Books to Die For

by John Connolly

  Marcia Muller has authored more than thirty-five novels, three of them in collaboration with her husband, Bill Pronzini. Together, the Mulzinis—as their friends call them—have coedited a dozen short-story anthologies and a five-pound nonfiction book on the genre, which can also be used as a doorstop. In 2005 Muller was named a Grand Master, the highest award of the Mystery Writers of America. Pronzini was given the same honor in 2008, making them the only living couple to share the title (Ross Macdonald and Margaret Millar were similarly honored). The Mulzinis live in Sonoma County, California, in a house full of cats and books. Muller’s next Sharon McCone novel, Looking for Yesterday, will be published by Grand Central Publishing in October 2012. Visit her online at www.marciamuller.com.

  The Friends of Eddie Coyle

  by George V. Higgins (1970)

  ELMORE LEONARD

  * * *

  George V. Higgins (1939–99), sometimes referred to as the “Balzac of Boston”—although he would probably have preferred a comparison to Dickens—was a lawyer, academic, columnist, and author. He was a prosecuting attorney in the Organized Crime Section of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office before turning to private practice, and his pursuit of mobsters and lowlifes lent a particular pungency to his fictional portrayals of their kind. Unfortunately, he was probably cursed by the fact that his first novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, was his best. Despite writing many others, he struggled to escape Eddie’s shadow. His 1990 book On Writing is honest about the writer’s trade to the point of being depressing, and is probably better read after one has become a published writer, rather than before.

  * * *

  In the winter of 1972, my agent at the time, H. N. Swanson in Hollywood, called to ask if I’d read a recently published novel called The Friends of Eddie Coyle. I told him I hadn’t heard of it and he said, “This is your kind of stuff, kiddo, run out and get it before you write another word.” Swanie was a legend in the movie business, having represented F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. I did what I was told, bought the book, opened to the first page, and read: “Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.” I finished the book in one sitting and felt as if I’d been set free. So this is how you do it.

  The reviews were all raves. Joe McGinniss in the New York Times said that George Higgins has “given us the most penetrating glimpse yet into what seems the real world of crime—a world of stale beer smells . . . and pale unnourished little men who do what they have to do to get along.” Walter Clemons in Newsweek said Eddie Coyle “isn’t a thriller (though it is—stunningly—that) so much as a highly specialized novel of manners.” The review in the New Yorker nailed it in the opening paragraph by listing these friends of Coyle—the man himself described as “a small fish in the Boston underworld”—the bank robbers Jimmy Scalisi and Artie Valantropo; the gun dealer Jackie Brown; Dillon the bartender, a character to keep your eye on; and a dealing T-man, Dave Foley. They’re the book. They reveal themselves not only by what they do, but also by the way they speak, their sounds establishing the attitude or style of the writing.

  To me it was a revelation.

  I was already writing in scenes, trying to move my plots with dialogue while keeping the voices relatively flat, understated. What I learned from George Higgins was to relax, not be so rigid in trying to make the prose sound like writing, to be more aware of rhythms of coarse speech and the use of obscenities. Most of all, George Higgins showed me how to get into scenes without wasting time, without setting up the scene, where the characters are and what they look like. In other words, hook the reader right away. I also realized that criminals can appear to be ordinary people and have some of the same concerns as the rest of us.

  George Higgins learned all this on his own. He majored in English at Boston College, which was my major at the University of Detroit Mercy, another Jesuit school. Higgins went on to Stanford, he said “to learn how to write fiction,” which he found out “can’t be taught, but I didn’t know that then.” I left school to write Chevrolet ads and also failed to learn anything about writing. Higgins joined the Associated Press as a rewrite man, a step in the right direction referred to as “like toilet training.” He returned to Boston College for a law degree, got a job as an assistant U.S. attorney, and loved it, meeting a parade of characters he would soon be using in his novels.

