Detectives Beyond Borders

Saturday, October 15, 2016

Charles G. Booth: What do you know about him?

Charles G. Booth is largely unread today, according to The Black Lizard Big of Pulps, where I have just read his story "Stag Party." Even the Thrilling Detective Web Site, my first source for posts like this.

That's all too bad, because "Stag Party"'s stripped-down toughness reminds me a bit of Paul Cain, the greatest of the hard-boiled writers who followed Dashiell Hammett at Black Mask, and one of the very few, perhaps the only one, whose writing qualifies as noir.

"Stag Party" doesn't dig as deeply into the doom and resignation that make noir what it is, and its plotting is weaker, but it does contain such Cain-worthy bits as:

"I've been in pictures.' Her voice was husky. `That's where you've seen me.'

"`No, it isn't,' McFee said. `Sit down.'"

and

"Cruikshank was careless with his eggs."

Booth also worked bits of social-realist type description into the story a good deal less obtrusively and to better narrative purpose than is often the case with such writing, and his bitter cops sound a good deal more like real people than such characters often do. So maybe Booth has a touch of Horace McCoy in him, too.

"Stag Party" has its protagonist, McFee of the Blue Shield Detective Agency, address one female character continually as "sister," and the story repeatedly mentions another by her last name only. Each is reminiscent of Cain's referring to the protagonist's girlfriend in Fast One most often solely by her last name: Granquist.

Here's the most thorough discussion I've been able to find of Booth, on the Bear Alley blog. All right, readers: What should I know about Charles G. Booth? What should I read by him?

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Labels: Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, Black Mask, Charles G. Booth, Paul Cain

Friday, August 05, 2016

DBB meets Dolores Hitchens

I first read Dolores Hitchens while preparing for a panel I moderated at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, the first of my Beyond Chandler and Hammett sessions focusing on lesser-known crime writers from the middle of the twentieth century. Hitchens will be among the subject of this year's version of the panel at Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans next month, and this pre-Long Breach post captures nicely why I like these panels so much: I get to read, experience, and come to grips with authors new to me.

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A friend sent along Dolores Hitchens' 1955 novel Sleep With Strangers because of its setting in Long Beach, site of Bouchercon 2014. Indeed, the book is even more evocative of its setting than is that other great Long Beach crime novel, Paul Cain's Fast One.

Hitchens is new to me, so naturally I start out thinking of her in terms of other crime writers her work evokes, and those writers are two of the best. Hitchens' compassion for characters who lead marginal existences reminds me of David Goodis, particularly T~~he Street on the Corner~~ [At this late date, I don't remember if I meant The Blonde on the Street Corner or The Street of No Return. The latter, I suspect.] and Cassidy's Girl, and her dissection of family life in California brings to mind The Big Sleep. (Ed Gorman's discussion of Sleeps With Strangers invokes Ross Macdonald. I've never warmed to Macdonald, but I suspect that what Gorman sees as Macdonaldish is what I see as Chandlerlike. In any case, that's another illustrious name associated with Hitchens.)

The novel's opening is an atmospheric, moody, tension-filled inversion of the usual scene in which a P.I. meets a client, and it hooked me on Hitchens right away. (The client is named Kay Wanderley. "Wonderly," of course, is the name Brigid O'Shaughnessy uses when she first calls on Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Homage? Coincidence? Either way, it's more good fictional company for Dolores Hitchens.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2014, 2016

Labels: Bouchercon 2014, California, Dashiell Hammett, David Goodis, Dolores Hitchens, Ed Gorman, Long Beach, Patti Abbott, Paul Cain, Raymond Chandler, Sarah Weinman, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon

Monday, August 31, 2015

My Bouchecon 2015 panels

The Bouchercon 2015 schedule is up, and I'll be moderating a couple of good panels, including one special event. On Thursday, October 8 (Thursday, 8 October, for our English friends) I'll moderate "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald," in which authors, editors, and other experts in present-day crime fiction talk about their favorite lesser-known, less-remembered crime writers of the past.

This year's lineup includes Sarah Weinman on Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Kevin Burton Smith on Norbert Davis, Jordan Foster on Ted Lewis, and, Mark Coggins on Paul Cain in a late-breaking addition, Laura Lippman, who will discuss that mysterious writer TBA.

On Saturday, October 10, at 8:30 a.m., I'll discuss the greatest crime writer ever with two of the people who know his work and life best. The discussion is called "Inside the Mind and Work of Dashiell Hammett," and the two insiders are Julie M. Rivett, Hammett's editor and granddaughter; and Richard Layman, Hammett's biographer and perhaps the leading name in Hammett scholarship. This is an especially good time to talk about Hammett, what with Nathan Ward's new book and this past spring's donation of two major collections of Hammett's papers to the University of South Carolina. Layman donated one of the collections, Hammett's family the other, so this panel will be the center of the Hammett universe, and I hope you'll all attend.

