “Teet” Carle and Dean M. Dorn. The Messrs. Carle and Dorn were at one time Hollywood publicity and promotion agents for such studios as MGM, United Artists, Paramount, and 20th Century-Fox. Teet Carle, in fact, was director of publicity at Paramount for ten years and rubbed elbows not only with the likes of Bogart and Gable but with the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler (Jimmy Starr, too, no doubt) during their Hollywood stints. It was after World War II that Carle and Dorn began their crime-fiction collaborations, and Nine More Lives (later published in paperback as The Blonde Body) was the first fruit of their labors.

  Nine More Lives is a wholly different Hollywood mystery from Three Short Biers. Like all of the other Carle/Dorn stories, it features Bill Ryan, the movie stuntman with an eye for the ladies and a penchant for homicide, who must utilize his stuntman’s training to escape all sorts of cliffhanger situations cleverly devised by Dean Dorn (who did most of the gimmick creating). As Teet Carle has rightly pointed out, Ryan was the world’s first stuntman sleuth, preceding Lee Majors in “The Fall Guy” by some thirty-five years. Ryan, however—by his own admission on more than one occasion—is not terribly bright. He blunders into and out of all sorts of improbable situations and as a detective remains on a par with those paragons of ineptitude, Charlie Chan’s Number One, Two, and Three Sons.

  The improbable situations Ryan blunders into in Nine More Lives involve a mysterious Mickey Finn, the bump-off of a blond babe from Chicago, another stuntman, a film director, three thugs named Chiller, Algie, and Blackie, a beautiful blond “press dame,” blackmail, and such spectacular stunts as Ryan leaping off the roof of an apartment building in a single bound and Ryan escaping a raging flood while tied up in the middle of it.

  But none of this is what makes Nine More Lives a Hall of Fame novel. It is the radiant prose of Teet Carle, who did most of the writing. In the article for The Armchair Detective, and again in Gun in Cheek, I said that Carle was a “poet laureate of the absurd.” And indeed he is. His similes, metaphors, one-liners dazzle the eye, stimulate the mind, linger in the memory. Only the Chief, Michael Avallone, has concocted nuggets to rival the alternative beauty of the dozens to be found in Decoy and the following from Nine More Lives.

  Her voice had little bubbles in it, like it was dancing with her thoughts.

  Her quick intake of breath was as strong as a travelling man eating soup during a ten-minute train stop at a Harvey House.

  She came to life. Gone was the bubble, however, and the tingling businesslike coolness and, likewise, the comeuppance of the vocal chords.

  And, damn it, that old urge for her was crowding my body to subway capacity.

  She had my goat so firmly, I felt like bleating.

  I pulled a smile out of my beard.

  He grinned and dimpled his lips like a thread sagging between two thumb tacks.

  I finished my drink, had another pair and was about to add a fourth when a big blonde body hove into sight and kept on hoving until it blocked out my view of anything else.

  I jerked my head erect. My brain was behaving like a stuck record. That was crazy. The old think organ in the gourd was always. . . . Well, it was always. . . . What the hell was it always?

  Then, there was light and my eyes were open and I was staring at blue sky. Only it wasn’t sky. It was a blue ceiling, and my brain was up there, bouncing crazily against the plaster. . . . My head had expanded in all directions, and I felt its sides pressing against the walls of the room. My tongue was as large as an elephant’s leg.

  My head was clear enough now to let me clutch a fistful of anger.

  He dropped a hunk of eyelid over his frozen left optic.

  Hoping to pull his neck out a little farther so I could see what collar fit him, I tossed him a bone.

  He shut off the lip-service and I watched his tongue do a cat-under-the-rug around his cheeks.

  Walmers nodded slowly and hung a fixed stare over my ears. He tried to smile, but the cold in his peepers froze up the attempt.

  A bead [of sweat] started at the edge of his thin hair, rolled slowly down the side of his face like an old lady picking her way across the street.

  I snapped my head erect. The movement brought a sharp pain at the top of my head. It ran straight up to a point, the pain did. Wow! That conk on the noggin had made me pin-headed.

