Now then. Tom and Susan fall in love. Luther Drange tries twice to murder Tom so he can seduce Susan (he’s a sort of Wrexian Lamington Carpe, you see), and is thwarted in both instances when Tom uses a never-explained trick taught to him by a commando parachutist during the war to render him (Drange) unconscious. Drange, along with Mother Dose and Rebecca Bogging, decide to revive the “Festival of the Sea,” the ancient ceremony in which a virgin is deflowered and then sacrificed to the Face of Stone, it being the middle of May and the festival day of May 16 or May 17 (Horler can’t seem to make up his mind which) close at hand. Meanwhile, Honoria Golightly accidently meets and then tries to seduce Dick Twellingford, who is on his way to Creep to see Susan and relax for a few days with his old friend Tom Rendick (that scream of pain you hear is old man coincidence having his arm frightfully twisted). But Dick, being an honorable man and a secret reader of hard-boiled American detective novels, especially those featuring private eye Slim Stetson, and having a burning desire to be a hard-boiled private eye, refuses to succumb to Honoria’s jaded charms and therefore arrives in Creep unsullied and eager, once he learns what is going on, to help Tom and Susan out of their terrible predicament with Luther Drange and Mother Dose and Rebecca Bogging and the Reverend Jeremiah Panpoolardy and the rest of the wicked devil cultists.
Unfortunately for Dick, he never gets to follow through on his dream of being a British Slim Stetson and saving a beautiful woman from the clutches of evildoers. Neither do Tom Rendick and his commando parachutist trick come to the rescue when Susan is abducted by Luther Drange and his band, all of whom are naked at the time, and carted off to the Face of Stone on the night of May 16 or May 17 so the Festival of the Sea can be reenacted for the first time in two hundred years. Who does save Susan and her maidenhead? Why, the bobbies, naturally, they having been summoned by the only other good guy in Creep, Reverend Timothy Pearn, the “comical cleric.”
In an exciting scene in which the suspense is allowed to build to unbearable heights over a third of a page, there is “an alarming shout” just as Susan is about to be set upon by Luther Drange, “a shout that drove the rampant lust out of the hearts of those naked men and women” who were “dancing in a frenzy of eroticism.” What happens next, as a journalist puts it in a wrap-up article published the following day (complete with misplaced comma): “Panic-stricken, the worshippers who in a state of frenzy had stripped themselves naked in order to avoid arrest, rushed headlong over the steep cliffs, and were killed.”
Susan and Tom get married, of course, and go off on a Scandinavian honeymoon, where presumably she at last gives her all to the man she loves. Horler does not say what, if anything, happened to Dick Twellingford, Lamington Carpe, Obadiah Milk, Cecil Whimbam, O. Horatio Farthingale, Honoria Golightly, Slim Stetson, Martita Headley, the comical cleric, the stodgy old firm of Pimpley and Shortass Ltd., or the remaining inhabitants of either Creep or Barfe.
And there you have The Face of Stone, crime fiction’s version of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. In the tongue of that European race Sydney loved so well: C’est magnifique!
Didn’t I tell you he was a caution?
The Deadly Pick-Up, MILTON K. OZAKI (1952)
A Chicago newspaperman, artist, tax accountant, and one-time owner and operator of the Monsieur Meltone beauty salon, Milton K. Ozaki began writing mysteries just after the end of World War II. Between 1946 and 1959, he published twenty-four crime novels—a dozen under his own name and a dozen under his pseudonym of Robert O. Saber. The first two Ozaki titles, The Cuckoo Clock and A Fiend in Need, are hardcovers starring the oddball sleuthing team of Professor Caldwell, head of the psychology department of a large university, and his brash young Watson, Bendy Brinks. The other twenty-two are paperback originals, nearly all of the sex-and-violence sort popular in the early fifties; several under the Saber name feature private eyes Max Keene and Carl Good (who became Carl Guard in one Ozaki title, Maid for Murder).
The Deadly Pick-Up, one of Ozaki’s early softcover mysteries, is narrated not by a PI but by Gordon Banner, a Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, salesman for the Tacoma Flour Company. It has plenty of violence but not much sex (unless you count three pairs of naked breasts gazed upon but never touched) and involves dope dealers and addicts, crooked cops, a not very believable female private investigator, counterfeit money that turns out to be real, and no more improbabilities than your average pb original of the period. In fact, it would be just another average fifties pb original—and Ozaki just another average fifties pb writer—if it weren’t for one outstanding feature.
That feature was his uncanny ability to manufacture similes and metaphors of rare exuberance and ingenuity. The Ozaki/Saber canon is strewn with these nuggets (you will no doubt remember some from other of his books in Chapters 3 and 7), but in no other title will you find more sparklers than The Deadly Pick-Up. This embarrassment of riches is what elevates it to Hall of Fame status. Feast your eyes on these shining lumps of alternative gold:
She bent her head over [the package of money] and studied it intently. “No wonder!” she exclaimed softly. “It’s as phony as a yellow pousse-cafe!”
Her voice sounded as though it had been dipped in sleigh bells.