  Still, getting published was tough. Along the way from Stanford to Eddie Coyle, Higgins wrote as many as ten books that he either discarded or were rejected by publishers—perhaps for the same reason my first novel with a contemporary setting, The Big Bounce, was rejected by publishers and film producers eighty-four times in all, editors calling the book a “downer,” void of sympathetic characters—the same ones I’m writing about thirty years later. Higgins’s agent at the time of Eddie Coyle read the manuscript, told him it was unsalable, and dropped him. Let this be an inspiration to beginning writers discouraged by one rejection after another. If you believe you know what you’re doing, you have to give publishers time to catch up and catch on.

  In the beginning, both Higgins and I had to put up with labels applied to our work, critics calling us the second coming of Raymond Chandler. At the time we first met, at the Harbourfront Reading in Toronto, George and I agreed that neither of us had come out of the Hammett-Chandler school of crime writing. My take on The Friends of Eddie Coyle, for example—which I’ve listed a number of times as the best crime novel ever written—makes The Maltese Falcon read like Nancy Drew. Our method in telling stories has always been grounded in authenticity based on background data, the way it is as well as the way such people speak. We also agreed that it’s best not to think too much about plot and begin to stew over where the story is going. Instead, rely on the characters to show you the way.

  Five years after Eddie Coyle, a New York Times review of one of my books said that I “often cannot resist a set piece—a lowbrow aria with a crazy kind of scatological poetry of its own—in the Higgins manner.” And that’s how you learn, by imitating.

  Higgins has been called the Balzac of Boston while I’ve been labeled the Dickens of Detroit. We didn’t discuss it, so I’m not sure what George thought of his alliterative tag. What I wonder is who I’d be if I lived in Chicago.

  George V. Higgins died on November 6, 1999, only days short of his sixtieth birthday. During the past twenty years or so his name and mine have appeared together in the press—often in the same sentence—some 178 times. I’m honored.

  Addendum:

  There’s not much I can say about George V. Higgins that I didn’t say twelve years ago when I wrote this piece, which was the introduction to the paperback edition of The Friends of Eddie Coyle that came out in 2000. I can only say whatever I felt about that work then, I feel about it now with interest. It doesn’t get any better than Eddie Coyle, which is a blessing and a curse. You know you’re reading the best, but you also want to top it. (Elmore Leonard, January 2012)

  Regarded by his peers as a “writer’s writer,” the best-selling and critically acclaimed Elmore “Dutch” Leonard is the author of forty-six novels. Originally a writer of Westerns, he was first published in 1953 with The Bounty Hunters. He turned to writing crime novels in 1969, with The Big Bounce (The Moonshine War was published in the same year), and has continued to write crime novels since. His most recent novel is Raylan (2012). He was given his nickname in high school by a classmate, who named him after the Washington Senators’ pitcher Emil “Dutch” Leonard. Visit him online at www.elmoreleonard.com.

  The Steam Pig

  by James McClure (1971)

  MIKE NICOL

  * * *

  James McClure (1939–2006) was a South African–born journalist and novelist best known for his Kramer and Zondi series of mysteries set in the land of McClure’s birth, as well as two fine nonfiction studies of police at work in Liverpool and San Diego. Tromp Kramer is an Afrikaner police lieutenant, Mickey Zondi a Zu
lu detective sergeant, and the novels in which they feature are sly but impassioned studies of the realities of life in apartheid-era South Africa, influenced by McClure’s work as a journalist in Natal. McClure, married with a family, and under police surveillance because of his work, left South Africa and moved to England in 1965. He departed journalism in 1974 to write fiction full-time, but his heart was really in the newspaper business. He missed the camaraderie of the newsroom and, following a brief stint as an undertaker, he returned to his former trade, eventually becoming editor of the Oxford Mail, a post in which he remained until his retirement. Intending to return to fiction, he died with a novel left unfinished.

  * * *

  When James McClure’s The Steam Pig appeared in 1971, it came “like a slam to the kidneys,” to quote the New York Times Book Review. At least that’s how it was received outside South Africa. Inside, the reception was less enthusiastic. McClure was not much reviewed, and when he was, the notices were short. There was, however, a small coterie of left-leaning readers who snapped up The Steam Pig, but, their attentions aside, McClure remained underappreciated, if not unread.

