BEAT to a PULP: Hardboiled

by Garnett Elliott

  BEAT to a PULP: Hardboiled

  Introduction by

  Ron Scheer

  Cover by

  dMix

  Copyright © 2011 by BEAT to a PULP

  All stories copyrighted by their respective authors. Any story previously published in the BEAT to a PULP webzine, or otherwise noted, is copyrighted the date it originally appeared online.

  Copyright © 2007

  Patricia Abbott ("Ric with No K" previously published in Spinetingler)

  Copyright © 2009

  David Cranmer ("Vengeance on the 18th" first appeared online in May)

  Copyright © 2011

  John Hornor Jacobs ("The Death Fantastique" first appeared online in February); Thomas Pluck ("Black-Eyed Susan" previously published in Powder Burn Flash)

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, except where permitted by law.

  The stories herein are works of fiction. All of the characters, places, and events portrayed in this collection are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Image credits:

  Cover photo from iStock.com, Photoshop effect by dMix.

  PO Box 173

  Freeville, New York, 13068

  Other titles from BEAT to a PULP:

  BEAT to a PULP: Round One

  Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles

  Adventures of Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles Vol. II

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Hard Times

  Ron Scheer

  The Tachibana Hustle

  Garnett Elliott

  A Small Thing at the Devil's Punchbowl

  Kent Gowran

  Obstruction

  Glenn Gray

  The Death Fantastique

  John Hornor Jacobs

  Ric with No K

  Patricia Abbott

  Black-Eyed Susan

  Thomas Pluck

  The Blooming of Lester

  Brad Green

  The Janitor

  Ron Earl Phillips

  Vengeance on the 18th

  David Cranmer

  Second Round Dive

  Benoît Lelièvre

  The Second Coming of Hashbrown

  Kieran Shea

  .38 Special

  Amy Grech

  Bull's-Eye View

  Wayne D. Dundee

  Introduction: Hard Times

  We all see things through our favorite pair of reading glasses. Mine date from the turn of the last century, 1895 to 1915, the period of the early-early westerns. These were the years of Teddy Roosevelt, remembered as the champion of a Progressivist era of expansion, reform, and optimism. You see this celebrated in the western novel, where the freedom of the frontier lets ordinary men and women escape the constraints and corrupting influences of civilization, government, and Eastern capital.

  Optimism does not disappear in the decades that followed, but it takes a beating. Victorian ideals and sentiments fade. What were once glimpses of disillusionment among writers like Jack London and Frank Norris become more widespread, and hardboiled fiction emerges as a new genre.

  What came along to cause the big shift? Several jolts of twentieth-century reality: WWI, the promise and failure of Prohibition, the growth of organized crime, the noisy materialism of the 1920s, the stock market crash, and the Great Depression.

  Fractured

  The change was gradual, but you could argue that 1912 was the year it got started. A three-way split in that year's elections fractured the political landscape and produced an "accidental President." Republicans, divided between Roosevelt and Taft, lost out to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who moved into the White House with only 41.8 percent of the popular vote.

  Wilson may be remembered for his idealism, but his years in office were marked by a growing national discontent. As the age of Roosevelt-style social reform ebbed, a fierce anti-capitalist spirit grew, and along with it the labor movement. Suppressing anti-war sentiment going into WWI, the feds targeted activists and other dissenters. Eugene V. Debs, a Socialist who got as much as six percent of the vote in 1912, was thrown into prison as a "traitor."

  Even if you ignore the politics, you'd sense a major slippage along cultural fault lines when you pick up Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929) and Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930). Both writers, born in the 1890s, have found a voice that speaks of loss of faith in a dependable social order.

  Fool to care

  The new order now revealed in fiction is corrupt, hypocritical, and complacently indifferent to the consequences. The bleakness of that vision found expression in a break from literary styles that had served the past. Others no doubt preceded them, but Hemingway's and Hammett's influence was profound and is still felt today.

  It's a style marked by a stripping away of old-style sentiment. It feigns to not care—to have no feelings about the loss of all that used to feed dreams and faith in the old truisms. Only a few short decades before, mainstream culture thrived on the mythology of the Old West, cowboy stories, and the likes of Horatio Alger. Gumption, courage, and honesty were the American way.

  These notions would linger in popular fiction and the new medium of movies, but there was a growing chorus of writers and an army of readers who didn't buy them anymore. Toughened, in the way that the runny insides of an egg turn solid in boiling water, they responded to the stripped-down style we've come to know as "hardboiled."

  Over the decades hardboiled has come in different forms, but at its purest, it uses language and constructs sentences that shun emotion. Its tone is matter of fact, which is often a mask for deep irony. It also makes no effort to be polite. While the fiction that came before wouldn't offend anyone's maiden aunt, the new fiction could be rude and crude, even purposely shocking.

  Betrayed

  Understand that I'm not saying the new fiction had no feeling. It just drew a hard line on sentimentality—the open display of sentiment. Beneath the surface of hardboiled fiction are the feelings that attend disillusionment. There is sorrow and anger on the one hand and a kind of relief on the other.