  His eyes were deep-set, but they sparked out of their cavernous settings like red-hot rivets in a bucket.

  Inspiration splattered me in the face like a custard pie.

  This was a wagon of the law, and those men slipping hurriedly from it, exerting caution and alertness, were flatfeet.

  For the second time in an hour, pin-wheels made a motordrome of the inside of my skull.

  The Velvet Fleece,

  LOIS EBY AND JOHN C. FLEMING (1947)

  Lois Eby and John C. Fleming were yet another dynamic duo of uncommon alternative skill. According to the dust jacket on one of their novels (Blood Runs Cold), they were Hoosier first cousins whose “first novel, written via the mails across the country, proved so successful that Mr. Fleming joined Miss Eby in Los Angeles to continue the partnership.” The partnership produced upward of a dozen novels, five of which were mysteries published between 1944 and 1952, and numerous radio plays and B-movie scripts. If their straight novels, radio scripts, and screenplays are the same caliber as their mysteries, I regret never having read, heard, or seen any of them; they, too, must surely provide a feast for the connoisseur.

  The Velvet Fleece is the Eby-Fleming magnum opus. It tells the tale of a trio of con men, Silky and Dice and Rick Fagan (a.k.a. The Featherbed Kid), who set out to bilk a California war-widow and her city manager father out of a hundred thousand dollars. Fagan is “dynamite with the dames,” which is why Silky picked him as “the come-on for the fix” in Hart City, “a perfect sucker town.” Posing as a buddy of the widow’s husband, Fagan turns on the charm to win her confidence and eventually her affection. Only then he begins to fall for her, and at the same time starts getting ideas about double-crossing Silky, the boss of the operation, and running a solo scam. Further complicating his activities is a slick twist named Tory Pizarro, who happens to be Silky’s moll but who has been bedding down with Fagan on the sly. When she turns up unexpectedly in Hart City, the results are as predictable as they are volatile.

  What we have here is one of those “crime doesn’t pay” extravaganzas that might well have been subtitled “The Fall of the Featherbed Kid.” Fagan narrates it all in a sort of grifter’s slang—or what Eby and Fleming seem to have considered grifter’s slang. What self-respecting con man, after all, would call a twist “Angelpants” or refer to a fink as a “dirty earwigger”? An unpremeditated murder is what finally collapses the Featherbed; he and Silky and Dice walk smack into a trap arranged by th
e wised-up widow and her old man, and before long he finds himself squatting in the gas chamber at Alcatraz, in a scene right out of a thirties gangster film starring Cagney, Bogart, and Pat O’Brien as Father Duffy. . . .

  What’s that? Alcatraz was a federal penitentiary, you say, and no executions were held there during its thirty years of operation? Condemned murderers in California have always been put to death at San Quentin? Well, you and I know that, but Eby and Fleming evidently didn’t. Fagan “crosses the threshold into God’s eternity” at Alcatraz, and that’s that.

  What Eby and Fleming did know was how to mix metaphors. They were, in fact, a couple of virtuosos at this alternative feat. Consider these among their more sterling efforts:

  I saw him puff up like a toad. Nothing like soft butter for a biscuit like him. This baby was made to order for our game.

  I had to keep his attention. If he looked around at Dice sitting there trembling, with that gaffed-fish look on his pan, our goose would be cooked.

  Did I say nice dames were dynamite? Well, take a nice dame that’s a redhead too, and you have an atomic bomb! Three kisses and I was on the ropes. She looked a little drugged herself.

  Slowly it began to penetrate that something was really wrong. She wasn’t throwing things. She wasn’t blowing off any steam. Automatically my mind called signals to block that kick.

  Metaphor mixing was not their only narrative talent, however. Not by any means. They could turn a phrase, too—right over on its back.

  The waves of violent enthusiasm bouncing around that room had me walking on bubbles.

  Charley practically scooped out his tonsils in his gulp.

  His smile wasn’t confined to his mouth, but extended in a ruddy glow over his square face.

