The major attraction of the room, however, was old books: hardcover editions in dustjacket, with prices routinely in the forty to one hundred dollar area-The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, a surrealistic cover depicting a little idol with blood on it; Galatea by James M. Cain, a purple cover with a picture of a water tower. The appeal of all this was a bit beyond me. I’ve never been a collector, anyway not the type who has to have first editions and the like (a novel’s a novel-it doesn’t matter to me what’s on the cover or what edition it is, so long as it’s in English). But I did get a kick out of seeing the rare old paperbacks from the ’40s and ’50s, with their garish covers.
I had done my collecting years and years ago, in secondhand stores where I’d gotten dog-eared paperbacks of Spillane and Prather and Roscoe Kane and the like with gloriously tacky covers, babes and bullets and blood-what more could an impressionable teenager ask? And I’d paid a nickel or a dime apiece for them. The dealers here were asking (and sometimes getting) ten dollars and up. It wasn’t unusual to see a paperback (The Marijuana Mob by James Hadley Chase; Five Murderers by Raymond Chandler) go for thirty dollars or more.
And all the Roscoe Kane first edition paperbacks-which yesterday would have brought perhaps five dollars per-were marked twenty-five dollars and up. Dying can do wonders for a guy’s career. Gat Garson would’ve cheerfully shot the dealers who’d indulged in this overnight grave robbing; Gat wasn’t around, so I shot them for him-using dirty looks for ammunition, instead of.38 slugs. Not that any of them noticed, or anyway cared.
I caught up with Kathy and her Noir sweatshirt at a table where a lavish paperback selection had every passerby’s eyes popping out at the bright colors and sexy, gory subject matter. This particular dealer was a guy I knew-Bob Weinberg, a bearded guy with glasses and a sense of humor so dry you didn’t laugh till a day later; his prices today were, as usual, not out of line. And he hadn’t raised his Roscoe Kane prices, either. I complimented him on that.
“Don’t be silly,” he said. He wore a green sweater and cream button-down shirt and gray slacks, a conservative contrast to the excesses of the covers of his wares, spread out before him like a kitsch banquet. (Do real men eat kitsch?)
“It’s just refreshing to run across a dealer who isn’t a ghoul.”
“Dealers are rumored to be human,” he said, as if not entirely in agreement with that notion. “I do have a Roscoe Kane item you might be interested in. In fact, I brought it with you in mind.”
“I have all the books, Bob. And I don’t have the patience to go after the short stories in the pulps.”
“No, this is something special. I think you’ll like this. Let me check with my wife and see where we put it.”
Bob’s wife was his business partner.
Meanwhile, Kathy was looking at the cover of a Kane book called Hearse Class Frail.
“Don’t tell anybody,” she said, “but I have to admit I like these covers.”
This particular one portrayed a beautiful busty blonde in a negligee looking out her bedroom window where, in the blue darkness of the night, Gat Garson was punching out several thugs.
“You don’t like the books,” I said, “but you like the covers.”
She shrugged. “It evokes an era. And I have to admit something…”
“Feel free.”
“I never read one of these Gat Garson things all the way through. Maybe if I got into one…”
“I’ll buy you a copy of one of his better ones.”
“That’d be nice. I’d like to give Roscoe Kane another try.”
“As a gesture to me.”
She gave me wry smile #764. “Maybe I’m just trying to keep on your good side. I’m counting on that interview with you.”
“Your publisher might have some objection to your running an interview with me, you know.”
“Gregg gives me free editorial rein. The interview’s still on, then?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“After you take me out to dinner, that is.”
“Right. I’m all for bribing journalists before they interview me; it’s good for my image.”
“What image is that?”
I scowled at her. “The Gat Garson of the ’80s.”
Weinberg was back and he had a big twenty-by-twenty-five piece of bristol board covered with a protective sheet of tissue paper through which I could, barely, see something-something I liked very much.
“I don’t collect that stuff,” I said, not very convincingly.
“It’s up to you,” Weinberg said. Not the hardest sell.
“It’s beautiful,” Kathy said, something like awe in her voice.
And so it was: the original cover painting to Murder Me Again, Doll, my favorite Gat Garson novel; the very painting that had adorned the cover of the novel’s original publication in 1958, which I had read a battered used copy of in 1961, the first Roscoe Kane novel I ever read, the book that gave me Gat Garson fever.
The painting showed Gat on a fire escape, a lithe brunette beauty in a negligee huddling next to him as he fired his.38 down toward several armed thugs climbing up toward them. It was a night scene, blue tones shattered by bursts of red and orange from Gat’s gat.
“It’s by Kinstler,” Weinberg said. “He’s a big-time portrait painter now, you know-his paperback covers are getting collectible.”
“I believe it.”
“Imagine,” Weinberg said, “having a painting by somebody who did both Gerald Ford’s portrait and Gat Garson’s.”
“I don’t think I can afford it.” I was holding the painting in my hands, which were shaking-Gat seemed to be moving; I could almost hear the gun going KA-CHOW….
“I was going to ask two hundred for it. Unless you wanted it, in which case I’d settle for one seventy-five. Of course, that was before Roscoe Kane died on us.”
