Gun in Cheek
By Bill Pronzini
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
© 1982 – Digital Edition © 2011 Bill Pronzini
First Published 1982 by Mysterious Press
Cover Design By: David Dodd
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Acknowledgments
For their help and encouragement on this project, the author would like to thank the following writers, critics, and aficionados: Jeffrey Wallmann, Jon L. Breen, Francis M. Nevins, Douglas Greene, Ellen Nehr, Bill Blackbeard, Angelo Panagos, Art Scott, and Bruce Taylor.
Special thanks, for their faith and perseverance, to Clyde Taylor of Curtis Brown, Ltd., and Bill Thompson of Coward, McCann & Geoghegan.
For all those who love a mystery
Contents
Introduction
I think I know why Bill Pronzini asked me write an introduction to a book that really needs none. He knows. Not only does he know how to write good mystery novels, he also knows where to find all the bad ones, those he will soon define for you as "alternative classics." But more than that, he has an encyclopedic memory of the entire genre, and surely a man such as this knows that I myself wrote a few of these alternative classics, way back then when I was still struggling to learn my trade. Frankly, I feel a bit offended that some of my early masterpieces were passed over for consideration.
Who, for example, among any of the entrants Mr. Pronzini has chosen to include in his wonderful book could ever have written an exchange like:
"You're cute, "she said. She was slightly looped, he thought, and her voice sounded deep and throaty even when she spoke. "I noticed you while I was singing, and I said to myself, He's cute. I was right."
She looked better close up, much better than she did on the bandstand. She had her hair pulled back tight over her ears, clipped at the back of her neck with an amber clasp, fanning out over her shoulders. The blouse she wore had a deep V sweeping down from her shoulders, terminating in a shadowed cleft between high breasts. He remembered staring at the soft whiteness of her skin as she leaned over the table.
"You're very cute," she repeated, and he said, "You're not bad yourself."
She blew smoke across the table. "Sparkling dialogue," she said dryly. "Refugees from a Grade-B stinkeroo."
"Pardon me. I'm not dressed for repartee."
I wrote those priceless lines. Yes, Mr. Pronzini.
Moreover, they were published.
But did this scrupulous scholar consider them worthy of inclusion in his otherwise impeccably researched and wittily informative book? I should say not. Or how about this?
And then I was falling.
I don't know what I thought as I fell. I know it seemed to take a long time, seemed to take forever, seemed never to end. I saw the ledge and the struggling figures on it, and the figures came closer, and below them I saw the twisted rocks of Hokus Pokus, waiting I kept dropping and there was a tight nausea in my throat, and a scream that never found voice. I closed my eyes, and I forced moisture from them, and I felt the wind ripping at me, and I was aware of the rope around my waist and the rush of air as I fell.
I hit. I hit with a wrenching pain that shot up the length of my leg. My body crushed onto my twisted foot, and a flash of yellow exploded inside my head. I heard someone scream, a hoarse curse that shattered the stillness of the mountain, an anguished cry of sheer, raw pain. And then I realized that my mouth was open, and the scream was coming from my own throat.
I wrote that, too.
And it, too, was published, Mr. Pronzini.
Or how about:
She snatched the knife from the table, and then she took a lithe step toward my chair, gripping my hair in one hand, pulling my head back, and then lifting the knife high over my throat, a tight grin on her face.
"Aren't you, darling?" she said through clenched teeth. "Aren't you quite helpless?"
Tarrance stood frozen. Yoshi, on the other side of the tea cart, had gone suddenly pale. I sat in the chair and looked up at the tip of the carving knife, and then Adrienne began laughing shrilly, tossing the knife down onto the terrace. Yoshi picked it up.
"My wife has a keen sense of humor," I said coldly.
Now surely, if Mr. Pronzini had a decent bone in his body, he would have included at least this fine example of breathless suspense among those he winnowed out for honors. What else did one have to write to be considered a nominee? Was he looking for something a bit more literary? In which case, I offer the following:
The sky hung overhead like a moth-eaten gray shawl, and the flakes spilled down from it like a loose dandruff at first, lazy and slow.
I could go on. And on. (Oh, how I did go on and on in those days.) The point, of course, is that Mr. Pronzini surely knew about these gems when he was preparing his brief. He has obviously read and digested everything ever written in the genre by anyone anywhere. But even giving him the benefit of the doubt, even assuming he somehow missed these published morsels, doesn't the man ever go to the movies? Didn't he see the film The Birds, for which I wrote the screenplay? Does he truly not remember (or is his forgetfulness just a clever ploy to avoid giving me my rightful due?) the birthday party scene? Where all the birds swoop down and break balloons and knock over tables and whatnot? Did Mr. Pronzini truly not witness the touching scene afterward, in which the hero expresses his concern for the heroine? A scene Hitch desperately tried to excise from the film but couldn't because the camera was in tight on his stars talking, and he had no covering footage? Has Mr. Pronzini honestly forgotten those immortal lines?
MITCH: Look, do you have to go back to Annie's?
MELANIE: No, I have my things in the car.
MITCH: Then stay and have something to eat before you start back. I'd feel a lot better.
I rest my case.
Mr. Pronzini asked me to write this introduction only because he knew samples of my work should have been included in this book and weren't. As simple as that. I am properly insulted.
So I'll leave now.
—Ed McBain (Evan Hunter)
Without Malice,
In recent years, those of us who love the mystery have been pleased to note the publication of an increasing number of critical works devoted to the genre and its writers. These include general histories (Julian Symons's Mortal Consequences); social histories (Cohn Watson's Snobbery With Violence); biographies (Frank McShane's The Life of Raymond Chandler, John McAieer's Rex Stout: A Biography); collections of critical essays and commentary (Barzun and Taylor's A Catalogue of Crime); appreciations (Leroy Panek's Watteau Shepherds, Robert Barnard's A Talent to Deceive); and bibliographic and encyclopedic reference works (Allen Hubin's The Bibliography of Crime Fiction, 1749-1975, Otto Penzler's and Chris Steinbrunner's The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, and the recent Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John Reilly).
