by John Harvey
EARLY BIRD BOOKS
FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY
BE THE FIRST TO KNOW—
NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!
The Geranium Kiss
A Scott Mitchell Mystery
John Harvey
MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM
For Julie: forever
The Scott Mitchell Mysteries
An Introduction
Growing up in England in the immediate postwar years and into the 1950s was, in some respects, a drab experience. Conformity ruled. It was an atmosphere of “be polite and know your place.” To a restless teenager, anything American seemed automatically exciting. Movies, music—everything. We didn’t even know enough to tell the real thing from the fake.
The first hard-boiled crime novels I read were written by an Englishman pretending to be American: Stephen Daniel Frances, using the pseudonym Hank Janson, which was also the name of his hero. With titles like Smart Girls Don’t Talk and Sweetheart, Here’s Your Grave, the Janson books, dolled up in suitably tantalizing covers, made their way, hand to hand, around the school playground, falling open at any passage that, to our young minds, seemed sexy and daring. This was a Catholic boys’ grammar school, after all, and any reference to parts of the body below the waist, other than foot or knee, was thought to merit, if not excommunication, at least three Our Fathers and a dozen Hail Marys.
From those heady beginnings, I moved on, via the public library, to another English writer, Peter Cheyney, and books like Dames Don’t Care and Dangerous Curves—which, whether featuring FBI agent Lemmy Caution or British private eye Slim Callaghan, were written in the same borrowed faux American pulp style. But it was Cheyney who prepared me for the real deal.
I can’t remember exactly when I read my first Raymond Chandler, but it would have been in my late teens, still at the same school. Immediately, almost instinctively, I knew it was something special. Starting with The Big Sleep—we’d seen the movie with Bogart and Bacall—I read them all, found time to regret the fact there were no more, then started again. My friends did the same. When we weren’t kicking a ball around, listening to jazz, or hopelessly chasing girls, we’d do our best to come up with first lines for the Philip Marlowe sequel we would someday write. The only one I can remember now is ‘He was thirty-five and needed a shave.’
I would have to do better. The Scott Mitchell series was my attempt to do exactly that.
I’d been a full-time writer for all of eighteen months. Spurred on, to some extent, by tales of Chandler, Dashiell Hammett—another formative influence—and others, writing for the pulps at the rate of so many cents a word, I had given up my day job as an English and drama teacher to try my hand as a hack for hire. Biker books, war books, westerns: 128-page paperbacks at the rate of roughly one a month. One of the editors I got to know was Angus Wells, with whom I would later write several series of westerns, and it was he who gave my proposal for a new crime series the green light.
Scott Mitchell: the toughest private eye—and the best.
American pulp in a clearly English setting—that was the premise. A hero who was a more down-at-the-heels version of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. A style that owed a great deal to Chandler and a little, in places, to Mickey Spillane. Forty years earlier, I could have been Peter Cheyney selling his publisher the idea for Lemmy Caution.
Amphetamines and Pearls—the title borrowed from Bob Dylan—was duly published by Sphere Books in 1976. John Knight’s gloriously pulpy cover design showing a seminaked stripper reflected in the curved blade of a large and dangerous-looking knife. 144 pages, 50,000 words, £500 advance against royalties. You do the math.
But, I hear you asking, is it any good?
Well, yes and no. Reading Amphetamines and Pearls and the other three books again after many years, there were sequences that left me pleasantly surprised and others that set my teeth on edge like chalk being dragged across a blackboard.
Chandler is a dangerous model: so tempting, so difficult to pull off. Once in a while, I managed a simile that works—“phrases peeled from his lips like dead skin” isn’t too bad—but, otherwise, they tend to fall flat. What I hope will come across to readers, though, is how much I enjoyed riffing on the familiar tropes of the private-eye novel—much as I have done more recently in my Jack Kiley stories—and how much fun it was to pay homage to the books and movies with which I’d grown up and which had been a clear inspiration. Inspiration I would do nothing to disguise—quite the opposite, really.
As an example, quite early on, there’s this:
What I needed now was a little honest routine. I remember reading in one of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels that he began the day by making coffee in a set and practiced way, each morning the same. It also said somewhere that Marlowe liked to eat scrambled eggs for breakfast but as far as I can recall it didn’t say how he did that.
What I did was this. I broke two eggs into a small saucepan, added a good-size chunk of butter, poured in a little off the top of a bottle of milk and finally ground in some sea salt and black pepper. Then I just stirred all of this over a medium heat, while I grilled some bacon to go with it.
They say that a sense of achievement is good for a man.
And later, this:
I didn’t know whether she was playing at being Mary Astor on purpose, or whether she’d seen The Maltese Falcon so many times she said the words unconsciously.
But I had seen it too.
Intertextuality. Isn’t that what they call that kind of thing? Metafiction, even?