The back of my head jumped spastically like a caterpillar on a hot stove and my cranial cavity seethed with thick volatile chili juice.
I felt as gay and feverish and as desperate and inadequate as a lover in a t.b. ward.
I felt as though a stone block had been lifted from my lungs.
Thoughts came and went in my mind like guests arriving by mistake at the wrong funeral.
He threw the words at me like a preacher getting ready to sweat out a tough congregation.
An idea had been pawing at my mind like a nagging mendicant.
She stood motionless, indecisive, with her hands clasping and unclasping in front of her like separate automatic things.
Ponzio . . . kept watching me as though my nose were an independent organism likely to do tricks.
The minutes crayfished along.
Her shoulders trembled as though a breeze were playing beneath her blouse.
Feeling as out of place as an uplift on a six-year-old, I sipped the Scotch.
Slowly, as though experiencing an exquisite pleasure like the first bubble of a seminal spring, she closed her eyes.
While I waited, tired-footed and homeward bound employees straggled past me, one by one like roaches on their way to a newly leased apartment.
His face rippled colors like a child’s kaleidoscope.
The floor around him was a slowly oozing pool of crimson, shaped somewhat like Australia.
The Murder Business, PETER C. HERRING (1976)
This mean-spirited paean to violence is one of two Hall of Fame classics published by Major Books, a short-lived (1975–1981, requiescat in pace) paperback house operating out of the Los Angeles suburb of Chats worth. (The other classic is William L. Rivera’s Panic Walks Alone, about which see Gun in Cheek.) Major was a bottom-line house throughout its six years of existence, meaning that in the main it published what others had already rejected. Occasionally, as with other bottom-line houses, it lucked into a pretty fair manuscript: the first novels of Loren D. Estlemen and Western writer James Powell, for instance. More often, what appeared under its imprint were novels by the likes of Peter C. Herring.
The Murder Business, Herring’s only published fiction, tells of the activities of a professional British assassin named Michael, a fun-loving lad who likes to cut people’s throats with his trusty knife because the sight of blood gives him a jolly orgasm. Michael works for an ultra-secret outfit called the Board, comprised of ten men who, we are told, control politics, finance, and the value of life itself in every major country in the world. When rotten old left-wingers who prefer to think for themselves oppose the Board, Michael or someone like him is brought in to dispose of them. It was the Board, in fact, according to Red (for blood) Herring, that arranged the assassinations of both
Kennedys.
We follow Michael all over London, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas as he fulfills his bloody contracts, then join him en route to the South of France on a richly deserved vacation with his lady love, Jenny, who at first knows nothing about what he does for a living. But then guys start trying to kill the Englishman (as he is known) and he—with Jenny—is forced to commit more mayhem in return in order to save his hide. Seems what few good guys are left in the world have found out about the Board and about Michael and are trying to eliminate them/him. Or something like that; Herring never does make the motives of the counterassassins very clear. Bodies pile up and there is more copious bloodletting on the way to a predictable conclusion, in which both Michael and poor Jenny are themselves slaughtered.
All of which would make The Murder Business an unappetizing throwaway if it weren’t for Red Herring’s prose. Herring was a stylist of singular abilities—a man who could do really bizarre things with, and to, the English language. Red Herring may never drag himself across our trail again, but if he hadn’t done so this once he would have not have left such spoor as:
It was raining again. . . . Michael glanced up at the dark sky and as he expected, the moon was hidden behind the thick waterlogged clouds.
The black tarmac shot streaks of light from the hordes of vehicles that, like Michael, were crawling through the busy evening streets.
The butterflies in Michael’s stomach became more unsettled until they felt like huge canaries as he remembered the importance of his success tonight.
The side street where he was parked shouted back at him in utter silence and desertion.
Typically sturdy for this type of house, Michael flexed his body upward and he sprang over the gate with ease.
Cigarettes were lit and they stayed silent in the warm darkness smoking.
He swallowed as his heart pounded the blood through his body at three times its normal speed. He could hear the blood whipping past his ears.
Like a bolt of lightning, a needle stabbed into his solar plexus as he realized that Jenny had been in his [overnight] bag.
For one second, nothing happened; then the hairs on Michael’s neck screamed at him and he turned.
Walking down the plane steps, the intense dry heat of the desert hit him in the face like a blast from a powerful hair dryer.
The Winning Streak, ARNOLD GRISMAN (1985)
What first drew my attention to this recent novel was the unique quality of its dust jacket quotes. Usually such encomiums are provided by well-known writers in the mystery field; not so in Grisman’s case. Famous (and not so famous) people from other walks of life have done the lavishing here. No less a personage than Lee Iacocca says that The Winning Streak “is a good read” and further deposes that “Goldberg’s sharp insights and his penchant for gambling add pizzazz to the story.” Mr. Iacocca is nothing if not astute; not many writers would have thought to mention that a professional gambler’s penchant for gambling in a book about gamblers and gambling add pizzazz to the story. Then we have somebody named Sidney Olson, who says, “If the Raymond Chandler seat is still open, Arnold Grisman is an authentic candidate. This book is a jackpot.” And finally we have this comment from Fred Gwynne: “High humor and devastating reality are strange (but wonderful) bedfellows in a novel. In The Winning Streak, Arnold Grisman serves them up in spades!” Fred Gwynne, in case you don’t recognize the name, is the author of such books as Chocolate Moose for Dinner and The King Who Rained; he is also an actor whose most famous role was as Herman Munster in the TV series “The Munsters.”
