“Okay, then,” I said, “don’t speak.”
“Mal?” he asked, brightening. “I didn’t recognize you!”
“I don’t mean to be a pest or anything. You probably got a book to write between here and the ground floor.”
He grinned and I grinned and we shook hands.
“It’s been a long time,” he said.
“It was another Bouchercon in Chicago, as I recall,” I said. “Many moons ago.”
“You had longer hair then, and a mustache.”
I gestured toward his own ever-scraggly mustache/beard and writerly unruly hair. “I looked around and noticed that all the old men had long hair and facial whiskers, and the kids were wearing short, punky hair.”
“So you got a haircut. What else is there to do in Port City, Iowa?”
The elevator doors slid open and we walked toward the nearby lounge.
“I keep busy,” I said. “I know you New Yorkers find it hard to believe a writer can actually get ideas in Iowa.”
We walked into the lounge; Pete Christian and Tim Culver were gone, and Brett Murtz had hopped to another table, where he and several people I didn’t recognize had cornered William Campbell Gault, giving him an eager, fannish interrogation. Gault, a dignified but unpretentious man in his early seventies, was the author of a number of fine tough-guy mystery stories, though he was also noted for his sports-oriented young-adult novels.
Tom and I found a table, and the same barmaid who’d helped Roscoe Kane stay knee-deep in Scotch took our orders; I was drinking Pabst from bottles, and Tom was, too, since I was paying. The barmaid was trying for another five-buck tip.
“You know,” Tom said, picking up on the Iowa motif, “I somehow can’t shake the image of you sitting in a cornfield, a scarecrow looking over your shoulder while you perch on a crate writing stories on lined paper with a stubby pencil.”
“Did I ever mention I hate New York?”
“Frequently.”
“Well, just for the record, I hate New York.”
“You do manage to keep stumbling onto murders, in that little hayseed community of yours.”
“Give me a break, Tom. It happened twice. And years apart.”
“You’re just the only mystery writer I know who’s done research that active. Still live in a trailer?”
“I moved out.”
“How come? Did it finally sink into that landfill it was sitting on? Or did selling your books to the TV movie folks make you nouveau rich?”
“That’s riche. I think. As for the trailer, I got tired of being mistaken for Jim Rockford. Anyway, I did come into some dough from those TV sales, and got a chance to pick up a little house.”
“On the prairie?”
“No, with a river view.”
“Sounds real Mark Twain.”
“It’s a house, not a houseboat, Tom. I don’t want ’em to start mistaking me for Travis McGee.”
“Well, you did put a color in one of your titles.”
“Hey, be fair, Tom-last I heard, the rainbow was in the public domain. You didn’t like that book much, did you?”
He shrugged. “I liked the book okay. I just like your short stories better.”
I shrugged back. “Can’t make a living at that. Books are where it’s at. Maybe you’ll like the next one; maybe I’ll put you in it.”
“That’d help,” he admitted. “Just promise me you won’t make any cracks about my name sounding fishy.”
“If you slip me a fin, it’s a deal.”
His grin under the almost-mustache was infectious. “Very funny. You know, I can’t say I was nuts about what the TV folks did to your first book.”
I groaned, swigged some beer. “Couldn’t we talk about something more pleasant? Like my hernia operation?”
But Tom was enjoying my misery, and plunged on, archly: “Granted, they made some minor changes. They switched the locale from rural Iowa to Los Angeles, and your white-bread hero was played by O. J. Simpson. And they changed the ending, ’cause they didn’t think the high school sweetheart ought to be involved in the murder.”
“Otherwise it was a faithful rendition,” I said.
Now Tom seemed to feel a little bad about needling me, and leaned forward and said, with no archness at all, “Don’t forget what James M. Cain said when the reporter asked him what he thought about what the movies had done to his books: ‘Nobody did anything to my books,’ he said, ‘they’re right back up there on the shelf, just like I wrote ’em.’ ”
“O.J. Simpson isn’t going to be in the next movie.”
“That’s good.”
“They’re talking Scott Baio.”