Without exception, these and other critical works have focused on the positive side of crime fiction. That is, they dwell on its technical and/or artistic qualities. They offer in-depth studies of its best writers, its best books. They laud, applaud, dissect, gently chastise, and sometimes canonize the great and the near-great of mysterydom.
Which is all fine, of course; no one could be more delighted than I at this passionate interest in the field in which I publish the bulk of my fiction. And yet the absolute emphasis on the good strikes me as unfair. The good mystery gets all the credit, all the attention. So does the good writer.
But what about the bad mystery?
What about the bad writer?
The amount of (critically) inferior crime fiction published during this century far exceeds that of the superior, after all; there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of works of all types and description. Most of these are of average badness, to be sure. Yet several stand out as unique and in their own way are every bit as memorable as any of the classic good ones. Or would be if enough people knew of their existence.
The "alternative classics" and their authors, however, have been neglected to the point of invisibility. Much has been written about the contributions of Doyle, Christie, Hammett, Chandler, Stout. But how many readers—indeed, how many aficionados—are aware of the contributions of Michael Morgan, Tom Roan, Eric Heath, James O'Hanlon, Sydney Horler, Michael Avallone, Robert Leslie Bellem, Milton M. Raison, and Joseph Rosenberger? Everyone has heard of The Hound of the Baskerviles, The Maltese Falcon, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Big Sleep. But how many know the joys to be found in Decoy, The Dragon Strikes Back, Murder of a Mystery Writer, Murder at Horsethief, Lord of Terror, Bride of Terror, and The Bat?
The purpose of this book is threefold: first, to rectify the neglect of these writers and their works, to give them the critical attention they deserve; second, to provide a different historical perspective on crime fiction—its detectives, its sub-genres, its publishers—and on the social attitudes it reflects (which are often more pronounced in the bad mystery than in the good one); and third, to add a few chuckles—perhaps even a guffaw or two—to the heretofore sobersided field of mystery criticism. It is all well and good to take the genre seriously; as a mystery writer, I take it (and this book) rather seriously myself. But it is not hallowed ground, as some would have us believe. Nor should it be so snooty in its newfound position as a "legitimate" literary art form to want to bury its so-called black sheep or refuse to give itself an old-fashioned horse laugh now and then. * The ability to laugh at one's self, it has been said, is the sign of a healthy organism. And the mystery, one hopes, is a very healthy organism.
As to my qualifications for undertaking such a project, I submit the following credentials: mystery novelist, short-story writer, anthologist, and essayist; collector and student of mystery criticism, biography, bibliography, history, and ephemera; owner of several thousand mystery novels, collections, anthologies, and pulp and digest magazines, a good many of which are quite bad. I also submit the following sentence from my novel, The Stalker: "When would this phantasmagoria that was all too real reality end? he asked himself."
Can there be anyone better suited to write a tribute to the alternative classics of crime fiction than the author of that immortal line?
*Academics consider it "legitimate" nowadays, anyhow. The self-styled 'literary establishment" considers any prose that has a plot, makes a linear kind of sense throughout, and does not involve suburban sexual angst to be trash, or at best subliterary.
1. "Wanna Woo-woo?"
" . . . I have a plot for a book that I intend to write some day that I believe gets over the perfect murder most adequately. . . . In that book I shall show that the police and detectives are utterly baffled and that at last the murderer himself has to come forward and tell how he committed the crime. I will have him to do this out of a pure sense of bravado and love of the dramatic, or possibly motivate it by showing that he is suffering from an incurable disease and is going to die soon anyway."
"Sounds like a lot of baloney to me," snorted Lang.
—Eric Heath,
Murder of a Mystery Writer
"Fire's a damned sight worse," he muttered. "Cripes, my head's like a pumpkin! It's always at the back of my mind."
—Ellery Queen,
The Siamese Twin Mystery
The amateur detective, or AD as he is affectionately known to insiders, is the most popular crime-solving creation among the writers of detective fiction. Beginning with Jacques Futrelle's Professor F. X. Van Duesen, "The Thinking Machine," in this country, and, somewhat later, Chesterton's Father Brown in England, the AD has seen more bloodletting, faced more peril, and unraveled more mysteries than all professional detectives, public and private, combined.
The AD can be of either sex, of any age; can possess any quirk or specialized knowledge and be of any profession (or no profession at all). The AD roster includes doctors, lawyers, merchants, thieves; little old ladies with a homicidal eye and fusty professors with very large brains; bored young men of wealth and breeding, and derelicts on Skid Row; newspaper reporters, poets, playwrights, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, unpublished writers, songwriters, and insurance underwriters; salesmen, bankers, Indians, artists, magicians, priests, nuns, gamblers, teachers, scientists, sports figures, photographers, publicans—and a hundred more. The AD can be hard-boiled, soft-boiled, half-baked, well-pickled, or sugar-coated. He/she can use fists, guns, wits, half-wits, innocence, guile, luck, pluck, deduction, guesswork, or any combination of these to solve a case and bring an evildoer to justice.
What the most enduring of the amateur detectives seem to have in common is an abiding interest in criminology, an encyclopedic knowledge of trivial and/or esoteric facts, a Sherlockian intelligence, a penchant for withholding evidence from the police (but never from the reader, no matter how obliquely it is couched), and such endearing qualities as the enigmatic smile, the gimlet eye, the curled lip, the disarming grin, the sharp retort, the clever pun, the cryptic remark, and the perfect squelch. Consider the great ADs of mystery fiction: Father Brown, Dr. Fell, Ellery Queen, Lord Peter Wimsey, Reggie Fortune, The Great Merlini, Miss Marple, Perry Mason, John J. Malone, "The Old Man in the Corner," Mr. and Mrs. North, Miss Hildegarde Withers. When these ladies and gentlemen embark on a case, it is bound to be a memorable one.
The same is true of the great ADs on the other side of the qualitative coin.