Bouchercon 2015. The time: Oct. 8-11, 2015. The place: Raleigh, North Carolina. See you there.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Labels: Dashiell Hammett, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Jordan Foster, Julie M. Rivett, Kevin Burton Smith, Laura Lippman, My Bouchercon 2015 panels, Norbert Davis, Paul Cain, Richard Layman, Sarah Weinman, Ted Lewis

Friday, August 21, 2015

A bit about the best hard-boiled writer named Cain

Two crime novels I’m reading now have nothing in common except startlingly good prose style. Paul Cain’s Fast One, the only novel by that most elusive of the great Black Mask authors, is a textbook for today’s neo-noir and neo-hard-boiled authors and movie makers. It has all the pace, all the wit, and, though there is lots of shooting, none of the hyperviolence and over-the-top jokiness that sometimes mar the newer efforts.

Possibly most astonishing for a novel published in 1932 is that it is not at all dated. There are no “dames” here, and none of the archaic diction that mars the work of other writers from the same period, such as Raoul Whitfield or even some early Hammett. If only the mysterious Cain had written more, he would be mentioned right up there with Chandler and Hammett, and the Chandler-Hammett debate might be over which was the second-best of the group. As this brief discussion reveals, Cain is also an ancestor of the tradition by which hardboiled writers seek to buttress their tough-guy credentials with extravagantly glamorous hard-edged work histories.

The other style king is Australia's Peter Temple, about whom readers of this blog will have read much. Dead Point, third of Temple’s novels about lawyer/cabinetmaker/horse-racing expert Jack Irish, contains more of the gorgeous prose that Temple readers know well. Here’s the novel’s opening:

“On a grey, whipped Wednesday in early winter, men in long coats came out and shot Renoir where he stood, noble, unbalanced, a foreleg hanging. In the terminating jolt of the bolt, many dreams died.”

That’s gorgeous, I’d say, the kind of stuff that may make you want to stop just so you can savor the prose. And that leads to today’s tough question for readers: Who are your favorite crime-fiction prose stylists? Whose sheer skill with words takes your breath away? And is this necessarily a good thing?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Labels: Australia, Paul Cain, Peter Temple

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

New York, New Jerk

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Good fun at Mysterious Bookshop (right/above) in New York this evening for the launch of Syndicate Books' reissue of Ted Lewis' Get Carter. I bought a nice pile of books, including titles by Paul Charles, Gary Phillips, Bert and Dolores Hitchens, and James Ellroy, who will read from his new Perfidia next week at the shop before an audience that will include me.

Luminaries and near-luminaries of New York's crime fiction scene celebrated the launch of Lewis' dark, moving crime novel, and, more so than usual, the talk was about books. It's good to hear writers talk about their favorite writers (Ed Lin on Paul Cain) and to talk up some favorites of my own.

Before and after the launch, I wandered around the Lower East Side and Tribeca with my camera. On the way, I spotted some attractive neon over a bar's entrance. "Excuse me," I said, indicating my camera and directing my question to the bouncer, "mind if I shoot your sign?" My one multisyllabic word was apparently too much for him, because he just raised his eyebrows and kept masticating his cigarette. The only point in the moron's favor is that he did not wear his hair in a ponytail.

"I'll take that as a yes (you do mind)," said I, and continued on my way. Good thing I'd taken a picture of the sign before I asked.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Labels: Ed Lin, Get Carter, Mysterious Bookshop, Paul Cain, Syndicate Books, Ted Lewis

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Detectives Beyond Borders discovers a Black Mask writer

One of the catcher's
masks looked like this.

Good fun in New York yesterday at a party HarperCollins threw for book bloggers in conjunction with BookExpo America (BEA) 2014.

I didn't meet any other bloggers, but I did renew acquaintances with James Hayman, an author who was part of a panel at Bouchercon 2013 that struck me with its commonsense stance on e-books and electronic publishing. A chat I had with Hayman's editor could eventually lead to posts on editors and book promotion and ways to keep midlist authors from leaping out of high windows. The sliders and little hot dogs and other hors d'oeuvres were just fine, too, and the wine flowed like water.

HarperCollins is a subsidiary of Nosh Corp., and the bash happened at the NoshAmerica Building in Midtown Manhattan, in a room normally occupied by the sports division of Nosh News. The decor was all photos and exhibits, including a display of baseball catcher's masks from the 1880s through the 1950s, including one that looked like the famous helmet from the Sutton Hoo ship burial, but with a turban on it.