“Maybe we better get some more beers. That better be some house.”
“Oh, it is. Got a roof and everything. I bought a new car, too.”
“What was wrong with the van?”
“Just not my style. I’m not a kid anymore. I turned thirty-three last time I looked.”
“What car d’you buy?”
“A silver Firebird.”
“No kidding? That’s what Rockford drives.”
I’d just bought the car a few days ago, and this drive into Chicago, on a cold, rainy October afternoon, had been my first extended experience behind its wheel. I liked the feeling of driving a sporty car, my last two vehicles having been an old Rambler and that van Tom had asked about; but the dreariness of the day, and the realization that I had finally gotten a sporty car at an age, or anyway “time of life,” when it didn’t mean as much to me, had a sobering effect on me (unlike the Pabst I was now chugging).
I’d been nervous about attending the Bouchercon; the last one of these I’d attended, I was a barely published writer of short stories-now I was a more visible “author” of two published hardcover novels, one of which had just been nominated for Novel of the Year by the Private Eye Writers of America (whose awards ceremonies were traditionally held at Bouchercon). I considered the nomination a fluke-for one thing, the book had gotten (deservedly) mixed reviews; for another, the hero wasn’t a private eye and so, technically, the book probably shouldn’t have even been in the running. But knowing I didn’t deserve to win-knowing I didn’t have a prayer to win-didn’t keep me from writing an acceptance speech over and over again in my brain on the four-hour drive from Port City to Chicago.
“I understand your idol Roscoe Kane’s here,” Tom said.
“Yeah, you just missed him.”
“Damnit! Will you introduce me tomorrow?”
“Of course.”
“I bet meeting him must be an experience.”
“It certainly is.”
“He’s one of my favorites, too, you know.”
Tom was one of the world’s foremost authorities on private eye fiction, and one of the genre’s biggest enthusiasts; getting on his list of favorites didn’t make you one of the elite. Even I was on. In fact, the first fan letter I ever had was from Tom. God bless him.
“What do you think about this Hammett thing?” he said.
“What Hammett thing?”
“The new Hammett book.”
“What, you mean the latest biography, the one by Cynthia Crystal?”
“No, no… I mean the new novel.”
I picked up the bottle of Pabst he’d been pouring from and looked it over.
“Tom,” I said. “I don’t know how to break this to you, but Hammett’s been dead since ’61, and that’s put a crimp in his publishing efforts. Considering he stopped writing around ’34, I hardly think there’s a new Hammett novel, unless it was written with a Ouija board.”
“It’s an unpublished book that he wrote in the twenties. A lost manuscript that got found a few months ago.”
“Yeah, right, in a box in the back of Murder Ink bookstore next to MacBeth Meets the Bowery Boys by Francis Bacon and Huntz Hall.”
“Mal, this is for real. The manuscript’s been authenticated. The Hammett estate is standing behind the thing.”
“Are they
involved in the publication? Will they hold the copyright?”
“I believe so.”
“Then they stand to gain. Sounds hinky to me.”
Tom made a face; this time he looked at my Pabst bottle to check what I was drinking. “Hey, the executors of the estate aren’t going to hoax the public where Hammett’s concerned. If they were out for a buck, they wouldn’t’ve kept so many of his short stories from being reprinted in book form; they’re fussy about what Hammett stuff gets put back in print. But how could they stand in the way of a newly discovered book-length work?”
I was starting to think Tom was telling the truth and not taking advantage of a hick from Iowa who’d been drinking all evening.
“Hammett’s my favorite writer,” I said. “I’d love to read a new Hammett book. So would a few other people. Don’t play games with me, boy. What’s the deal?”
The novel, a mystery featuring Hammett’s famous Continental Op character, was entitled The Secret Emperor, and until recently had been believed left unfinished by Hammett, in its earliest stages, as some notes in the Hammett collection at the University of Texas would indicate. But, apparently, during 1927-a year when Dashiell Hammett had been thought to have temporarily given up writing to go back to the ad copy-writing game-Hammett had revised and completed the manuscript.