The earliest of these is Joseph Rouletabille, a Parisian reporter who solves a number of cases in the early 1900s narrated by his Watson, Sainclair, and created by French writer Gaston Leroux. The first, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907), is well known and also considered by some – John Dickson Carr, the grand master of the "impossible crime" story, was one—to be among the finest "locked-room" mysteries ever penned. This may be true, if one reckons solely on ingenuity of plot; but if one takes into account stilted writing, nonexistent characterization, incredible coincidences, and a welter of disguises, aliases, and red herrings—plus such other implausibilities as the fact that Roületabille, already a successful journalist, is not much older than sixteen when he solves the mystery of the yellow room—Leroux might seem better placed, or at least equally well placed, at the opposite end of the mystery spectrum.
From this standpoint, his most (or least) accomplished work is the second of the Rouletabille cases, The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1909). Chief among its noteworthy aspects is a preposterous plot in which the villain of The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a brilliant former detective named Frédéric Larsan, who was supposedly killed off in that book, returns alive and in disguise (a la Sherlock Holmes) to commit a new locked-room murder, this one involving the use of false-face and a tricked-up wardrobe. There are also more aliases, red herrings, and coincidences, some crudely worked out motivations, a final "revelation" that Rouletabille is the illegitimate son of Larsan, and such artful prose as:
He rushed to the canal, sobbing, and, with a prayer, uttered as much to the Lady in Black as to God Himself, threw himself into the water. Happily, in his despair, the poor child had forgotten that he knew how to swim.
He had mocked her, even while the tears had streamed down his cheeks. I could never have believed that Rouletabille could have been so cruel or so heartless—or, even, so ill-bred!
The first of the notable ADs on the American front is Professor Herman Brierly, who appears in four novels by Will Levinrew published in the late twenties and early thirties. Brierly is an elderly research scientist of the following description: "small, exquisitely formed body, not over five feet tall; tiny hands and feet, bushy, snow-white hair, bushy black brows over dark blue eyes so deeply sunken in their sockets as to seem jet black; high, fresh complexion rarely found except in infancy." Brierly is also a superintellect of a crabby, somewhat egotistical nature that puts him in a class with his obvious role model, Philo Vance. His stock-in-trade is solving crimes through "scientific deduction," which is a masking euphemism for the fact that he unravels the most convoluted, Van Dineish plots with a minimum of detection and a maximum of obscure textbook science and pathology.
The most interesting of his cases is Murder on the Palisades (1930), in which a number of people are murdered in a gloomy old mansion on the New Jersey Palisades, across the Hudson River from New York City. Because Levinrew was a devotee of Van Dine, this novel, like his others, is chock full of footnotes, interminable question-and-answer sessions, befuddled cops, bizarre occurrences, and clues of the esoteric variety (the first few letters of the Hebrew alphabet, for example, play an important, if rather unbelievable, part in the plot). But it is none of these things that distinguishes Murder on the Palisades-,rather it is the sheer number of exotic methods of murder and attempted murder—certainly more than in any other mystery novel in the genre's history—and the identity of the "instrument" used in perpetrating most of the crimes.
Characters are murdered, or almost murdered, by the injection of microorganisms to cause spinal meningitis; by mixing a quantity of ergotized (ergot is a poisonous grain fungus) flour with whole-wheat flour and baking it into a loaf of bread; by poisoning some chocolate-coated almonds with almond-tasting nitrobenzol; by injecting a drug called phiorizin, which causes diabetes, so that the person can then be given too large a dose of insulin, which will send him into fatal insulin shock; and by scratching a man's hand with a match that has been dipped into ajar of hydrophobia germs. But the crowning method is a locked-room murder in which a missile, presumably a stone, is hurled through a window to crush a man's skull but then "disappears" before the police arrive on the scene seconds later. The explanation for this one is demonstrated as follows by Professor Brierly:
[They] suddenly saw an object, at the end of a rope, rise above the roof with incredible velocity. Thi object described giant arc, and continued describing the arc, limited by the rope with undiminished speed…
The rope flattened out on the roof; the object at its free end continued with undiminished speed outward and downward, the rope flattened out against the rear of the building and the object at the end of this gigantic lash whipped through the closed window with a crash, shortly to reappear hanging taut at the end of the rope, oscillating gently.
According to the professor, this device—a large catapult affixed to the roof by bolts, with a rope stretching to it from a staple—works in the following manner:
"This rope is taut. I have at the end of it in the toe of this stocking a stone a little larger than a baseball. I tied a piece of string around the stocking above the stone, although hardly necessary. I now put it into the catapult which is aimed upward in the direction of the garage door, in perfect line with the window. The force of the catapult will shoot it almost straight upward, but the pull of the rope on that staple will prevent it from going straight upward. Also, it will not jerk as it would if I propelled it straight upward or straight outward from the staple. No, this counter-force will make it describe the arc you saw. Whirl a watch-chain and see the undiminished speed with which it will wind itself around your finger, to the very end. Same principle involved here. The initial impetus on the end of the watch chain is not around the finger, but straight ahead or upward as it is here. This staple acts like the finger on the chain."
The person responsible for most of these fanciful acts is an embittered member of the household, the wife of one of the victims, who has been confined to a wheelchair since suffering a paralyzing attack of poliomyelitis. It was she who worked the catapult from the roof, we are told, but since she couldn't get around to commit the other crimes, she hypnotized her twelve-year-old son, who is suffering from a form of dementia praecox, and ordered him to commit them in her stead. When Brierly has the boy hypnotized as part of his reconstruction of events and instructs him to reenact his crimes, the youth becomes "all evil, the personification of murderous desire," and the sight of him causes a hardened newspaperman to tremble "as if with the ague" and a hard-boiled cop, "inured to hardships in himself and others, familiar with ugly sights and scenes, exponent of the third degree with recalcitrant prisoners," almost to faint dead away. Brierly, however, is unmoved. Nothing much bothers the true scientist—and the true AD—in his never-ending pursuit of truth, justice, and the American way.