Much of the success of the book depends on how the reader responds to its hero. In many respects, Scott Mitchell fits the formula: men are always pointing guns at him or sapping him from behind; women either want to slap his face or take him to bed or both. When it comes to handing out the rough stuff, he’s no slouch. Anything but. He’s the toughest and the best, after all. But, personally, I find him a little too down on himself and the world in general, too prone to self-pity. On the plus side, he does immediately recognize Thelonious Monk playing Duke Ellington, he knows the difference between Charlie Parker and Sonny Stitt, and he has a fondness for Bessie Smith.
The scenes in the novel that work best, for me at least, are those in which the attempts to sound and seem American are pulled back, letting the Englishness show through. That only makes sense: it’s what I know, rather than what I only learned secondhand. And what I know, of course, London aside, is the city of Nottingham, destined to be the home of the twelve novels featuring Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick.
It had been so long since I last read Amphetamines and Pearls that I’d forgotten that’s where quite a lot of the book is set. And in the chapter where Mitchell visits the city’s new central police station, there’s a description of urban police work that points the way pretty clearly towards the world Resnick would step into a dozen or so years later.
Men in uniform and out of it moved quietly around the building. Policemen doing their job with as much seeming efficiency as men who are worked too hard and paid too little can muster. From room to room they went, sifting the steadily gathering detritus of the city night: a group of drunken youths with colored scarves tied to their wrists and plastic-flowered pennants on their coats; the first few of the many prostitutes whose soiled bodies would spend the remainder of their working hours in custody; a couple of lads—not older than fifteen—who had been caught breaking into a tobacconist’s shop and beating up the owner when he discovered them; a sad queen who had announced his desires a little too loudly and obviously in the public lavatories of the city center; and the car thieves, the junkies, the down-and-outs.
You couldn’
t work in the midst of all this without it getting to you. It didn’t matter how clean the building was, how new. The corruption of man was old, old, old.
And down these mean streets … well, you know the rest.
—John Harvey
London, December 2015
1
It was nine minutes after eleven and I was lying in a bath tub of water, that was gradually becoming the same depressing shade of grey as the sky outside. Or my last memory of it. But then, most of my memories were that colour.
It was early December and after pretending for a long time that it wasn’t going to happen, it was winter. Summer had been hot and long; Autumn had produced reds and golds the brightness of kids’ picture books. Just when everything had conspired to lull folk into a false sense of security—wham!
The thing that annoyed me most was that I had been surprised. I shouldn’t have been. I’d been around long enough to know that life worked like that. Maybe I’d been around too long. Thirty-six years too long.
No. It hadn’t all been like that. There was a time back there, somewhere. Four years less than four days. …
Something cut in on my self-pity. Downstairs the phone was ringing. Another thing I should have known. No-one would call for days. Then when I took a bath there would be enough bells ringing to make me think I was the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Not that I’d ever worked out whether the best thing to do was to jump out of the bath, grab a towel and run down the stairs or wait until they phoned again later.
If it was important they’d call again.
Maybe.
Maybe they’d just move on through yellow pages to the next private investigator in the book.
I stayed where I was. There’s something about your own warm dirt which is eternally consoling. I guess in the end it has to be.
The phone stopped ringing. I began to apply my mind to the great human problem of how the hell I was going to pass the time until there was a reasonable chance of getting to sleep for the night.
I could walk down to the coffee shop and indulge myself in blueberry shortcake; stay home with my stereo and a book of bridge problems; wait in the bath until my skin began to flake off into the water …
The phone cut across my thoughts again.
Okay, I said to myself, let’s go.
I splashed a good quantity of murky water on to the floor; pulled at a towel and secured it around myself at the third attempt; collided with the edge of the bath; half-ran, half-hopped down the stairs, almost slipping three steps from the bottom; grabbed at the receiver; in time to hear the phone cut off at the other end of the line.
I told the telephone exactly what it could do with itself and sat down on the stairs, drawing breath. Then I padded through into the kitchen and put water in the kettle, switched it on. Took down the glass jar of Columbian coffee beans and shook some into the electric grinder. Ground the beans, warmed the enamel pot. I measured the amount of coffee that went into the pot and the amount of water that followed it. Stirred everything up and set the pot on the cooker.
Now I could go upstairs and get dressed. It was five minutes off twelve o’clock.
At three minutes past midday the phone went again. Don’t ask me why I noticed the time. Occasionally I get obsessive about little things like that. Once I swore to myself that I wouldn’t be able to live unless I had scrambled eggs for breakfast every day. I had sworn I wouldn’t be able to live without a whole lot of things.
But here I still was and it was a hell of a long time since I’d had scrambled eggs.
I took the phone off the hook.
‘Hello,’ I said, ‘this is Scott Mitchell.’
‘Well, hello,’ said someone somewhere, ‘I’m glad you’re finally up.’
The speaker was female with the kind of voice that goes with all those ads for Martini and Bacardi and the other drinks I’d never really got around to. I wondered what she wanted from me.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Well, Mr Mitchell, you have been proving rather difficult to get hold of.’