“Hammett’s editor at Black Mask, old Cap Shaw, had encouraged him to do this book,” Tom said, “but when Hammett showed it to him, the Captain was disappointed.”
“Why? Was it bad?”
“How should I know? I haven’t read it yet; damn few people have. But Shaw is said to’ve been disappointed because Hammett didn’t construct it as a serial, so that Shaw could run it in installments in Black Mask.”
“Which is how Hammett’s first book, Red Harvest, and most of his other books were put together,” I said.
“Right. This one was all of a piece. Hammett apparently lost confidence in the book, and never showed it to a major publisher; instead, he sold first rights to a little California firm that specialized in rental library hardbacks-westerns and detective stories. Why that company never printed the book is, you should pardon the expression, a mystery. But here’s the rub: they never really folded, that house. They were swallowed up by several other publishing firms, the latest of which is Mystery House.”
“Mystery House! That’s Gregg Gorman’s company.”
“You know Gorman?”
“I know the s.o.b.”
“Sounds like a warm relationship.”
“That’s another story. Keep going with yours.”
“Well as you know, Gorman’s a specialist in reprinting ‘important’ mystery fiction… stuff the hardcore mystery fans are willing to buy, in rather expensive editions. You collect that stuff?”
“Some of it,” I admitted. “I bought The Complete Race Williams by Carroll John Daly, in a slipcased set.”
Daly’s character Race Williams was, historically, fiction’s first hard-boiled private eye; but Daly was a rotten if energetic writer-“Okay, rats… make a move and I’ll open you up, and see what you had for supper!”-and only a fool (like me) would buy the complete Race Williams novels in a slipcased set. I said so to Tom.
“Well, meet another fool. Apparently there were around twenty-five hundred of us that foolish, and at two-hundred dollars a boxed set, that ain’t hay. And it’s just one of many editions Gorman’s brought out.”
I nodded, sourly. “Gorman’s done some good work, for scholars and mystery-fan fools like us. But he’s still an s.o.b.”
“So I gather. Anyway, Gorman uncovered this manuscript, somehow, and rather than publish it himself, sent it out for bid to all the major publishers last month. He worked out some kind of deal with the Hammett estate-since all he owned was first publication rights-and everybody seems to be happy.”
This was an important literary event, to say the least; Hammett was, by nearly universal acclamation, the finest mystery writer America has yet produced (or is ever likely to). One of a handful of American crime writers (with Chandler and possibly James M. Cain) to achieve a reputation of literary worth transcending the genre, Hammett published a mere five novels: Red Harvest, a violent shoot-’em-up that paved the way for the Spillane school; The Dain Curse, a complex story about a family with skeletons in its closet that set the pattern for Chandler and Ross Macdonald; The Maltese Falcon, the most famous private eye story of all, starring the most famous private eye of all, Sam Spade; The Glass Key, the understated crime story that was Hammett’s personal favorite (and Roscoe Kane’s favorite Hammett, incidentally); and The Thin Man, which combined the tough mystery with the comedy of manners, and gave the world (particularly Hollywood) Nick and Nora Charles and their terrier, Asta.
And now a posthumous work: The Secret Emperor.
“Who’s bringing it out?”
“Random House.”
“What did they pay?”
“Six figures, is what I hear. What six, exactly, I couldn’t say.”
“Here’s to capitalism,” I said, clinking my glass of beer to Tom’s. Considering Hammett’s leftist politics, I made sure my facetiousness was self-evident, in case his ghost was nearby; and if Hammett’s ghost was anywhere, it would be in a bar.
“For a Hammett fan you don’t seem too thrilled at the prospect of reading a ‘new’ Op novel.”
“I just don’t trust Gorman,” I said.
“I understand the book is authentic.”
“First-rate Hammett?”
“What I heard was ‘authentic’ Hammett. It’s actually his first novel, so it’s bound to be a lesser work.”
“Not really. He’d been writing short stories for a good many years by ’27. If it isn’t close to Red Harvest in tone and quality, I… I don’t know.”
Tom was amused. “Suspect fraud, Mal?”