“Now what do you want?”
“One seventy-five.”
“It might be worth twice that, now that Roscoe’s gone.”
“I brought it here to offer you for one seventy-five. Do you want it or not?”
I handed the painting back to him-and wrote him out a check.
“Keep it for me till I’ve been around the room, would you, Bob?”
“Sure,” he said-shrugging, as if this deal couldn’t have meant less to him. But he’d gone out of his way to be nice to me, and had managed to confirm the rumor that some dealers were human, after all.
Kathy and I walked along, glancing at the various tables of colorful paperback and pulp covers.
“Did you notice how much the ‘doll’ Gat’s holding onto in the painting looked like you?” I asked her.
“I was afraid to point it out without sounding like an egomaniac,” she admitted. “That’s some pretty girl in that painting.”
“Don’t you mean pretty ‘woman’?”
Her smile went crinkly on me. “No, Mal. That was definitely a girl.”
“You, on the other hand, are…”
“Definitely a woman. But is that so bad?”
“You don’t hear me complaining.”
We each picked up a few books as we wandered through the adjacent rooms-she bought an extra copy of guest-of-honor Donaldson’s most recent novel, Poisonous Wine, to get an autograph later; and I found a couple of novels I’d been looking for by Jim Thompson, an underappreciated crime novelist of the ’50s whose bleak books made James M. Cain seem like Louisa May Alcott. Phyllis White, the widow of the ’con’s namesake, Anthony Boucher, and a regular, treasured guest of the Bouchercon, was chatting with Otto Penzler at the Mysterious Press table. Kathy and I stopped so I could pick up the Spillane collection Penzler had recently published and I exchanged smiles with Otto and Mrs. White. Tim Culver had joined Cynthia at the autograph table; they were cordial to the fans, but I still sensed a tension between them.
Then we came to the Mystery House table. Various Gorman publications were on display-including that slipcased set of Carroll John Daly that both T
om Sardini and I had sprung for by mail-and so was Gorman.
So much for dealers being human.
I hadn’t noticed him come in, which was like failing to notice a garbage scow pull into your marina. I must’ve been caught up in that deal with Weinberg and the painting, and Gorman must’ve been uncharacteristically close-mouthed for the past few minutes, because normally his loud and obnoxious voice would have carried like a bad smell in a small room.
“Well,” he said. “It’s Mallory. The asshole.”
He wasn’t a big man, at least not tall; maybe five-eight. He had a beer belly and a goatee in which flecks of his last half-dozen meals hung on like bad memories. His hair was a washed-out, colorless red and thinning, and his nose was roadmapped darker red. His eyes were little dark beady things that looked out from under bushy eyebrows like bugs hiding under weeds. His thick upper lip curled up under the mustache part of the goatee and revealed teeth as yellow as the sun, but not shining.
“I love you, too, Gorman.”
He poked a thumb at a chest ensconced in a pale green sweater polka-dotted with vague foodstains and strained to the point of looking threadbare over the protruding belly; one of the collars of the paisley shirt beneath the sweater poked out like a knife, the other was tucked in. For a guy worth half a million easy, he was hardly a page out of GQ.
“Anytime you want a piece of me, say the word, asshole. We can step outside now, if you like.”
“All right,” I said.
He just stood there behind his table with a nervous, fallen expression, trying to figure out what to do since I’d called his bluff.
Then he grinned, lamely. “You’d fall for anything, Mallory. You’re that big a sucker.”
“Oh. I get it. You were just kidding. You don’t want to go outside and beat me up.”
“I got better things to do.”
“Like swindle people?” I said.
He bristled. “That’s a serious accusation, asshole. You… you better be able to back that up.”
I looked at Kathy, whose presence Gorman hadn’t yet acknowledged despite her being the editor of one of his publications, and said, “You want to hear why the king of Publisher’s Row, here, doesn’t like me?”
Caught between me and her boss, Kathy just looked blank, managing to swallow once, but not to say anything.
I went ahead: “There was an old mystery writer named Raoul Wheeler. He wasn’t the greatest mystery writer in the world, but he did a series of short stories back in the ’40s about a character who was the forerunner of James Bond. Erik Flayr, a secret service man who battled larger-than-life villains.”
Kathy was nodding; she’d heard of Wheeler and his creation.
Despite her knowing most of this, I wanted to say it all; some people were gathering, and not all of them knew the Raoul Wheeler story.
“Wheeler was one of those writers like Carroll John Daly who are historically important, mentioned in all the reference books and such, but who didn’t really make it. The Flayr character had a brief period of popularity in the pulps, and Columbia Pictures even made a serial about him; but that was it for Wheeler-his moment of glory. Then came the James Bond boom in the ’60s and some of the mystery-fiction historians remembered Wheeler’s work and started dropping his name. But none of Wheeler’s Eric Flayr stuff got brought back in print, during the Bond boom, because Wheeler had never done Flayr novels, just short stories, and publishers of paperbacks like to do novels, not short-story collections….”
The rest of Gorman’s face was gradually turning to the same shade of red as his nose.