I made a pre-party stop at Mysterious Bookshop, where I bought a fat volume of stories by Theodore A, Tinsley, a Black Mask author new to me, about Jerry Tracy, celebrity reporter, a character also new to me. The book grabbed me from the first line:

"Jerry Tracy opened a ground glass door and stepped into the dingy little Broadway office maintained for him by the Planet, New York's goofiest Tab."

The first few stories have all the wisecracking I've come to expect from detective pulps of the early 1930s, and little or none of the dated prose style I sometimes find obtrusive in such stories. And the story "South Wind" includes a brand of heartstring-tugging tragedy and humanity rare in any crime fiction, much less the kind that features speakeasies, hard-drinking reporters, and hard-boiled dames.

Tinsley wasn't Dashiell Hammett; no one was, and no one ever will be. But my early reading suggests he ought to be at least right up there with Frederick Nebel and Raoul Whitfield.

Finally, I also bought the complete stories of Paul Cain, one Black Masker who might well be up there with Hammett if he'd written more. I have a good deal of this material elsewhere, but the volume has an illuminating introduction that's especially good in its assessment of Cain's critical reception as compared to Hammett's.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Labels: bookstores, HarperCollins, independent bookstores, James Hayman, Jerry Tracy celebrity reporter, Mysterious Bookshop, Paul Cain, Theodore A. Tinsley

Saturday, February 01, 2014

The great and the good, Part III

Raoul Whitfield's 1931 story "About Kid Deth" (that's not a spelling mistake. Deth, not death, is correct.) is as chilling and hard-edged as anything this side of his fellow Black Mask writers Paul Cain (Fast One) or Dashiell Hammett (The Glass Key).

Whitfield's story takes its place alongside Cain's and Hammett's novels on my list of crime fiction written in the early 1930s that reads, entirely or in part, as if it could have been written today. But, like some of his colleague Frederick Nebel's writing, Whitfield's story is rife with verbal quirks that have dated badly and that keep its author out of the Hammett-Raymond Chandler pantheon. (Cain might be part of a hard-boiled Big Three had he written more than just Fast One and Seven Slayers.)

In "About Kid Deth," these quirks often take the form of periphrasis — a fancy, though scientifically and grammatically precise word for wordiness. Current preference in American English (and, damn it, in stories that come across my desk at work) calls for the car's engine rather than the engine of the car, the girl's body rather than the body of the girl. Not so in Whitfield's story.

Then there's Whitfield's weird penchant for the word tone. No one ever speaks bitterly in "About Kid Deth." No one ever says anything, his voice casual. No one ever speaks grimly or easily. Rather:

"She spoke in a low, bitter tone."

“`Hello, Deth,' he said in a casual tone."

“`Think so?' he said in a strange tone." [ed. note: What is "a strange tone"?]

"`You can’t—not that way,' he said in a hard tone."

“`At Old Andy’s,' he replied in a low tone."

"He said in an uncertain tone: `Watch what you do, Kid.'”

"He spoke in a low, easy tone."

"He said in a grim tone: `Yeah? Did he do that job?'”

By today's standards, that's the stuff of an early, rough draft. Then there's swearing. Publishing mores in the 1930s did not permit curse words, and the results can look odd to readers today, our eyes and ears assaulted by four decades of artistic and literary cursing. "The skunks!" exclaims a character in Nebel's Crimes of Richmond City, and a reader today can't help but smile.

Here's how Whitfield handles his era's prohibition on swearing:

"The Kid swore."

"Joey Deth lowered his hands and swore."

"Kid Deth swore."

"Rands swore hoarsely."

"He swore shakily."

"Then he sat back and swore softly and more steadily."

Granted, the brisk, monosyllabic swore conveys the right, er, tone for a hard-boiled story, but at the risk of a certain sameness. Chandler, on the other hand, turned the prohibition on swearing to entertaining, creative advantage in The Big Sleep in 1939, as Hammett had in "The Girl With the Silver Eyes" in 1924 — seven years before "About Kid Deth."

I may be lazily leftish in my politics, but I'm a cultural conservative in one respect: I believe in artistic discrimination and artistic standards, with absolute, if hard to define, differences between bad and good, and between good and great. Whitfield and Nebel are good, and worth seeking out today. Hammett and Chandler are great.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Labels: Black Mask, Dashiell Hammett, Frederick Nebel, Paul Cain, Raoul Whitfield, Raymond Chandler, the great and the good, things that drive me nuts

Saturday, January 26, 2013

No-nonsense openings then and now

My Nordic kinsman Thjostolf the Thinker is no great shakes as a farmer and too given to moody self-analysis to be a great warrior in the business world. An executive must feign passion where none exists, what most people call lying, and Thjostolf couldn't do it (though when a colleague, in the course of lighthearted office persiflage, called Thjostolf weak rather than morally upright, Thjostolf cleft him in twain, from collarbone to hip, with his great sword.)

