by David Dodge
“I've thought about it. I don’t see that we could have helped them by giving up.”
“No. But we’ve hurt them by winning, Jess. Bulič has never been beaten before. He can’t stand defeat. He isn’t sane. He’ll rage like a beast. Because of our escape, he’ll shoot dozens of others in our place. Hundreds. He’ll murder everyone whom he even suspects of helping us, people who were barely connected with us!’ It poured out of her, poison from a deep sore. “Everybody in the Republic will pay in part for our freedom! Those who are only shot will be lucky. He’ll turn his rokos loose like wolves, to beat, burn, and torment the people he can reach because he can’t reach us who beat him! He’ll find them all! Those two farm boys with their funny cracked voices – Piotr’s girls – poor babbling Danitza—”
Her voice failed. She put her face in her hands.
“So that’s why you can’t write. You still haven’t escaped Bulič.”
“I’ll never escape him! Never, never, never!”
It was my turn to look at the lights across the river.
The loudspeakers had either been toned down or the night wind was against them. I could barely hear the noise they made. I wondered how long it would be before the Party got organized to handle our escape in the way it would have to be handled, and the loudspeakers announced the correct Party line. Days, probably. Until then, no news would be coming out of the Republic. It was sealed off.
So it was hard for me to say what I did say. I had my story, the beat I had earned on my own. Nobody could get it away from me if I didn’t choose to surrender it. Cleary’s beat had been luck. Jim Oliver’s had been luck. Cora’s had been luck. Mine I had made for myself, the hard way. I stood on a clear path to the hall of journalistic fame with the exclusive of all exclusives, and I tossed it down the drain. It was a big price to pay for what I had to learn from her, but I paid it.
I said, “You can forget Bulič. He’s dead. Peaceful coexistence will be back in the saddle in a few days.”
She didn’t move. With her face buried in her hands and her shoulders bowed, she seemed to freeze, as if she had stopped breathing.
“I garroted him. I put two tight turns of wire around his throat in the loge of the mosque and tied a boy scout knot under his ear.”
She lifted her face then. I could see the glint of teardrops on the lashes of her wide eyes. It was the only time I had known her to weaken to the point of tears.
“I wasn’t thinking of making a story for myself when I did it,” I told her. “I just wanted to kill him. I tried to get us killed, too. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why?”
“I – think so.”
“I wish you’d tell me, then.” I was sweating, all of a sudden, although it was cold there on the hill. “You set me at damn near everything I did, with one trick or another. You tricked me in the mosque. I know how you did it, although I don’t see what you hoped to accomplish by it unless you wanted to get us shot, and if that was what you were after you – it doesn’t matter. What I really want to know—” I had to swallow before I went on. My throat muscles weren’t working properly. “What I’ve got to know is whether or not the -graveyard – was only another trick.”
She went on staring at me with wide startled eyes, tears winking in her lashes, for another moment. The lights of Skaro gleamed at us from across the river. Then, without a word, she stood up and walked away, over the hilltop and out of sight.
I sat down on the stump.
I don’t remember what emotions I really felt during the next quarter of an hour, except that I didn’t care about my lost beat any more. A news beat isn’t as important as some other things. If you fumble one story, you can always write another. History has a way of making news from day to day. Time marches on, the moving finger writes. The Moslems shrug it off with Inshallah: as Allah wills it. I was philosophizing with the top of my mind to keep from falling into the black bottom of it when she came up behind me – I heard her, but I wasn’t going to invite any further pointless conversations – wrapped her arms round my head and pulled it tightly against her breast.
“You poor boob,” she said.
I felt more philosophical than ever. Inshallah.
“You poor, dumb man!’ She tightened her headlock a notch, twisting my neck. “I should have slapped you! To ask a question like that – if you weren’t so – if I didn’t – Jess, I thought we were going to die, in the graveyard. When you gave up, I gave up. I thought we had only a few hours. I wanted to live all the life I had left with you. Didn’t you know?”
“How could I know?”
“How could you not know?”
“You didn’t say anything.”
She sighed. I could feel the sigh against my cramped cheek.
“What was there for me to say? What did you have to say?”
I couldn’t think of an answer. She went on, with amazement, “Didn’t you ever see the real reason why I told you I would go or stay as you liked, when Piotr asked us to stay? Could I have made it any plainer how I felt, without beating you over your thick-head?” The amazement became complete incredulity when she asked her final question.
“Didn’t you know?”
There are times when the best answer is to keep quiet. I swiveled round on the stump, turning the way she had my neck twisted until I had unwound the twist and was in a better position to take hold of her and say nothing.
That way, I could no longer see the lights of Skaro. But another illumination grew and brightened in my mind.
FIN
ABOUT DAVID DODGE
David Francis Dodge was born on August 18, 1910 in Berkeley, California. He was the youngest child of George Andrew Dodge, a San Francisco architect, and Maude Ellingwood Bennett Dodge. Following George’s death in an automobile accident, Maude “Monnie” Dodge moved the family (David and his three older sisters, Kathryn, Frances, and Marion) to Southern California, where David attended Lincoln High School in Los Angeles but did not graduate.
At the age of sixteen, he took a job as a messenger at Citizens National Trust & Savings Bank of Los Angeles and began night school classes at the American Institute of Banking. In 1931, after moving up to the position of supervising the bank’s commercial books, he quit the bank to become a marine fireman on a South American run for the Grace Steamship Company. In 1933, he came ashore to work as a stevedore and night watchman for Tubbs Cordage Company in San Francisco. In 1934, he went to work for the San Francisco accounting firm of McLaren, Goode & Co., becoming a Certified Public Accountant in 1937.