A considerably different, if no less notable, amateur detective is Tony Woolrich, a New York drama critic fathered in the forties by Milton M. Raison. Woolrich's greatest case is Murder in a Lighter Vein (1947), about which Anthony Boucher wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle: "This latest exploit of Tony Woolrich . . . is in plot and writing simply down to Mr. Raison's standard. I list it only to warn you that this (to quote the jacket) 'intimate, behind-the-scenes tale of big-time radio' does not even have the virtue of reasonable accuracy in depicting the industry."
Murder in a Lighter Vein is set in Hollywood, to which city Woolrich has come to write a series of articles on its "little theaters." (Why anyone in New York would be interested in Hollywood's little theaters is not specified.) The first theater group with which he becomes involved is the Dramatic Arts Guild, a serious bunch that has selected for its first production Edmond Rostand's verse play, Cyrano de Bergerac.
The group is so serious, in fact, that they have picked up a sponsor to air a radio adaptation of the play and persuaded a stand-up radio comic of uncouth reputation to play Cyrano. The rationale for this decision is that the comic, Artie Aragon, has a very high Hooper rating—the radio equivalent of the Nielsen TV ratings—and it is felt Artie will pull a large audience and thereby launch the Dramatic Arts Guild into the big time. If the logic of this seems dubious, it is because Raison was a master of dubious logic—an art perhaps learned while practicing his alternate career of scripting screen potboilers.
Problems begin to develop when Artie decides he doesn't like the Cyrano script. It's not right for him and his image, he says. It doesn't have any boffo laughs. Worst of all, it doesn't have any "Wanna woo-woos?"
"Maybe I might look at a rough scrip'," hedged Artie. He turned to the Worths. "Get writin'. Fix up somethin' good. Put that dame [an actress named Sara] in lots of scenes with me. And don't forget to put in a couple 'wanna woo-woos.'"
There was dead silence as Rostand whirled in his grave like a dervish.
Parmalee finally cleared his throat and asked almost timidly, "A couple of what?"
"Woo-woos," said Artie impatiently, as though he was explaining something to an idiot. . . . "There's a reason for it in all my scrip's. Wanna woo-woo made me what I am today."
"Wanna woo-woo?", you see, is Artie's big catch phrase, in the mode of Lou Costello's "I'm a baaaaaaaaaaaddd boy!" or Joe Penner's "Wanna buy a duck?" At some point in each of his radio shows, Artie looks at one of the female cast members, leers obscenely, grabs the microphone as if it were the woman, and says, "Wanna woo-woo?" For some reason, this is deemed hilarious by one and all, and the audience topples out of its collective seat and rolls in the aisle.
The various members of the Dramatic Arts Guild are shocked; they are artists, after all, and can't bear to see a wonderful play like Cyrano ruined with one-liners and "Wanna woo-woos?" They all hate Artie; so do his drunken wife, his well-endowed mistress, and his two "scrip'" writers. And so does Woolrich, who has a professed fondness for fine art. Of course, Tony also has a fondness for such fine art as one of the actresses, Sara, and is too busily engaged in making a play for her to worry about somebody knocking off Artie.
(You should not get the impression, however, that Tony is a playboy. Nor should you get the impression that he is suave, sophisticated, or has a scintillating wit. The best word to describe him might be "virginal." He blushes quite a bit, particularly when someone makes a sexual reference, and says things like "the moon fell on my head and burst into a million rose-colored bubbles" after an evening with Sara.)
Comes the night of the big broadcast. Artie's role in Cyrano has been completely rewritten to include plenty of boffo laughs and "Wanna woo-woos?" The audience, we are told, topples out of its collective seat and rolls in the aisle. The cast grimaces. Woolrich grimaces. Then, near the climax, Artie grabs the microphone in both hands, gives Sara a magnificent leer, and says his most obscene "Wanna woo-woo?" ever. Whereupon he falls down dead. No fanfare, no histrionics. He simply says "Wanna WOO-woo?" and falls down dead.
Joe Holden, of the "downtown Homicide Squad," is called in. A preliminary examination of the body reveals no marks or signs of violence; could Artie have succumbed to a heart attack? Joe, who has the IQ of a house plant, conducts a superficial investigation, becomes frustrated, and turns to Woolrich for assistance; it seems he is in awe of Tony's AD abilities, having worked with him once before on a case. He asks the county sheriff to swear Woolrich in as a special deputy, complete with badge and gun and a salary of ten dollars a day.
Tony is overwhelmed by this. "Imagine," he says, "an undercover deputy at my age? It's like a bad B picture!"
Yes, indeed.
Joe and Tony do a considerable amount of running around, questioning and also bantering with suspects. Raison's long suit is sparkling repartee, as may be seen from the following two examples:
"Been having your tea-leaves read?" asked Tony.
"No. I guess I've had my intuition simonized."
"I've been wondering about you, Joe."
"Well, here I am, sister. If they kick me off the force, maybe you can make me a radio writer."
"Radio writers are not made; they're unearthed," she answered.
"You're a pretty good-looking corpse yourself, Betty," said Joe.
What seems like a long time later, inspiration strikes Tony. Despite the fact that the coroner has carved up Artie's remains and discovered no internal evidence of violence, Tony is convinced Artie was murdered. And he knows who did it and how it was done! He does some checking at the studio where Cyrano was broadcast, after which he has all the suspects assembled there in traditional AD fashion. Then he beings his reconstruction of the crime.
The killer, who turns out to be one of Artie's writers, a man who "had obviously overeaten since leaving the Navy, for his stomach bulged suddenly," happens to have had electrical training from Uncle Sam during the war. After deciding to murder Artie—Artie had been having a secret affair with the writer's wife—he rigged an "electric ear": an electromagnetic relay connected to a "hot" 220-volt circuit attached to the base of Artie's microphone. This relay was activated by a photocell designed to respond to Artie's speech pattern when the comic spoke a specific phrase. As the culprit explains:
"In order for Artie to kill himself . . . he had to grab both the mike and the stand to complete the circuit the moment he said 'Wanna woo-woo?' Well, there wasn't much chance that Artie wouldn't do that. It was part of the act. I was really playing safe because I knew that he would at least once—in the many times he said that poisonous gag—say it at the precise moment he grabbed the mike and stand and made love to it. . .