One day Thjostolf suggested that similarities existed between the Icelandic sagas and the pulp and paperback-original crime fiction I sometimes read.

"Behold," he said, indicating the opening of Egil's Saga:

"There was a man named Ulf, the son of Bjalfi and of Hallbera, the daughter of Ulf the Fearless."

and "Dig this," pulling out his tattered reprint of Charles Runyon's The Anatomy of Violence:

"Each evening a twilight wind blows through Cutright City."

"And this," voice hushed, as he read from a text we both regard with near-scriptural reverence:

"Kells walked north on Spring.” *

Thjostolf was right. In each case the author plunges right into the story, wasting no words. Arnaldur Indriðason, the best of the current Nordic crime writers, claims inspiration from the Icelandic sagas, though I edged toward the door as I reminded Thjostolf that Arnaldur attributed their concision to economic necessity rather than love of laconic prose. Ruminations, false starts, lengthy description, useless adverbs, and seventy pages of the hero dipping his madeleine in a cup of tea would have made a prodigious waste of calfskin, the expensive material on which the Icelanders set down their stories.

But Thjostolf just nodded and reminded me, in turn, that Josef Škvorecký once had a character suggest the Nordic sagas had inspired Dashiell Hammett. Škvorecký may have been taking the piss, but Hammett, the sagas, and punchy openings of the kind offered above will appeal to readers who like their stories brisk, their prose clean, and their humor deadpan.

Speaking of clean prose that wastes no words, I reminded Thjostolf, I have to get back to work on the copy desk. Thjostolf, who hates a bad sentence as much as I do, tightened his hand on the grip of his sword but said nothing. Maybe he'll make an executive after all.

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* Fast One, by Paul Cain

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Labels: Arnaldur Indridason, Arnaldur Indriðason, Charles Runyon, Dashiell Hammett, Egil's Saga, Icelandic sagas, Josef Škvorecký, Paul Cain, proto-crime fiction

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

If Hammett, Chandler, and the Cains were baseball players

My recent posts about classic American hard-boiled fiction (click the link, then scroll down) have reverberated all the way to Finland, where that genre-jumping pulp maven Juri Nummelin raises his eyebrows at my suggestion that James M. Cain has dated worse than Hammett, Chandler, or Paul Cain.

Here's what I meant: If all four were baseball players, Hammett and Chandler would be Babe Ruth or Honus Wagner, pioneers of staggering and lasting accomplishment whose achievements arguably dwarf those of their successors. Paul Cain is Shoeless Joe Jackson, an awesome talent kept out of the Hall of Fame by a career quirk (Jackson's involvement in the Black Sox scandal; Cain's tiny, though absolutely first-rate, output).

Bur James M. Cain is something like Candy Cummings, a nineteenth-century pitcher of modest career statistics who made the Hall of Fame because he was credited with inventing the curveball. That's probably hard on Cain, but you get the idea: As important an innovator as he was in sexual frankness and portrayal of doomed characters, his successors did it better.

Acknowledging that I've read less of his work than I have of Chandler's or Hammett's, the most I can grant James M. Cain is the status of a trailblazer surpassed by later, greater achievements by others. I find The Getaway's doomed lovers on the road to hell fresher and more chilling than those in The Postman Always Rings Twice, for example.

One could argue, on the other hand, that Hammett and Chandler remain unsurpassed at the things they did best.

Who would your favorite crime writers be if they were athletes (or politicans, tycoons, or leaders in some field of human endeavor other than crime writing?)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Labels: Babe Ruth, baseball, Candy Cummings, hard-boiled classics, Honus Wagner, James M. Cain, Jim Thompson, Juri Nummelin, Paul Cain, Shoeless Joe Jackson

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Bite me, you nut: A descent into James M. Cain's world

The Postman Always Rings Twice is supposed to have shocked readers upon its publication in 1934, and Raymond Chandler famously wrote:

"James Cain … is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way."

To read Postman today, with Chandler’s assessment in mind, is to be thrown back to a time when readers could be shocked by bits like:

"I took her in my arms and mashed my mouth up against hers. … `Bite me! Bite me!'”

and

“Come here, before I sock you.”

“You nut.”