  Yet The Steam Pig was unique. Nothing like it had appeared in South African fiction before. Sure, there was a handful of mysteries in the English tradition that had been published in the late 1950s, and a few PI stories had appeared in a magazine called Drum during the same decade, but nothing as visceral, as sardonic, as cutting, as ironic as this.

  In the early 1970s, South African literature in English was largely the late-bourgeois world of Nadine Gordimer’s novels. Crime fiction wasn’t on the radar, and it isn’t difficult to understand why.

  Crime novels featuring cops who solved crimes would be read as reinforcing the dictates of the state: in this instance, the apartheid state. If the state brought order to chaos, what were you saying about a state founded on racial discrimination that enforced its laws by exploitation, division, and abuse, not to mention torture, disappearances, and deaths? No liberal, self-respecting writer was going to side with the police by writing a police procedural. The cops were the enemy. They were an invading army.

  McClure might have agreed with this, but he had a different strategy. A South African by birth, he had worked as a reporter in the Durban and Pietermaritzburg area of what is now the province of KwaZulu/Natal, before immigrating to the U.K. in 1965. By then, apartheid was an iron fist. The resistance movements were banned, their leaders either imprisoned on Robben Island or in exile. The security branch was a frightening reality. You could be detained without representation for up to 180 days.

  Into this drops The Steam Pig, a novel that begins with a beautiful girl on a tray in a funeral parlor being adored by the undertaker.

  Look at her. Like that poet had said: a thing of beauty was a joy for ever.

  The perfect figure, and bones good for years yet. The navel, a dainty dish, was especially fine.

  His eyes felt none of the chill of the taut white skin. His fingertips rejoiced in the spring of the jet hair. Like the toes, the fingers were exquisitely shaped and well cared for. Not a mark or blemish anywhere.

  This scene, this tone of voice, was new in South African literature. But it didn’t stop with this unsettling, slightly risqué description. No, next there is a mix-up in the mortuary, and the wrong body goes off to the incinerator. Because of this mistake the young girl, whose death has been signed off as a heart attack, is put on the slab for an autopsy. And lo, she has been murdered with that particularly nasty weapon: a sharpened bicycle spoke inserted under the armpit and into the heart.

  The wonder of this instrument, according to the pathologist examining her remains, is that “as you withdraw a thin thing like a bike spoke, it seals off, see? All those layers, muscles, lungs, tissue, close up.” If you weren’t looking for a wound, you wouldn’t find one. So you can’t really blame the GP who wrote her off as a “cardiac arrest,” especially as she had a history of heart trouble.

  It is this discovery of a murder that introduces Lieutenant Tromp Kramer and his assistant, Sergeant Mickey Zondi. A white man and a black man who not only enjoy one another’s company but make a formidable team—in itself this was unusual, both literally and figuratively. Indeed, Kramer elects to work with Zondi rather than his white colleagues, something they cannot understand. Why would a white man deliberately choose to partner with a black man? It is unfathomable. The truth is that, as likeable as Kramer is, he is not as smart as Zondi; and although Zondi plays second fiddle throughout the investigation, it is Zondi who puts things together.

  Their walk-on scenes are fascinating in their differences. Here’s Kramer’s entrance:

  A suspect in the next room screamed. Not continuously, but at irregular intervals which made concentration difficult. Then the typewriter unaccountably jammed. The report was not going to be finished on time; Colonel Du Plessis had stipulated four o’clock and it was already 3.55 with at least a page to go.

  “So you can bloody well stick it, Colonel, sir,” Lieutenant Tromp Kramer declared loudly. He was quite alone in the Murder Squad office.

  The horror of the tortured prisoner’s scream juxtaposed with the humor of the jammed typewriter and Kramer’s irritation are part of McClure’s subversive strategy. His intention throughout the book is to lampoon and satirize the apartheid state. So Kramer is introduced in a police station that doubles as a torture chamber, a not uncommon situation in those days.