The reason, if Artie was electrocuted, that there were no burn marks on the body and none of the internal organs was damaged? Simple. "Amps, the strength of electricity, [can] cause death even with low voltage . . . since low voltage would leave no burns!"
Exit Tony Woolrich.
The AD of the fifties, by a wide margin—and perhaps the greatest of all alternative ADs—is Dr. Wade Anthony, the creation of Eric Heath, a writer with talents that can only be described as awesome. Psychiatrist, amateur criminologist, writer, and inventor of the motion-picture theory of crime detection and prevention, Dr. Anthony uses observation, ratiocination, the motion-picture theory of crime detection and prevention, and plenty of sneaky help from the author to solve his cases. He is a lean Dr. Fell, an American Peter Wimsey, a male Miss Marple—truly, an AD among ADs.
Murder of a Mystery Writer (1955) is his finest performance. It is one of those rare books that must be read two or three times to be fully savored and appreciated. On each rereading, new subtleties and nuances reveal themselves, much as is the case with Chandler, Hammett, and other masters.
The novel opens with Dr. Anthony and his beautiful secretary, Penny Lake, arriving at a place called Mystery Lodge in the snow-covered Sierras. Attached to their car is a large trailer containing Anthony's portable crime lab, darkroom, and equipment for the perpetuation of his motion-picture theory of crime detection and prevention. But their purpose in coming to Mystery Lodge is not crime; it is for a few weeks of peace and quiet so that the doctor can dictate a treatise on psychiatry and crime.
What he and Penny find at Mystery Lodge is anything but an atmosphere of peace and quiet, however. They find Egyptian sarcophagi, rugs bearing mystic designs, chandeliers fashioned to resemble "long silver tentacles holding in place a great hoop of brass, dangling from which were a number of half coiled snakes, each one holding a light globe between open fangs," light bulbs set in human skulls inside wall niches, a painting of a bloodstained man wielding a dagger, another painting of Satan gloating down at a bunch of pleading faces in a smoldering lake of lava (" 'Isn't it beautiful! A masterpiece! It has so much depth of feeling!'"), drawer keyholes painted to look like great hypnotic eyes with gleaming white eyeballs, a Mephistophelian dummy brandishing a revolver and hidden away inside a closet, and a lifelike statue of a huge black cat in the dining room. They also find a Brazilian parrot, a dwarf named Gargoyle, assorted Chinese servants, six vacationing members of the Mystery Writers Guild, and an artist who sketches portraits of murderers and whose other hobby is the ruination of young girls. They also find Antrim Zarzour, the owner of Mystery Lodge, who looks like a cross between John Carradine and Don Rickles, and his lovely but strange wife Sonia, who looks like something out of Charles Addams. They also find "a grotesque, ferocious-looking animal [with] a scaly, fish-like body and a head which was part human and part wolf; gleaming fangs protruded from its mouth and its eyes were two circles of phosphorous." Penny, upon seeing this apparition, screeches in terror. "Don't be frightened, Miss Lake," Zarzour tells her. "It's just my pet cat made up in a way that is a little frightening."
The pet cat's name turns out to be Balzac. The reason for that, Zarzour says, is "because the more you study him, the less you can understand him."
Zarzour also explains that the horrific trappings have been carefully manufactured to make the lodge live up to its name, to give it "a charming atmosphere of mystery—something different.') He has also had a lifelong love affair with the macabre, he says, and is a great fan of mystery stories. That is why he invited the six members of the Mystery Writers Guild to hold their annual meeting at Mystery Lodge.
After Penny and Dr. Anthony are shown to their respective rooms, they get together again to discuss Anthony's motion-picture theory of crime detection and prevention. "I would like to see every suspect in a murder case," Wade says, "questioned with a microphone in front of him and a motion picture camera photographing him—in other words, have a sound motion picture made of each suspect as he tells his story or makes a confession." He also thinks pictures ought to be taken of "bits of evidence, such as weapons used to commit murders, bullets taken from guns, pieces of pipe, vials of poison, and the like."
Penny thinks the doctor's motion-picture theory of crime detection and prevention is a wonderful theory. "It [the film] could even be run off in a courtroom for the judge and jury, district attorney and others," she says. "They would all have every aspect of the case right before their eyes. It would simplify the procedure, save time . . ." Penny is no dummy, either. She even comes up with a suggestion Anthony admits he hadn't thought of himself and which he finds splendid: "Couldn't sound pictures also be used for identification purposes? Why not take motion pictures of every major criminal arrested, showing him moving around and talking? Wouldn't that give detectives a much better idea of his appearance and personality, voice and distinguishing characteristics—a splendid adjunct to fingerprints and the regular rogues gallery snapshot?"
Later, at dinner, while a storm rages outside, Penny and the doctor are introduced to some of the vacationing mystery writers, including an obnoxious sort named Ferdinard Lang and one Merrill Atwell, author of "those corny Chet Huntley yarns." There is a good deal of shoptalk, and the topic of conversation naturally turns to murder in general and the perfect murder in particular. Zarzour says he has always been fascinated by the perfect crime. Lang asks him how he would commit one if, say, Lang were in love with Zarzour's wife and Zarzour wanted to get rid of him. Zarzour gives this some thought. Then he says, "Suppose you were right where you are seated now, Mr. Lang. Let us say that the lights go out, which the storm might bring about. A shot is heard. When the room is again illuminated, you are found to be dead, with a bullet in your head. Everyone in the room is searched. No revolver is found in the room. No one apparently had moved from his seat at the table. Just how would you say the murder was committed?"
Lang has no answer for that. Neither does Zarzour; he is called away to the telephone. When he returns, he informs his guests that they are completely "marooned" at Mystery Lodge by the storm and may be so for days.