On July 17, 1936, he was married to Elva Keith, a former Macmillan Company editorial representative, and their only daughter, Kendal, was born in 1940. After the attack on Pearl Harbor he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and earned his first commission in October 1942 in the Office of Supervisory Cost Inspector, 12th Naval District, San Francisco. He emerged three years later with the rank of Lieutenant Commander.
David Dodge’s first experience as a writer came through his involvement with the Macondray Lane Players, a group of amateur playwrights, producers, and actors whose goal was to create a theater purely for pleasure. The group was founded by George Henry Burkhardt (Dodge’s brother-in-law) and performed exclusively at Macondria, a little theater located in the basement of Burkhardt’s house at 56 Macondray Lane on San Francisco’s Russian Hill. Other regular company members included Morris Shaw, Kathryn Dodge (Dodge’s sister and Burkhardt’s wife), Frances Montgomery, Steve Broder, Harvey and Edith Muldoon, Whitney Henry, Enola Barker, Lettie Connell (Kathryn Dodge Burkhardt’s daughter), and Elva Dodge. His publishing career began in 1936 when he won First Prize in the Northern California Drama Association’s Third Annual One Act Play Tournament. The prize-winning play, “A Certain Man Had Two Sons,” was subsequently published by the Banner Play Bureau, of San Francisco. Another Dodge play, “Christmas Eve at the Mermaid,” co-written by Loyall McLaren (his boss at McLaren, Goode & Co.), was performed as the Bohemian
Club’s Christmas play of 1940, and again in 1959. In 1961 the Grabhorn Press published the play in a volume entitled Shakespeare in Bohemia.
His career as a writer really began, however, when he made a bet with his wife that he could write a better mystery novel than the ones they were reading during a rainy family vacation. He drew on his professional experience as a Certified Public Accountant and wrote his first novel, Death and Taxes, featuring San Francisco tax expert and reluctant detective James “Whit” Whitney. It was published by Macmillan in 1941 and he won five dollars from Elva. Three more Whitney novels soon followed: Shear the Black Sheep (Macmillan, 1942), Bullets for the Bridegroom (Macmillan, 1944) and It Ain’t Hay (Simon & Schuster, 1946), in which Whit tangles with marijuana smugglers. With its subject matter and extremely evocative cover art on both the first edition dust jacket and the paperback reprint, this book remains one of Dodge’s most collectible titles.
Upon his release from active duty by the Navy in 1945, Dodge left San Francisco and set out for Guatemala by car with his wife and daughter, beginning his second career as a travel writer. The Dodge family’s misadventures on the road through Mexico are hilariously documented in How Green Was My Father (Simon & Schuster, 1947). His Latin American experiences also produced a second series character, expatriate private investigator and tough-guy adventurer Al Colby, who first appears in The Long Escape (Random House, 1948).
Two more well-received Colby books appeared in 1949 and 1950. Dodge drew on his experiences living in Arequipa, Peru and his travels around South America to give these novels their locales. In 1950, the Dodge family relocated to the south of France, which, of course, provided the background for his most famous novel, To Catch a Thief (Random House, 1952). With this book, Dodge abandoned series characters and focused on stand-alone suspense adventures set in exotic locales around the world. To Catch a Thief was also Dodge’s greatest career success, primarily due to the fact the Alfred Hitchcock purchased the film rights before the novel was even published and turned it into the 1955 Paramount film starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.
In 1952, the Dodges returned to the United States, staying for a time in Burlingame, California, before settling down semi-permanently in Princeton, New Jersey. Dodge picked Princeton because it was centrally located to both his New York and Philadelphia publishers. After Kendal graduated from high school in 1957 and went off to Wellesley, they sold their house and started traveling again.
For the remainder of his career, Dodge alternated between mystery and travel writing, continuing the saga of the Dodge family as they bumbled and bargained their way around the world. The Poor Man’s Guide to Europe, a “tipsheet for nickel-nursers and skinflints” appeared in 1953 and was so successful that Random House issued annual revised editions from 1954 to 1959. It was also a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Although this book was a more traditional—and practical—travel book, it too was liberally sprinkled with anecdotes of the Dodge family’s personal experiences. He also wrote numerous travel articles for various magazines, appearing as a regular contributor to Holiday Magazine from 1948 to 1968.
In 1968, David and Elva settled in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Elva died on October 17, 1973. David died less than a year later on August 8, 1974. They are both buried in San Miguel.
Although a writer by profession, Dodge’s true love was travel. He was fond of explaining that while many writers traveled in order to gather material to write about, his goal was to write in order to gather money to travel.
In 2005, Hard Case Crime reprinted Dodge’s second Al Colby novel, Plunder of the Sun, and in October 2006 published his last completed novel, The Last Match. The manuscript, which remained unsold at the time of his death, was discovered among his papers and is the first new Dodge material to be published in 35 years.
Randal Brandt, October 2006
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Novels
Death and Taxes (1941)
Shear the Black Sheep (1942)
Bullets for the Bridegroom (1944)
It Ain’t Hay (1946)
The Long Escape (1948)
Plunder of the Sun (1949)
The Red Tassel (1950)
To Catch a Thief (1952)
The Lights of Skaro (1954)
Angel’s Ransom (1956)
Loo Loo’s Legacy (1960)
Carambola (1961)
Hooligan (1969)
Troubleshooter (1971)
The Last Match (2006)
Travel Books
How Green Was My Father (1947)
How Lost Was My Weekend (1948)
The Crazy Glasspecker (1949)
20,000 Leagues Behind the 8-Ball (1951)
The Poor Man’s Guide to Europe (1953)
Time Out for Turkey (1955)
The Rich Man’s Guide to the Riviera (1962)
The Poor Man’s Guide to the Orient (1965)
Fly Down, Drive Mexico (1968)