  Zondi, on the other hand, arrives on the scene by surprising his “boss” who has fallen asleep on the couch in the murdered woman’s rooms. Interestingly, Zondi always calls Kramer “boss,” and never uses the more loaded Afrikaans word “baas,” which came to signify subservience but also, according to the inflection, sarcasm.

  Zondi, who is a dapper dresser in a “snapbrim hat . . . [and a] zoot suit,” immediately begins examining the photographs of the murdered woman.

  Zondi tucked in the corners of a smile and went on with his illicit scrutiny of Miss Le Roux’s bromide image. Even dead a white woman had laws to protect her from primitive lust.

  “You want to get me into trouble, hey?”

  Zondi ignored him. The photographs were sharp and expertly printed, but the lighting had been too oblique and Miss Le Roux seemed to have ended up with a lot of her curves in the wrong places. Nevertheless, Zondi nodded his approval before tossing the envelope across.

  “A good woman,” he said. “She could have given many sons.”

  “Is that all you ever think about?” asked Kramer, and they both laughed. Zondi was an incorrigible pelvis man.

  Such is the bantering, knockabout relationship between Kramer and Zondi—at the time a seditious idea in itself. However, McClure never accords Zondi the same presence and authority in the story that he does the lieutenant, so Kramer remains the boss.

  Many years later, permutations of this duo were to resurface in South African crime fiction when it began to appear in the mid-2000s, having lain dormant (with one exception: Wessel Ebersohn) for almost a quarter of a century. It was as if McClure had set a convention for local crime novels where the crime-fighting protagonists would be drawn from different groups. Or maybe he just hit on a good thing. After all, the wisecracking duo is a stock-in-trade in literature (think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, think Vladimir and Estragon), and maybe McClure’s antecedents saw the same advantages.

  But beyond the duo, McClure also left a stylistic legacy of irony and humor, and a fascination with corruption in the public and private sectors. The Steam Pig, for instance, is about the lasciviousness of white businessmen and town politicians; it is about blackmail; it is about gang turf wars. It is about a casual viciousness and violence that permeates a society, not only in the state’s political system but in the underbelly, too. These elements, too, have been inherited by the South African crime writers currently building a foundation for the genre.

  The Steam Pig was not banned by the apartheid government, possibly because the censors felt the refe
rences to “kaffirs,” “wogs,” and “coolies” indicated that the writer supported the status quo. And, as the “cheeky black bastard,” as Kramer affectionately calls Zondi, was working for a white boss and the white boss “solved” the crime, all was well in the land of separate development. In fact, the only novel in the eight-book Kramer and Zondi series to be banned was The Sunday Hangman, which criticized the prison system. For the rest, the satire went unremarked in South Africa.

  It did not go unremarked elsewhere.

  Kingsley Amis said of McClure (who died in Oxford, U.K., in June 2006): “[He] provides not only action, pace, excitement and similar old-hat stuff, but more sense, more insight, more feeling, more about what it must be like in South Africa, more wit, more ingenuity, more craftsmanship, more art than you could find displayed by the sort of writer you see lengthily and respectfully reviewed in a month of Sundays (and of weeklies and dailies too).” The Washington Post reviewer called The Steam Pig “a revealing picture of the hate and sickness of the apartheid society.” The New York Times wrote: “Few first novels make this kind of impact.”

  Fortunately Soho Press in New York recently republished the novel, and gave it a new lease on life. This is just as well, as no South African publisher will touch it because of the controversial language. Strangely, though, Soho Press used a blurb on the cover that reads as if it might have been lifted from the 1971 edition: “In this award-winning first book of James McClure’s mystery series set in apartheid-era South Africa, a beautiful blonde has been murdered by a bicycle spoke through the heart, a Bantu gangster signature. It’s up to Lieutenant Kramer, the white detective, and Sergeant Zondi, his Bantu assistant, to figure out who killed her and why.” In a country agonizing over the language in Mark Twain’s books and over the use of the word “negro,” didn’t “Bantu” cause an editor to think twice? Apparently not.10