  The sorrow and anger you can understand, but it's also a relief to be freed from old, restrictive notions way past their shelf life. No more effort wasted on trying to make old verities work after they've been revealed as no longer operative. Thus the scorn for pretense, willful ignorance, and hypocrisy. Common is the belief that ninety percent of everything is crap and will probably stay that way.

  In self-defense, hardboiled protagonists retreat to the private world of the individual. There they rely on their own judgment, distrust others, and question authority. Power is assumed to be misused and wealth ill gotten.

  True, hardboiled fiction is also escapist. It offers a low-risk walk on the wild side. And in that regard, it makes romance of anti-romance. Cheap thrills. Kiss, kiss, bang, bang. But I'd argue it's about far more than that.

  If you listen closely, there's a tone of mourning under the words. The social order may have become unhinged, but worse is the loss of a moral order. The rage that often drives this fiction comes from the betrayal of human decency, fairness, and honesty. All the virtues once found, by the way, in the early cowboy westerns.

  Gender divides

  Polite fiction of the turn of the last century kept women on a pedestal and rarely alluded to those who'd fallen from it. Cowboys and other heroes routinely fell in love wit
h the sweetest of sweet young things. Some were both pretty and intelligent. But most could be trusted to be what they seemed. Altogether, I'll add, it was an arrangement that suited men.

  Enter the femme fatale, never what she seems to be and hardly to be trusted. Gladly displaying her sexuality, she's the kind of woman that dared not speak its name for turn-of-the-century readers. Does it matter that women had just won the vote, been the driving force behind the 18th and 19th Amendments, cut their hair short, threw away their corsets, and let their hemlines soar? Probably. A new creature, sprung from the confines of Victorian propriety, how could she not strike fear in the hearts of men? Fear and desire, too. Flip sides of the same coin.

  Hardboiled, as it flourished, was chiefly for and about a gender in shock. The brotherhood of man was now a quaint old notion and the docile female a thing of the past. The new fiction said it like it was, for a generation of males whose sexual anxieties were aroused by the arrival of a newly liberated woman.

  Crime fighting

  The cowboy hero of pre-war fiction was strong, but tough only when he had to be. In general, he was congenial and a willing defender of the social order. The code he lived by honored ideals of trust and honesty. Corruption and depravity were confined largely to the "civilized" East, and outlaws were kept as much as possible to the untamed fringes of the frontier. Until the coming of the law, there were vigilantes who took up guns and enough rope for hanging to remove undesirable elements.

  In hardboiled fiction, the crime-ridden East and the Old West style of law enforcement often converge. In place of the cowboy is the private citizen, possibly armed, up against a corrupt world that extends as far as he can see.

  Like the earlier cowboy, there is still a kind of honor in what he does. Often poorly paid, he takes pride in being incorruptible. He also works alone, living by his wits and, if necessary, his fists and a firearm. The cowboy of postwar pulp fiction evolved along similar lines.

  Wrapping up

  My argument here, if I have one, is that hardboiled fiction reflected the cultural crisis that followed the disruptive events ushered in by WWI. As social conditions worsened with the Crash, its bleak vision was further amplified. And the ordered, promising world found in earlier popular fiction receded even more swiftly into the distant past.

  Looking back to 1912 and the election of an "accidental President," we see history repeating itself in 2000, when two reformist candidates split a vote that put a third into office. The result has been a rolling back of Progressivist achievements at the expense of everyday working men and women. Waging war abroad has brought us so-called "Patriot" acts that have been used to justify the erosion of basic liberties.

  Government and the media are unduly influenced by big corporations. We hover on the brink of economic collapse. International relations are confounded by terrorism and loose nukes. Public trust is abused right, left, and center. Our government, we're told, is broken, while the rich get super-rich and the poor get poorer.

  Reading hardboiled fiction written today, as collected here in David Cranmer's new volume of BEAT to a PULP, we see reflected the same conditions that gave birth to hardboiled fiction almost a century ago. No surprise that hardboiled has found a renaissance among a new generation of writers. Like its antecedents, it is partly escapist and tongue in cheek. But read the news, and try to believe it's not a fitting response to the new normal.

  Ron Scheer

  October, 2011

  Ron Scheer reviews western fiction and movies at buddiesinthesaddle.blogspot.com. He is currently at work on a book about early western writers, 1880-1915, and a glossary of early western slanguage.

  The Tachibana Hustle

  Garnett Elliott

  Rain pelted the shops walled with corrugated aluminum, the worn signs, the flow of umbrella-wielding customers coursing down the clean, yet shabby streets of Uchiega district. Shinjuku skyscrapers loomed in the distance, monoliths of black glass and blinking corporate logos.

  Viper Ogata ducked under a shop awning to escape the rain. He lit a cigarette and passed it to the man squatting on a piece of sodden cardboard next to him. The man was dressed like a Buddhist monk. Fat drops spattered off his enormous straw hat and made splish sounds as they filled his begging bowl.