  I guess I was supersensitive, but his voice sounded to me like a very small chariot with its brake set against the pull of four blooded stallions.

  She watched a bird hedge-hopping along a shrub outside.

  Owens was hardening like a good cement mix to the decision he’d made.

  The Hoosier cousins were also adept at the profound observation:

  The human mind is a hell of a funny thing. It’s like a stagnant pool with layers of the conscious on top, the subconscious below. During the night [my] subconscious had come to the top.

  And physical description, especially of twists:

  She had a mop of hair that looked like somebody had touched a match to.

  The moon had come up. It platinumed her face above the black of her coat, and highlighted that mop of gold she used for hair.

  She was built on rangy lines but the slick tailored suit made them look swell. She wore no rouge but bright red lips.

  And, finally, the ingenious said substitute.

  “Sure,” I yessed him.

  The Face of Stone, SYDNEY HORLER (1952)

  Sydney Horler was, as they used to say in the old days, a caution. An outspoken caution, a priggish caution, a racist caution, an elitist caution, and an alternative caution.

  A self-styled guardian of British morals, a xenophobe of startling dimensions, a tireless self-promoter, and a deplorer of sexuality in literature (although he himself wrote about sex extensively late in his career), Horler was the perpetrator of such endearing comments as: “The majority [of ‘mentally sadistic sex-novel readers’] are women, very few men read the unhealthy novel”; “France has always been to me a country where . . . the two principal characteristics were the savage avarice of the average peasant and the all-pervading smell of urine”; “[the work of Dashiell Hammett] is crude to the point of mental disgust”; and “I know I haven’t the brains to write a proper detective novel, but there is no class of literature for which I feel a deeper personal loathing.” Between 1921 and his death in 1954, he churned out more than 150 novels, short story collections, plays, and nonfiction books, including more than 100 mystery and suspense novels. Most of his crime fiction features Secret Service agents (Bunny Chipstead, Tiger Standish) and dastardly villains of the megalomaniacal ilk (Paul Vivanti, “The Master of Venom,” “The Voice of Ice”). All of his work, almost without exception, is of such a singular virtuosity of style and content that it has earned him such encomiums as this one from critic LeRoy L. Panek: “[Horler was] an egregiously bad writer even by the less than exacting standards of the popular novel.”

  Sydney’s criminous stocks-in-trade were many and varied. He devised some of the most illogical and inane plots ever committed to paper—plots involving fanatical Germans, Fu Manchu–type mad scientists, evil cults, venal dwarfs, man-eating “death bushes,” and slavering “Things.” He loved to “give old man coincidence’s arm a frightful twist.” He concocted masterful epithets (“You skunk! You rotten swine of a skunk!”); sometimes garbled the English language with the same élan as Michael Avallone and Michael Morgan; took gratuitiously savage potshots at politicians, publishers and publishing, and foreigners of every type and description; and was rivaled by no one—not even Harry Stephen Keeler—in the formulation of eccentric character, place, and business names.

  The Face of Stone, a nonseries “suspense” novel published two years before his death (and like the bulk of his fiction, never issued in this country), is Horler’s magnum opus when it comes to names. Its plot, too, ranks right down there with such other of his Hall of Fame novels as The Curse of Doone and Dark Danger. Following is a brief synopsis of what happens, and to whom, in The Face of Stone. Remember, now, what you’re about to read was not intended as satire or farce, but as dead-serious melodrama.

  Susan Farraday is a professional “first reader” of manuscripts for Richard Twellingford Ltd., Publishers, of Largesse Square, London. She is also a typical Horler heroine: thirtyish, still a virgin, possessor of an attitude toward sex and marriage that is “positively antimacassar.” Figuring that she really ought to get married, though, because “there’s no real substitute for marriage for a woman, only the liars and freaks say otherwise,” she has gotten herself engaged to Lamington Carpe, a drunken critic who writes vicious reviews for The Scorpion, “a waspish weekly” published by Obadiah Milk “in a scruffy building in a scruffy street” called Scurf Alley. Carpe, in addition to being one of what John Steinbeck once eloquently referred to as the “pale and emaciated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches,” is a notorious womanizer whose only real interest in Susan is deflowering her.