You might expect something terrible to happen at that very moment, or at least that very night. But no. Instead, Heath introduces the artist and ruiner of young girls, whose name is Jorgenson and who has gotten himself caught in the blizzard; he is not only suffering from "severe exposure" but has an injury at the base of his skull, evidently from a fall, which seems to have resulted in temporary amnesia. As soon as Jorgenson's name is mentioned another of the mystery writers, Otto Oswald, becomes very upset and says that the artist "should be consigned to hell and appointed illustrator for the Devil!" The reason for this outburst is that one of the young girls whom Jorgenson ruined, back in wicked old New York, was Oswald's sixteen-year-old sister.
After the furor over this dies down, everyone retires for the evening. We are not told whether Penny and Dr. Anthony retire alone to their separate bedrooms or whether they decide to share a bed for the night; the precise nature of their relationship is never divulged. We can presume, however, that they are not now nor have they ever been intimate. Penny might wish it otherwise; she is constantly dropping little hints about not wanting to sleep alone in her bed, what with all the horrible things around. But Dr. Anthony ignores her.
Still and all, the next morning he does make an unintentional pass at Penny. He comes to her boudoir and asks if she minds having breakfast with a man in her room. She says it all depends on the man, but "inasmuch as it is you, boss, and as you are vouched for by my Puritanical aunt as about the only safe member extant of the male sex, beautiful me is willing to take a chance and allow you to enter."She's being coy, you see. Anthony sits down to breakfast with her, poises a piece of toast over his coffee cup, looks Penny in the eye, and says, "Have I your permission to dunk? I generally do it strictly in private." Penny, who knows a double entendre when she hears one, tells the good doctor that he can dunk all he wants. But Anthony, who wouldn't know a double entendre if it smacked him in the eye, still refuses to take the hint and instead begins rhapsodizing about his motion-picture theory of crime detection and prevention.
That night, everyone is again seated at the table in the dining room (except Jorgenson the seducer, who is confined to one of the guest cottages). The only female member of the mystery writers, curmudgeonly Cora Courtwright, appears for the first time—she was offstage with a headache the previous night—and immediately begins to make pithy comments. When the talk once more shifts to murder, and Zarzour alludes to her authorial talents by calling her "a superbly vicarious murderess," she says:
"I don't know whether that is a compliment or an intimation that I am a murderess at heart," chortled Cora. "And yet you may have something there, Zarzour. I will give my friend, Lang . . . a thought to mull over. Could it be true, Lang, that every good mystery writer is giving vent to a repressed desire to Commit murder—or to put it more plainly, is every mystery writer a killer at heart? If he had not turned to writing mystery fiction, would he have developed into a gangster?"
In spite of such speculation, it is not Cora Courtwright who is murdered a short while later. It is, to no one's surprise, the other obnoxious one, Ferdinand Lang. The murder takes place in more or less the same way as postulated by Zarzour the previous evening: all the lights suddenly go out, and when they come back on, Lang is lying dead across the table with a bullet in his heart; no one has moved from his chair during the blackout; a subsequent search reveals that there is no gun on any of the suspects or anywhere else in the room. Nobody heard the shot, either. Is it because a Wagnerian opus was playing on the phonograph? Is it because the Brazilian parrot let out a "guttural squawk"? Or is there another reason?
Dr. Anthony immediately assumes command, over protests from the others as to his qualifications. Cora Courtwright has the last word on the matter; when Zarzour makes grumbling noises, she says, "You'd better sit down and cool your gum shoes, Zarzour. You are only a reader of mystery fiction, and we are only the writers of such popular tripe. Therefore, the famous Doctor Anthony is in complete command of this snowbound murder castle."
Anthony proceeds to question everyone, without learning much. The mystery writers, meanwhile, argue over which of them is going to write up Lang's murder in fictional form; each wants to do so and each under the title Murder of a Mystery Writer. Nobody pays much attention to the corpse.
Suspicion falls on the dwarf, Gargoyle, when Zarzour claims to have found the murder weapon in Gargoyle's possession. (He also found a Maxim silencer, and that's why nobody heard the shot that killed Lang.) The dwarf proclaims his innocence. He doesn't know how the gun and silencer got into his coat pocket, he says, which is where he discovered them when he returned to his room after the shooting. Anthony's sharp questioning reveals that Gargoyle had once spilled a glass of water in Lang's lap and Lang had cursed him for his clumsiness. Everyone thinks this is a very damning motive for murder. Cora is particularly pithy in her condemnation: "Does anybody know whether cretinism causes people to see better in the dark than normally built people?"
Dr. Anthony isn't so sure of Gargoyle's guilt, though. As he confides to Penny later, "I'm inclined to think that there is a much deeper psychological basis for this crime than a dwarf committing murder to avenge a personal insult."
Another startling development occurs the following morning, when Jorgenson is found stabbed to death in his cottage.
Anthony and Penny immediately rush to the scene, where the doctor soon discovers that the artist did not die instantly from his wounds. He had time to crawl to a desk, on which was a sketch pad, and to draw three Indian symbols—eagle feathers, a snake, and a tepee. Anthony decides these must be a clue to the identity of the murderer, so he carts the note off to his portable laboratory for further study. He also carts the corpse off to the portable lab for a quick autopsy—a medical talent sorely lacking in most other ADs.
Some time later, while Anthony is preparing his equipment so that that he can put his motion-picture theory of crime detection and prevention into its first practical use, Sonia Zarzour appears and tells the doctor and Penny that she has something to show them in the cellar. The something turns out to be a ladder and a trapdoor in the ceiling. "That opening," she says, "allows a person to enter into the hollow body of the statue of the black cat in the dining room. If you will climb up the ladder, Doctor, you will find that you can enter the interior of the black cat and look through its open mouth into the dining room."