‘I’ve been taking a bath,’ I explained.
‘Oh,’ she said with a slight smirk in her voice, ‘then that would make you even more difficult to get hold of.’
‘That depends where you had in mind getting a grip,’ I said.
‘That depends what you’ve got that’s worth the effort.’
She was rising in my estimation with every minute and that wasn’t the only thing that was rising. It wasn’t every woman who could make me feel randy over the telephone in the middle of the day. But perhaps I’d been taking calls from all the wrong people.
‘Are you still there, Mr Mitchell,’ the voice said, ‘or have you slipped away for a quick rub down?’
‘A quick what?’
‘A quick … oh, forget it!’
‘I’m trying to,’ I said, ‘but it’s hard. There’s this image in my mind that’s most disturbing.’
‘The only thing I can suggest, Mr Mitchell, is that you take yourself in hand. There’s nothing else I can do in the circumstances.’
There was a pause during which I was conscious of the sound of her breathing, then she added, ‘Unfortunately.’
‘There is one thing you could do,’ I told her.
‘What’s that?’
‘You could tell me why you phoned. I’m sure it wasn’t only to brush up on your telephone technique.’
‘Are you telling me that my technique needs improving?’ She managed to sound almost hurt.
‘Not at all,’ I replied, ‘but I’ll withhold my written reference until I’ve experienced it in person.’
‘Now, Mr Mitchell, you’re bragging! Don’t tell me that you can write. I thought you were a big dumb private detective.’
‘I am. But I’m one of the newer kind. Got smart and went to evening classes: reading, writing and elocution.’
‘What happened to the elocution?’ she asked.
‘I dropped out of that one. The teacher would keep coming up behind me with a long, pointed stick. Something to do with my diphthongs.’
‘Your what?’
‘Forget it,’ I said, ‘I haven’t used them in a long time. And you still didn’t tell me why you called.’
‘You know a policeman called Gilmour,’ she said.
I didn’t know if it was a statement or a question, so I didn’t reply. Just waited.
Finally, she carried on. ‘He suggested that you might be the man to get in touch with. There’s a little difficulty and we need some help.’
‘We?’
‘Yes.’
‘Meaning you and your husband?’
‘Meaning my employer and myself, Mr Mitchell. I no longer have a husband.’
‘You make it sound as though you lost him in a waiting room at Victoria Station.’
‘Actually, it was room 101 of the Royal Hotel. Now can we get on with business?’
‘By all means. What kind of difficulty do you happen to be in?’
She hesitated, then said, ‘I don’t think I can discuss it on the phone, Mr Mitchell. Couldn’t we meet?’
‘I’m sure we could. But if you didn’t want to talk about it on the phone, why didn’t you go straight into my office?’
‘I don’t believe in trusting other people’s recommendations too fully. I wanted to make my own assessment before arranging any kind of meeting. This is a very delicate affair, Mr Mitchell.’
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘maybe you’d better try someone else. I’m about as delicate as King Kong.’
‘But look how gentle he was with Fay Wray,’ she replied.
I liked that. I liked a woman who’d seen a movie or two.
‘So what’s your assessment?’ I asked.
‘Where’s your office?’
I gave
her the address in Covent Garden and told her I’d meet her there in an hour and a half. She said it sounded a long time, but I figured that didn’t matter.
Hard-to-get Mitchell, that’s me.
‘One last thing,’ I said.
‘It’s Stephanie,’ she said, ‘Stephanie Miller.’
‘How did you know that was what I wanted?’ I asked.
‘It wasn’t,’ she replied and hung up.
I poured myself some coffee and sat in the armchair. Yes, that’s right, the armchair. I had visitors like starving people had food.
The coffee was a little strong by now, but that didn’t matter. I sat there trying to picture what she might be like. Finally figured that she’d be above medium height, longish dark hair, strong face; good clothes over a better shape.
I considered calling Tom Gilmour at West End Central and asking him what it was all about. For no good reason, I decided against it. I could wait. I was the kind of guy who just thrived on surprises.
Why, I was already getting worked up about Christmas.
This year I might even get a present from someone other than myself.
After another cup of coffee, I got the car out of the garage and drove into town.
Since the vegetable traders had moved away from Covent Garden and the developers had threatened to move in, it was like walking around in some kind of ghost town. The painted iron work of the original market still survived and where properties had been demolished, kids had used the walls that surrounded the empty sites for a series of highly-coloured murals. Yet, despite all this, there was a deadness, a lack of reality about the place.
Maybe that was why I stayed there; why I still liked it. Or maybe that was because I couldn’t afford an office anywhere else.
I pushed open the side door next to what had been a jewelry showroom and was now an empty space and another plate glass window waiting to be broken.
The stairs that led up to the first floor were dirty and looked as if they’d hadn’t been swept in a long time. It was dark on the landing and I felt for the light switch. Nothing happened. I should have known.