Passages like that require an act of imagination on the part of readers today, lest they induce ironic or condescending smiles. Does Cain’s narrative provide the ground for that imagination to take root? Possibly. (I’ve read just a few chapters.) Maybe the trouble with Cain is not, pace Chandler, that he was too dirty but rather that he was not dirty enough.

But Chandler and Hammett require no such imaginative leap; their best work remains as immediate as it was sixty, seventy, and eighty years ago. Same with the scant published work of the great Paul Cain. Why is this?

Though his name is often linked with Chandler’s, James M. Cain did not write for the pulps. Instead, he was a journalist and then a screenwriter, and, though I'm not up on my American magazines, it looks to me as if his short stories appeared not in pulp magazines like Black Mask, but rather in the slicks. Lacking a background in the pulps, did he have literary ambitions different from Hammett's, Chandlers's, or Paul Cain's? Could such a difference account for the occasional datedness of his prose?

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Labels: hard-boiled classics, James M. Cain, Paul Cain, Raymond Chandler

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Saudades do America

(Landscape with aqueduct and
laundry; Évora, Portugal)

I chose classic American crime fiction to read on this European trip, and:

After reading Double Indemnity, Fast One, and, on this trip, Seven Slayers for the second time, I still maintain that the best American crime writer named Cain was Paul.

The 1945/46 movie version of The Big Sleep may have brought together the most impressive collection of talent ever assembled for a movie. Possibly Hollywood's greatest director (Howard Hawks) giving orders to possibly Hollywood's greatest star (Humphrey Bogart) and a perfect supporting cast. A Nobel Prize winner (William Faulkner) and a talented novelist/screenwriter (Leigh Brackett) sharing writing credit, It's a hell of a movie. And Raymond Chandler's novel is still better.

Don't get me started on the radio script of The Thin Man.

Labels: Dashiell Hammett, Évora, images, Paul Cain, Portugal, Raymond Chandler, what I did on my vacation

Sunday, November 16, 2008

Fresh noir

It's been a recurring motif of my thinking about crime fiction: the occasional work that finds some new theme, setting or technique to bring back the kick that noir and the hardest of hard-boiled used to have.

Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera's Scalped did this for me most recently. Novels by Megan Abbott and Declan Burke had done so earlier. The three works accomplished this in different ways, primarily (though not exclusively) through setting and artwork in the first case, character in the second and action in the third.

What about you? What relatively recent crime writing has found new ways to deliver that nasty kick of a Hammett, a Chandler, a (Paul) Cain, a Jonathan Latimer, a Goodis or a Jim Thompson? How did it do so?

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P.S. I was remiss yesterday in not thanking Brian Lindenmuth for bringing Scalped to my attention and letting me read his bound collection of the first five issues.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Labels: Declan Burke, Jason Aaron, Jonathan Latimer, Megan Abbott, noir, Paul Cain, R.M. Guera, Scalped

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Intro- and outrospection

I've just finished Karin Fossum's When the Devil Holds the Candle and started Seven Slayers by Paul Cain. The former is introspective even by the introspective standards of Nordic crime fiction. The latter is a collection of stories by a writer from the Black Mask era of the 1930s whose writing is "void of introspection, conjunctions and all but the most necessary exposition," according to the book's introduction.

I'll use the contrast as occasion for some stray remarks between more substantive posts. The first is that some of Cain's work has a streak of humor surprising in an author Bill Pronzini called the hardest boiled of the Black Mask writers. In "One, Two, Three," a trio of men wake up from unconsciousness, ruefully amused by how they wound up where they did:

"I was thinking about what suckers we had been. I'd popped Raines and Gard had popped me and Mrs. Healey had popped Gard — all of us. One, two, three. Tinker to Evers to Chance — only more so. ... The whole Healey play, what with one thing and another, cost somewhere in the neighborhood of a grand. I got a lame skull and about two bits' worth of fun out of it.

"I pass."

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Back to Fossum. Her crime books are often referred to as the Sejer novels, after her lead investigator, the police Inspector Konrad Sejer, but Sejer appears less frequently than does the protagonist in any other crime fiction I can think of. (At least such is the case in He Who Fears the Wolf and When the Devil Holds the Candle, two of the six Sejer novels translated into English from Norwegian.)
In fact, protagonist is probably the wrong word to describe the tall, serious, compassionate and, yes, introspective Sejer. In the two from the series I've read, the readers learns more about the criminals, victims and suspects than about the people who investigate them. They are the real protagonists.

And here, readers, is your challenge: Can anyone think of crime fiction that features police or other investigators, but whose investigators are explored and portrayed less thoroughly than those they investigate?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Labels: Karin Fossum, Nordic crime, Norway, Paul Cain, Scandinavia