Anthony makes an immediate deduction: "Now we know how the murder of Mr. Lang could have been committed. Someone standing inside the body of the black cat would be able to fire a revolver through its mouth!" And when Mrs. Zarzour proceeds to tell them that Gargoyle used to climb up inside the cat and make ghostly noises to frighten the guests, as part of her husband's Mystery Lodge trappings, Penny remarks, "That makes the case against Gargoyle bulletproof, doesn't it?"
While the doctor hurries off to his room to do some more work on the motion-picture theory of crime detection and prevention, Penny searches the cellar for clues. And finds one, "a bit of metal formed into two cylinders," which she takes straightaway to Anthony. He identifies it as "a child's whistle, or a tuning pipe," and promptly records it on film.
All sorts of other clues and things are also recorded on film, with Penny acting as "camera woman." Then, after Anthony has processed the film in his portable crime lab and morgue, all the suspects are gathered together in the drawing room. There they are shown film clips of the revolver and Maxim silencer, of the whistle, of the statue of the black cat; and filmed interviews with Gargoyle, with one of the Chinese servants, with Oswald, and finally with Zarzour. At the end of each interview, the interviewees are depicted stabbing the dummy with overhand downward thrusts. All except Zarzour, that is. He starts to stab the dummy with an underhand upward thrust and only at the last instant changes it to an overhand downward thrust.
Zarzour, therefore, is the murderer.
And it has been proven by the motion-picture theory of crime detection and prevention!
For Jorgenson had been stabbed in the back with an underhand upward thrust, not an overhand downward thrust, and Zarzour is the only one present who stabs dummies (or people) that way. His motive? It seems that Zarzour was confined to an asylum in New York after having been convicted of some sort of heinous crime, and that Jorgenson had once sketched Zarzour as part of his series of murderer portraits. Zarzour was afraid that Jorgenson would recover from his amnesia and recognize him (in spite of the fact that, we subsequently learn, Zarzour has had plastic surgery, which altered his appearance from handsome to Carradine/Rickles). So killing the ruiner of young girls was imperative. Besides which, he had also killed Lang and murder was old hat to him by that time.
As for the Indian symbols Jorgenson drew before he died, and which Anthony also shows on film, the explanation is thus:
"I spent some time in Mr. Zarzour's excellent library before I was able to translate them. Among the Indian tribes of New Mexico such sign language was their only means of written communication These eagle feathers mean Big Chief This snake is a symbol meaning evil, or an evil person. And the final sketch, which you will all recognize, is an Indian tepee, denoting home."
Wade paused so everyone would have time to study the drawings and digest what he had said. Then he went on, "The meaning, therefore, as I interpret the symbols, is that the person who stabbed Jorgenson was the Big Chief or Master of a home or house, and that he was an evil person. That, Mr. Zarzour, could hardly be anyone but you!"
Zarzour doesn't have anything to say, although "a movement of his cheeks indicated that he was moving his jaw-bones up and down, and his attitude had become obviously tense."
Anthony proceeds to explain how the murder of Lang was accomplished. The lights did not go Out accidentally that night, he says; they went out when Zarzour blew into one of the tubes of the whistle Penny found in the cellar. It is a supersonic receiving set mounted inside the black cat statue and connected to the main light switch. The second tube, of course, activated "a tiny motor, when the tonal vibrations are transmitted to an electromagnet and the infinitesimal power generated is stepped up by means of a series of amplifying tubes," thereby turning a wheel with a string or wire attached to the trigger of the revolver, which is also mounted inside the black cat. As soon as the gun discharged, Zarzour dropped the whistle down the cat's gullet and through the trapdoor into the cellar. (Why he left it lying on the cellar floor for Penny to find is never explained. Nor is it ever explained how he managed to mount the gun inside the mouth of a ceramic statue. On the other hand, it is explained how Zarzour could be sure the mounted gun was aimed at Lang's heart: he had bolted that particular chair to the floor.)
Anthony continues: "After you were searched you had an opportunity to leave the dining room and go down to the basement. You had to do that in order to close the trap-door and remove the supersonic receiving sets. . . . As stated, one of the supersonic sound receiving devices operated under certain high frequency vibrations given out by blowing on one tube of this whistle. The other device was acted upon by different vibrations given out by blowing on the second tube."
But what about the gun? "While you were inspecting the body of Lang," Zarzour confesses, "I had a chance to take out the revolver with the silencer from the opening in the head of the statue. . . . My only chance was to slip the revolver and silencer into Gargoyle's pocket . . ."
Zarzour's motive for killing Lang has nothing to do with the writer having an affair with Mrs. Zarzour. It was simply that he has always been obsessed with committing the perfect crime, as Sonia notes after pushing her way to his side. "Antrim," she says, "I don't know what you've done, but I forgive you. I've known for a long time that you were in an asylum back East before we were married, paying the penalty for your first attempt at a perfect murder!"
But Zarzour isn't about to be shut away in another asylum. When his jawbones were working up and down, he had "taken something to destroy myself—something that I really believe will leave you completely baffled." (Not so. Following Zarzour's death, Anthony uses the facilities in his portable laboratory, as well as his autopsy-surgeon's knife, to discover that the red and white corpuscles in Zarzour's bloodstream were almost totally destroyed—the result of gulping down a large dose of irradiated phosphorus. "A most unusual manner of committing suicide," Anthony observes.)
As everyone prepares to leave Mystery Lodge, the remaining members of the Mystery Writers Guild heap praise on Dr. Anthony for his AD abilities in general and his motion-picture theory of crime detection and prevention in particular. One of them, Martenson, also notes that "Zarzour looked like a murderer—he acted like one—and he kept talking about committing the perfect crime. Now according to every precept of mystery fiction, he definitely should not have been the actual killer!"
Anthony smiles at this. And just before he and Penny drive off into the sunset (the storm has ended and the sun has come out), he leans out of the car window and says, "Don't forget, Martenson, that you are supposed to fool your readers. Maybe it pays to be original once in a while."
Maybe it does. And Murder of a Mystery Writer most definitely is an original. Not as original as the motion-picture theory of crime detection and prevention, perhaps, but pretty original just the same.