“I smell Gregg Gorman, is all.”
A pretty woman in her early forties, wearing a Sam Spade trenchcoat, her hands thrust in its pockets, was in the doorway, looking anxiously around the bar room. I knew her: Mae Kane, Roscoe’s current-and in my estimation best-wife. She had wide Joan Crawford eyes. An out-of-date silver pageboy hairdo that had been Kane’s idea swung in twin arcs as she looked about the room. Irritation tugged at the red slash of her mouth.
Then she saw me, and the slash turned into a nice smile, an attractive smile, and she moved toward our table.
Tom and I stood.
Mae came over and hugged me. I hugged her back and looked at her and saw a face like that of a Hollywood beauty who was aging but doing it well. In fact, Mae had been an actress, once, a stage actress and then a radio and TV personality of some national prominence, of the Faye Emerson variety-until her first husband (a banker, now deceased) had turned her into a housewife-a housewife with a maid and furs, admittedly, but a housewife. She and Roscoe had met four years ago on a talk show she was doing for a local TV station, in Milwaukee, where they both were living; after her banker husband’s fatal coronary, Mae had gotten back into broadcasting in a small way. Meanwhile, Roscoe swept her off her feet. I’d spent a weekend with them a year ago and, after three years, they still behaved like newlyweds. She was the bright glow in the midst of Roscoe’s currently dark universe; the glow that made that universe worth existing in, despite Roscoe’s publishing “situation.”
I introduced Tom and Mae, and Tom said some gushy but sincere things about Roscoe Kane and Gat Garson.
Mae seemed to have other things on her mind.
“Something’s wrong,” she said. “I was supposed to meet Roscoe in the lobby, at eleven. It’s almost midnight.”
“Didn’t you come down together?”
“No. I had some work to do at the station, and Roscoe wanted to come here a day early, to do some sort of business or other. He took a plane down yesterday; I drove down this evening.”
I gestured for Mae to sit and she reluctantly did. “Nothing to worry about,” I said. “Roscoe just got a little wound up tonight….
”
“Wound up as in ‘tight’?” she asked; her eyes looked sad.
“Yeah. He must’ve forgot he was supposed to meet you. He went up to his room half an hour ago.”
She glanced at Tom, wondering if she should get into this with a stranger present; then she said, “He’s been drinking too much, Mal.”
“He always has as long as I’ve known him.”
“Not like this. Did he tell you about the fire?”
“What fire?”
“He drank himself to sleep a few weeks ago. Nothing unusual about that. But I was at work, at the station. He was smoking… he’s supposed to have given that up, doctor’s orders, but when I’m not around to hound him, he’ll have a smoke. He fell asleep with the cigarette in his hand, it dropped to the floor and burned up half the carpet, and if the neighbor hadn’t been walking her dog and seen smoke, the house-not to mention Roscoe-would’ve been incinerated.”
I didn’t know what to say; I just tried to look sympathetic and shocked and concerned, which was no trick, because I was all of those things. But I just didn’t know what you could do to keep a sad proud chronic drinker, whose career was a shambles, from drinking. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I wasn’t sure Roscoe should have that taken away from him. What else did he have?
“I thought I was enough,” Mae said. She had a blank expression, but you could almost see her heart breaking in the watery shimmer of her eyes. “We were so in love. We still are. But we had plans to get his career going again. We had more than just plans. He was writing again. Only these past few months, he’s been drinking more than writing.”
Tom raised his eyebrows in a sideways glance that Mae wasn’t supposed to see; but she did, and picked up on how uncomfortable Tom was hearing all this, and she seemed suddenly embarrassed.
She stood. “Well. Maybe I should just take a room of my own.”
“Whatever for?” I asked.
“Roscoe said he planned to register under a phony name. He likes to mingle with people, with fans, but on his own terms; doesn’t like to have them dropping by his hotel room at all hours. But he went off and neglected to tell me what name he’d be using. The clerk is the night clerk and wasn’t on duty when my husband checked in, so describing him won’t get me a key or a room number.”
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