Gun in Cheek (5 page)

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."

The climax takes place in Hammett's hotel room, where he has been drugged and tied up by two of Tenuto's hoods. When the hoods return, bringing with them a thirteen-year-old girl so they can rape her and frame Hammett for it, Chandler and the police sergeant are waiting for them.

Chandler came out of the closet with the automatic in his hand. This was the real thing, but he wasn't afraid. He was too angry to be afraid. His voice was quiet and cool but there was real menace in it. "Hit that kid and I'll blow your fucking head off," he said. "Put your hands behind your heads and lean against the wall. Don't drop your guns, don't do anything."

"What the fuck!" Joey blurted out in astonishment. Charlie the Dasher's hand started to streak inside his coat. He stopped when the muzzle of the Browning lined up with his heart. "Go on, do it," Chandler said, shaking with the urge to kill the evil bastard while the automatic remained steady in his hand. "Go to it, you wop bastard, you stinking greaseball. Put your hands behind your head or I'll drop you right now. You too, moron."

Sic transit gloria AD.

He poured himself a drink and counted the money. It came to ten thousand even, mostly in fifties and twenty-fives.

—Brett Halliday,

The Violent World of Michael Shayne

She was as lovely as a girl could be without bludgeoning your endocrines.

—Stephen Marlowe, Killers Are My Meat

The sun [was] shining its ass off .

—Robert B. Parker,

Looking for Rachel Wallace

T
he private eye as we know and love him today was not born in the pages of twentieth-century pulp magazines, as some people seem to believe. He was not fathered by Dashiell Hammett or Carroll John Daly; they toughened him, taught him to shoot and to fight and to make love to beautiful women, adapted him to the violent American milieu of the twenties and thirties—but they did not create him. He is a hundred years old, not fifty, and his heritage is only half-American, only half-fictional. The fictional half, in fact, is British, and the milieu Victorian England.

The eye's British parent, of course, is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes was a private investigator; people came to him with problems, and he proceeded to investigate and to solve them. The focal points of his phenomenal success were certainly his power of observation and his deductive ability, but there is no question that some readers and writers equated his talents with his profession. The self-reliant loner, the white knight, the indefatigable crime fighter with abilities greater and methods less restricted than those of the police—these Ho!mesian characteristics became a central part of the budding mystique of the private detective.

The eye's American parent was Allan Pinkerton, the transplanted Scot who opened the first private investigative agency in Chicago in the 1850s, was a paid Union spy during the Civil War, and achieved something of an international reputation in the late 1800s for his well-publicized battles with train robbers and other Western outlaws. The famous Pinkerton symbol—a wide-open eye, with the words "We Never Sleep" below it—appeared on a number of ghostwritten "case histories" in the 1870s, bearing such titles as
The Expressman and the Detective
and
The Detective and the Somnambulist
. These were actually more sensational fiction than fact and contained a number of dubious observations:

We often find that persons who have committed grave offenses will fly to the moors, or to the prairies, or to the vast solitudes of almost impenetrable forests, and there give vent to their feelings. I instanced the case of Eugene Aram, who took up his abode on the bleak and solitary moor, and, removed from the society of his fellowmen, tried to maintain his secret by devoting himself to astronomical observations and musings with nature, but who, nevertheless, felt compelled to relieve his overburdened mind by muttering to himself details of the murder while taking long and dreary walks on the moor. (
The Expressman and the Detective
)

Pinkerton's books proved enormously popular, went into numerous reprintings, and inspired the dime novelists of the day to invent such Pinkerton-modeled characters as Old Sleuth and Nick Carter. With their talents for disguise, their feats of derring-do, and their continual assault on the organized forces of evil, these fictional operatives added yet another dimension to the mystique and carried it on a new popular wave into the twentieth century.

The heir apparent to the dime-novel sleuths was Fleming Stone, the primary creation of Carolyn Wells—novelist, playwright, poet, anthologist, writer of juveniles and short stories, and author of the genre's first nonfiction work, a combination of how-to and historical overview called
The Technique of the Mystery Story
(1913). Stone is what Miss Wells describes in
Technique
as a "transcendant detective"; that is, a detective larger than life, omniscient; a creature of fiction rather than fact. And indeed, Fleming Stone is as unreal an investigator as any of his dime-novel predecessors. In not one of his fifty-seven recorded cases does he come alive as a human being, or as anything more than a two-dimensional silhouette with a penchant for pulling murderers Out of hats on the flimsiest of clues and evidence.

Many of Stone's cases are of the "impossible crime" variety. Carolyn Wells had an inordinate fondness for this type of story and so perpetrated more than a score of them during her career. In
The Technique of the Mystery Story
, she warns beginning writers to plan their stories with absolute logic and sequence; this is sound advice, which, unfortunately, she seemed disinclined to follow in her own work. Some critics have allowed that she was expert at constructing a mystery, and this may be true; but when it came to constructing a plausible mystery, she was every bit as helpless as Gaston Leroux. It may be said, without fear of contradiction, that she produced the definitive "don't" list of impossible crime plots—that is, everyone's list of unbelievable plot gimmicks that every mystery writer who wishes to write a salable locked-room story should avoid at all cost.

Hidden panels and secret exits were far and away her favorites. Among her impossible-crime novels are ones in which the solution depends on a hidden sliding panel in a closet, a secret exit behind a sliding panel, a secret passage beneath the floor, a secret entrance into a room through a chimney, a hidden door frame with concealed hinges and lock, a secret elevator, a secret subterranean passage, and a shaft between a chimney and an external wall. Other of her "impossible" solutions include a victim stabbing himself with an icicle which melts before the body is discovered, a victim licking a postage stamp coated with poison, and a door locked from the outside with a duplicate key and inner bolts drawn by means of a thread.

Fleming Stone's two greatest cases are
The Broken O
(1933) and
The Wooden Indian
(1935). In the former, a strange death by poison occurs in a locked room, with the subsequent investigation uncovering no apparent means by which the poison could have been induced. Stone deduces that the murderer, a surgeon, implanted a tiny glass bulb into the heart of the victim; inside the bulb was a poisonous gas that slowly destroyed the surrounding tissues, thereby causing sudden death in the locked room more than twenty-four hours later. In
The Wooden Indian
, a collector of Indian artifacts is found shot to death with an arrow inside a locked room, the arrow having come from a wooden Indian kept inside the room. This was not the result of an accidental discharge, as everyone is supposed to believe, but through the machinations of a typical Wells murderer: while he was a guest in the victim's house some time earlier, the culprit manufactured a trapdoor leading from the attic into a grilled cabinet inside the Indian room; this enabled him to let himself down into the cabinet by means of a rope, from where, being an expert archer, he fired the fatal arrow through one of the grill openings. That the cabinet in question is barely large enough for a man to fit in, and that a considerable amount of space is required to maneuver a bow and arrow, are conveniently ignored by both the author and Fleming Stone.