In the past two decades, the foremost addition to the AD ranks has been that of the real person no longer alive—and, in particular, the real mystery writer no longer alive—who is placed within a fictional framework in order to solve a fictional crime. Joe Gores's Hammett (1976) was the first of these, with its time frame of 1929 and its San Francisco setting; another of note, despite some rather nasty speculation and innuendo, is Kathleen Tynan's Agatha, in which Agatha Christie becomes involved in murder and intrigue during her now-famous disappearance in 1926. This sort of fictionalizing is acceptable so long as the author treats his real-life character with intelligence and insight, makes a serious effort to portray accurately the life and times of the individual, and concocts a plot worthy of that person's abilities. In the case of an item called Chandler (1977), by someone named William Denbow, none of the foregoing applies.
Chandler is a rather obvious attempt to capitalize on the modest success of the Gores novel—one of those quickie paperback exploitations that hack writers disgorge in a few days, utilizing no more research than a bottle of A Scotch. It purports to tell the story of how Raymond Chandler, during a visit to New York, saves Dashiell Hammett, who is also on a visit to New York, from some vengeful "wop" gangsters. To anyone who knows anything at all about either Chandler or Hammett, however, the characters in this novel are instantly recognizable as imposters.
The number and magnitude of the gaffes that permeate Chandler are staggering. The novel appears to take place in 1936, owing to the statement that "a few years had passed since Repeal," and owing to the fact that one of the characters, who was born in 1896, is forty years old; yet Hammett is said to have just published Red Harvest in book form (it first appeared thus in 1929) and to still be turning out pulp stories for Black Mask (his last appearance in that magazine was in November 1931 with a story called "Death and Company"). "Hammett" repeatedly refers to San Francisco as Frisco, something no longstanding resident of that city, as the real Hammett was, would ever think of doing. He is depicted as an alcoholic so cynically and hopelessly besotted that he can barely write or otherwise function without first taking a drink; we are also informed that Joseph T. "Cap" Shaw, the pioneering editor of Black Mask, has been either rejecting outright Hammett's most recent submissions or returning them for extensive revisions. Hammett's days as a Pinkerton operative are described as if he himself had been a tough pulp hero—kicking down doors, shooting and arresting gangsters, watching out that "you didn't catch a bullet from some hophead with three guns on his emaciated person." The claim is also made that Hammett was a puking drunk during his Pinkerton stint and that he had to take "a sneaky drink now and then" to steady his nerves and give him Dutch courage.
Chandler, too, is portrayed as an alcoholic, though not quite of the same whiskey-soaked variety as Hammett. He has come to New York, he tells Cap Shaw, to buy some books he has been wanting to read; when Shaw asks him if they didn't have bookshops in Los Angeles, Chandler answers that they do but "not like the bookshops on Fourth Avenue." On some occasions Chandler is made to speak in stilted Britishisms, and on others like Philip Marlowe, and on still others like a pulp hoodlum. No mention is made anywhere of his elderly wife Cissy, who was far more important to him than either alcohol or his writing, or of any other aspect of his life in southern California. (Similarly, no mention is made of Hammett's relationship with Lillian Heilman, his Hollywood connections, his Communist affiliation, or of anybody or anything else that shaped and controlled his life in the thirties.)
In a drunken scene with Hammett, who has refused to meet with Chandler unless he agrees to bring a quart of Jack Daniel's to his hotel room, Chandler is told that he'll never make the big time unless he changes the name of his detective character from Carmady (only three of Chandler's several Black Mask stories feature a detective named Carmady) to something classier. "Let's give the mick a limey name for a change," Hammett says. "More class. I always liked Christopher Marlowe because he was some kind of secret agent. This isn't gumshoe exactly but it'll do. That's it, chum, we'll rename Carmady Chris Marlowe." And when Chandler protests that he doesn't like the name Chris because it's "too pansy," Hammett says, "I had a hound dog once, back in Maryland when I was a kid. We called him Phil. Phil was a good old dog, one hell of a good ole dog. Why don't we call your gumshoe Philip Marlowe?"
This sort of mind-boggling dialogue continues throughout. Another example:
"You don't look so good," Chandler said and wished he hadn't said it.
Knocking back the rest of his drink, Hammett snapped, "You don't look so great yourself, chum. You look like a guy who's pretending not to have a hangover."
"It's just a little hangover."
"They'll get bigger as time goes on. You say no but I say yes. I know whereof I speak, chum."
"I didn't say anything," Chandler said.
"I thought you were an American," Hammett said, looking sour and argumentative.
"As the Fourth of July," Chandler said. . .
"Then why the hell do you speak like a God damned limey? Next thing you'll be telling me you come from Boston. That won't wash with me, chum. I been to like to think they sound like limeys in Boston, for whatever God damned reason I can't imagine, but they don't"
Chandler said he'd been born in Chicago.
"That's better," Hammett, mellowing slightly as the sour mash took the edge off his frightful hangover [sic]. "Chicago is a tough town, a good tough town. You don't catch much shit flying in Chicago."
And here is Cap Shaw philosophizing about writers and writing to Chandler at the Black Mask offices:
"That blasted fool Hammett! There you have a man who could become one of the greatest American writers, but instead of taking hold of himself he's pissing his talent away, rotting his brain with liquor. Ah," he said—the compleat martinet—"if I could only lock you fellows up somewhere. Chain you to your typewriters and let you get drunk just once a year, on Christmas day. Then you'd see some worthwhile writing."
The plot, such as it may be, concerns the efforts of a New York gangster named Salvatore Tenuto to wreak vengeance on Hammett because Hammett, while working for the Pinks, locked Tenuto up in a Mexican jail on a charge of "running Mexican girls—kids—across the border into L.A. for the whorehouse trade, for the guys that like their meat . . . to be real young and fresh." When Chandler gets wind that somebody is after Hammett, he sets out to foil the attempt. And of course succeeds, with some help from the obligatory cop friend, a sergeant on the New York Homicide Squad whom Chandler had known "for ten years, ever since they both worked together for a failed oil company."