“Wheeler finished out his career writing soft-core porn and confession-magazine stuff, never amounting to much… but he had a certain pride in Eric Flayr. He lived in Clinton, Iowa, Wheeler did, near me. I heard he was living there and I drove up to meet him. He lived in a two-room flat and he was ill-dying of cancer, in fact. A frail little man with a mustache. Skinny. But he was a nice old guy, with lots of stories about people he met in the pulp days-Hammett, Chandler, Daly, Fred Nebel, Frank Gruber, all those guys-and he had a complete collection of the Thrilling Detective Adventure pulps with his Eric Flayr stories in them. One afternoon, he gave them to me. A gift. A legacy.”
Gorman began talking to his flunky, that teenaged kid with acne on his neck and a plaid shirt. Pretending to ignore me, and the small crowd that was gathering.
“I was an innocent back then-this was maybe six years ago. All I knew about Gregg Gorman was that he was reprinting rare, important mystery fiction, for the hard-core mystery fan market. So I wrote him a letter. Told him I had a complete run of the Flayr stories. Suggested collecting them into a book. Gorman called me-he came on a little strong, but I figured that was just the difference between Chicago and Port City, Iowa. What did I care if he was obnoxious, as long as he published a collection of Wheeler’s stories-which he said he intended doing. In fact, he’d had the idea before I even came to him, but had been stopped by the rarity of this particular pulp-even top collectors like Blackbeard and Pronzini didn’t have a complete run of Thrilling Detective Adventures between them! So he was very grateful.”
Gorman quit pretending not to be paying attention and tried to stare me down.
“We met in Chicago and worked out a deal: I would provide him with photocopies of all the stories-they numbered forty-some in all-and he agreed to pay Wheeler an advance of a thousand dollars per book… he planned a series of four Eric Flayr collections. And while four thousand dollars isn’t the moon, it would mean a lot to Wheeler, both financially and in terms of building his self-esteem by showing him that something he’d written had enough lasting value to generate a few bucks for him, at this late stage of the game. Also, Gorman agreed to put my name on the cover as editor of the series, use introductions by me, and pay me a hundred dollars per book. This meant quite a bit to me at the time, because I hadn’t published anything more than a few short stories in Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, and I could use the exposure.”
“Get out of here,” Gorman said. “You’re blocking my table-I wanna do some business here!”
“The punchline is predictable. Gorman looked into the copyright on the Thrilling Detective Adventure material and found it had lapsed; this made the Eric Flayr stories public domain. He used the photocopied material I provided to put the books together, and paid neither Wheeler nor myself a cent.”
Gorman said, “You didn’t have a contract, asshole.”
I pointed a finger at him. “Call me that once more.”
He sneered at me, but didn’t say anything.
“Wheeler died before the first of the books came out,” I told her-and the little crowd. “And Gorman here built his publishing empire on it.”
“Empire,” Gorman snorted. “I’m just a small-businessman, a cottage industry, and a fan who likes mysteries. Who besides me woulda printed that old hack’s garbage? I gave him some posterity, schmuck. You’re just cryin’ ’cause I didn’t put your name on the covers.”
I said nothing.
The crowd began to disperse-a crowd of people shaking their heads.
“Thanks, jerk,” he said. “I oughta sue you for defamation of character.”
“You’ll have to come up with some character, first,” I said.
Besides-these fans wouldn’t boycott Gorman; even I bought Gorman’s books, though I did so through another dealer, so as not to give him the satisfaction of knowing he was getting my money. For all his faults, Gorman was one of a handful of publishers putting out books of rare material the fans sorely wanted; and he was the publisher who had resurrected the Eric Flayr tales from their unjust oblivion. He was also the first American publisher in over a decade to give Roscoe Kane’s work the light of day….
“I want to talk to you about Roscoe Kane,” I said.
“Screw you,” he said.
“I have to admit I’m glad to hear you’ll be doing Roscoe’s final few Garson books.”
“First in the U.S. to do
it,” he said smugly.
“Maybe with the publicity Roscoe’s death’ll generate, you’ll have a valuable piece of property in those books.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just an observation.”
“Get outta here, Mallory! Just get the hell away.” He looked at Kathy. “You’re not with him, are you?”
Kathy, stunned by the behavior of both of us, managed only to nod.
“You keep lousy company, baby,” he said to her.
She burned. “It’s nothing compared to my taste in publishers,” she said, and turned and walked quickly away.
I pointed a finger at Gorman again. “We’re going to talk some more,” I said.
“I’m shakin’, I’m shakin’,” Gorman said, moving his body like a little kid responding to threats from another little kid. Which was maybe the case.
When I caught up with Kathy, she glared at me. “Couldn’t that have waited?”
“Uh, what have waited?”
“Your big scene with Gorman. He is my boss, you know!”
“Come on-that guy’s an iguana. He’s…”
“My publisher!” She turned and gave me a tight angry look. “Noir means a lot to me. I don’t make much off it, it’s not my living, you understand, but it’s the part of my life that makes the rest of my life worth living. And Gorman’s my publisher. He may not be Hugh Hefner, but he’s my publisher!”
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