  Susan, of course, being as chaste as she is, continues to spurn Carpe’s advances, which only succeeds in honing Carpe’s lust to a fine edge. So fine, in fact, that after dropping off his latest diatribe at Scurf Alley, he goes up to Susan’s apartment with the intention of mounting an all-out assault on his intended’s virginity. Susan isn’t home, so Carpe lies down on the couch to wait for her. Enter, then, Cecil Whimbam, a female sex-novelist and nymphomaniac, who recently left that stodgy old publishing firm of Pimpley and Shortass Ltd. in order to go with Twellingford, even though Dick Twelling-ford (a highly moral man) at first didn’t want to publish her sort of crap, considering it in the class of such scurrilous best-sellers as Flaming Ginger by Matilda Plumb and See, Here is My Love! by Duranda Drain. But Twellingford finally succumbed when he realized that by publishing Cecil Whimbam he could get back at O. Horatio Farthingale, who so offensively told him (Twellingford) at the Annual Dinner of the Associated Booksellers Benevolent Fund that he (Twellingford) never published anything that sells—this being the only reason Dick decided to publish Cecil Whimbam’s crap, of course, the money factor never once entering into it.

  Where were we? Ah, yes, Cecil Whimbam’s arrival at Susan’s apartment. Well, in she walks, because she wants to know why Susan hasn’t yet read the manuscript of her latest piece of crap, and there’s Lamington Carpe lying on Susan’s couch looking very horny indeed. So Cecil, being a sex-novelist and a nymphomaniac, takes the bull by the horn, so to speak, and begins to merrily cohabit with Carpe. In the middle of this revolting act, who should walk in unexpectedly but—you guessed it—fa
ir and innocent Susan. Shocked to the depths of her soul, she rushes over to Twitt Street to have lunch with her friend Martita Beatley, who advises her to leave London for a while, get over the trauma of her experience in more restful surroundings.

  So Susan rents a cottage in Wrexeshire, a “remote part of England” loosely patterned on Cornwall—Creeper Cottage, to be exact, in the village of Creep. Little known to naive Susan, however, is the fact that Wrexians are mostly pagans whose characteristics include “treachery, deep-seated (if clumsy) cunning, double-dealing, and religious hypocrisy,” one of the reasons for this “legacy of evil” being the mixed and foreign blood of their forebears. And what she also doesn’t know is that Creep is a hotbed of sex-crazed Satan worshippers, containing as it does the Face of Stone, a half-human, half-devil face carved out of a cliff nearby which “has an evil reputation, and is of ill-repute” because the old Wrexian shipwreckers considered it a heathen god and once sacrificed virgins to it.

  Among the individuals Susan encounters, both directly and indirectly, during her stay in Creep are Honoria Golightly, former occupant of Creeper Cottage, a nymphomaniac like Cecil Whim-bam and a drunkard besides; Rebecca Bogging, the cleaning lady, and also a witch who may or may not ride broomsticks outside Susan’s window in the middle of the night; Tom Rendick, one of the local physicians, a non-Wrexian who longs for an office in Harley Street like the famous diagnostician, Sir Barrington Broke; Luther Drange, the “local Casanova” and leader of the Satan worshippers; elderly historian Adrian Quoit; a corrupt minister, Reverend Jeremiah Panpoolardy, who has the best collection of smutty stories in all of Wrexeshire; Hezekiah Blunt, the barman at the Goat Inn, Creep, who isn’t such a bad guy for a low-life Wrexian; an unidentified member of the devil cult who lives on Barfe Farm, in the nearby hamlet of Barfe; and last but certainly not least, Mother Dose, the diseased, cave-dwelling old head witch of Wrexeshire, one of whose witchly ancestors was convicted of “worshipping Satan in the form of a goat, and paying homage to him by means of the posterior kiss.”