  "That's the one?" Viper said, nodding at a shop across the street.

  Smoke curled from under the hat's brim. "Check out the sign."

  Viper squinted. The shop used to sell oranges and persimmons, but now the windows had been blacked out. A circle of bright yellow neon glowed next to the front door. As Viper watched, the circle blinked, turned into a pie-chart with one slice missing, and blinked back into a circle again.

  "I don't get it," he said.

  "You'll have to see to understand." Junichiro rose from the cardboard square, flicking rain off his hands.

  Viper followed him across the street. A few customers came drifting out of the nameless shop. Their eyes were red and hollow, like junkies. After a moment, the rain's assault seemed to batter them back to reality, and they slunk off, fingers twitching.

  Viper pushed his way inside. The shop smelled of damp fabric and too many sweating bodies crammed together. Teenagers, salary-men in crumpled suits, housewives, Ginza prostitutes, and old pensioners wearing cheap plastic rain hats stood elbow to elbow, hunched over rows of arcade consoles, their faces awash with digital glow. Electronic music chattered.

  "Over here." Jun gestured towards the sole unoccupied console. Viper had to remove his sunglasses in order to see the screen. Colorful ghost-shapes chased a yellow circle through a maze of dots.

  "I still don't get it," he said.

  Jun shoved a coin in the console's slot. "Paku-paku taberu."

  * * *

  They'd hit several takeout places on the way back to Boss Gomyo's building. Arms loaded with Styrofoam containers, Viper had to shoulder the pachinko parlor doors before staggering inside.

  The parlor was dead. A few decrepit seniors flicked away at the machines, under a pall of blue-white cigarette haze. None of them looked up as Viper and Jun made their way to the lobby. In better times a dozen young men sporting perms and loud suits would've been hanging around the place, but now the couches were empty. Fumiko sat with her long legs braced on the reception desk, face hidden behind a manga.

  "Where's Hanzo?" Viper asked. "He's supposed to be floor security."

  Fumiko shrugged. "Resigned."

  "When?"

  "Couple hours ago."

  "Who's guarding the boss?"

  "You are now, I guess."

  He traded looks with Jun. The two of them wrestled their take-out over to the elevator. Jun managed to bump the 'up' button with his knee. They rode to the third floor.

  "If Hanzo's really gone..." Jun said.

  "Let's see what he says, first."

  The elevator doors opened onto a darkened hallway of bare steel frame and exposed wiring. All the interior panels had been removed from the third floor, making it a single, skeletal room. Black felt screened the windows. The only light came from an ancient Sony console set in a far corner.

  "Boss?" Viper called out. "Boss, we've brought food."

  A grunt echoed. Boss Gomyo lay sideways on a tatami mat, his back to them, watching TV. He'd slipped his robe down over one thick shoulder, exposing the Gomyo family tattoo: a cockroach leaping from the open petals of a lotus blossom.

  Viper cleared his throat. "Boss?"

  Gomyo pointed at the screen without turning. "Wrestling's on."

  "Sorry."

  Viper and Jun started setting down the containers, pulling back lids. After a moment the smell grew thick and Gomyo glanced behind him.

  "Did you get the tempura udon?"

  "And spareribs," Jun said.

  Another grunt. Gomyo slid around and grabbed a handful of steaming ramen. He choked the noodles down.

  "Hanzo's just left," Viper said.

  "Huh. Promote Shigeda."

  "Shigeda left two weeks
ago."

  "Huh." Gomyo slurped his udon. "This tempura's fucking soggy." He flung the bowl at Viper's feet, who danced back in time to avoid having his slacks splashed.

  Jun bowed his shaved head. "Boss, we found out why the pachinko parlor's been losing all its business. And why many of the shops have stopped paying protection."

  Gomyo seemed to forget about his food. "Go on."

  "There's a new video game."

  When Jun finished, the boss looked puzzled. "But people don't win anything, playing this Paku Man? No actual prizes?"

  "You can enter your initials if you get the high score," Viper put in.

  Gomyo shook his head. "So it's not actually gambling."

  "It's electronic heroin, is what it is," Viper said. "I myself played for two hours."

  "I as well," Jun said. "I figured out a pattern. The red ghost tries to chase you down by the most direct route."

  "But the pink ghost is trickier," Viper said.

  Gomyo wiped robata sauce from the corner of his mouth. "Then why have the shops stopped paying protection? Our fees should be going up, if everyone's playing this game."

  "Another family must've established a relationship with the Paku distributors," Jun said. "The protection is being assumed by them."

  "Which family?"

  Jun shrugged.

  "Find out. And find out how we can get our hands on these games. I'll mortgage this whole building to buy some." Gomyo heaved himself up from the floor and started pacing. "We'll undercut the competition, somehow. With money coming in again, I can hire our men back. Lease more games. We'll go to war if we have to."