Could a novel with such distinguished advance praise live up to its billing? I wondered. The answer is yes, though not in the way its publishers, some reviewers, and the Messrs. Iacocca, Olson, and Gwynne would have us believe. The Winning Streak concerns the wild and woolly adventures (in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Atlantic City, and other locales) of this professional gambler, Goldberg, who has not only a penchant for gambling but a penchant for trouble. In these pages, the trouble comes in the form of fast dames, hot dice, tough crooks, and twenty million dollars in “funny money” which Goldberg happens to stumble on. The action is fast and furious. And so is Grisman’s prose.
Kirkus Reviews, that great alternative reviewing service, says that “his language [is] bright and cocky,” not to mention “rich” and “alluring.” No argument from this corner; his language is all of that, and much more—every bit of it alternative. One of the pithier examples serves as an epigraph at the beginning of this chapter. Here are some of the others that earned The Winning Streak the honor of being the newest inductee into the Alternative Hall of Fame.
Goldberg was well acquainted with the feeling that started somewhere near his heart and blew down his arm like a trumpet call; it had betrayed him regularly for the past twenty-four months. Maybe, thought Goldberg tentatively, big and bent, only halfway out of his crouch, wearing a safari jacket, white pants, torn Adidas sneakers, still a man people noticed.
There was a cop on Goldberg’s side now, tap-tapping with the barrel of his gun. He was a very fat cop with a belly the shape and just about the size of a keg of beer. His navel protruded from the too-tight shirt like a very large doorbell.
“You wouldn’t believe how strong that broad is. She decked me with a lamp and I was out like a light.”
She towered and swayed on platform heels like a figure out of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a great swollen bosom and mammoth hips, encased in a loose tweed sack designed for some monster maternity. Black hair streaked with gray, which she patted and pushed and shoved into place. When she finished with the hair, she went to work on the bosom, swatting it peremptorily into fresh arrangements.
There’s nothing unusual about shooting craps one-handed, but when the other hand is busy with a hundred-seventy-pound woman whose greatest ambition is to disappear, you lose the easy movements that tickle and excite the dice. Nasty little plastic cubes the color of cheap candy, the dice snapped back at him like discarded mistresses, deadly snake eyes peering at him evilly, threes rolling into sight, snickering, only to be replaced by the crunch of twelves; he crapped out in every way available, and then started all over again. Every time the dice arrived at his position they stayed for a single pass and then flirted on, whoring after more exciting palms.
“Who’s this friend of mine?” he asked after a giant swallow [of Scotch] that sent the Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat like an escaped balloon.
She walked into the room ahead of him and the hips were going like a grandfather clock, ticktock, ticktock, ticktock. Apple-ass, Goldberg thought automatically, and apple-ass, apple-ass, apple-ass, the hips echoed back.
Yes sir and yes ma’am, that’s language!
Post-Mortem
What you have just read is not only a funny book about bad writing; it is also the second part of a crash course in alternative crime fiction. Taken in conjunction with Gun in Cheek, it provides all the essentials for the fledgling prospector—a sort of literary grubstake, if you will. Whether you take that grubstake and head into them thar fictional hills on your own hunt for alternative gold is of course up to you. But the fact remains, you can if you want to—and if you do, you’ll almost certainly strike paydirt.
Let’s assume you do decide to go prospecting. The first thing you should do is to head for your nearest library or secondhand bookshop specializing in, or with a large stock of, mystery and detective fiction. You can also write away for catalogues put out by mail-order dealers in used and rare mysteries, of which there are dozens these days; their ads can be found in such publications as The Armchair Detective and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Lay in a large supply of hardcovers and paperbacks both—titles by authors discussed here or in Gun in Cheek, or published by such houses as Macaulay and Phoenix Press, if you want to make things easy for yourself; titles by obscure authors published by better houses, if you want to make your search more challenging; titles by major authors of the past fifty to seventy-five years,
if you prefer the most difficult excavation. Then start digging with the tools in your grubstake. Sooner or later, you’ll unearth nuggets large and small, rich veins and startling bonanzas. And the first laugh, the first guffaw, will be yours and yours alone—a reward unlike any other in the enjoyment of criminous literature.
If you don’t explore the rest of those dusty hills of mysterydom, then the rewards will be mine. For I surely will continue to prowl among them, and I surely will make many more strikes—some that might have belonged to you. Why, if I find enough new nuggets, enough new veins, I may even stake claims on them—just as I’ve staked claims on those in these pages and in Gun in Cheek—by gathering them together into a third volume. And you wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?
Well, would you?
Bibliography
Alternative Hall of Fame Novels
Auslander, Joseph. Hell in Harness. New York: Doubleday Crime Club, 1929.
Avallone, Michael. The Bedroom Bolero. New York: Belmont, 1963.
———. The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1957.
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