Gun in Cheek (9 page)

The door chimes were still disturbing Beethoven in his grave when I rushed to meet him. (
The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse
)

His freshest laurel wreath was his recent interpretation of such tough aces like Stravinsky and Shostakovich; rendering their works on violin strings was like pushing peanuts up Mount Everest with your nose. (
Killer on the Keys
)

Her hips were beautifully arched and her breasts were like proud flags waving triumphantly. She carried them high and mighty. (
The Case of the Violent Virgin
)

She . . . unearthed one of her fantastic breasts from the folds of her sheath skirt. (
The Horrible Man
)

Her breasts and hips would put a scenic railway to shame. Or maybe make an artist drown himself in his fixative. (
The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse
)

Holly Hill's figure didn't take your breath away. It just never gave it back. . . . Her breasts weren't only round and full. They pulsed and throbbed like living perfections. The deep well of her stomach fell away to the superb convex leading gracefully to strong, starkly rendered thighs that were as firm and full as sixteen-inch guns. (
The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse
)

Her breasts were twin mounds of female muscle that quivered and hung and quivered and hung again. The pale red of her nipples were two twinkling eyes that said Go, Man, Go. (
The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse
)

If her eyes were like baseballs, her breasts took you from sporting goods to something like ripe cantaloupes. (
The Case of the Violent Virgin
)

"I've done a stupid thing, Ed," Opal Trace musicaled. (
The Case of the Violent Virgin
)

"Opal . . ." she hoarsed. (
The Case of the Violent Virgin
)

"Obviously!" she crackled, laying a whip across me and then turning with a sexy flounce she vanished through the glass doors, dragging her hatbox and portmanteau behind her. And my mind. (
Shoot It Again, Sam!
)

I looked at the knife. . . . One half the blade was soaked with drying blood. Benny's blood. It was red, like anybody else's blood. (
The Voodoo Murders
)

Dolores came around the bed with the speed of a big ape. . . . She descended on me like a tree full of the same apes she looked like. (
The Tall Dolores
)

It had been a journey into the absurd. A trip into Darkness.

And maybe a one-way ticket to Hell. And whatever lays [sic] beyond that. (
Shoot It Again, Sam!
)

In the sixties and seventies, the plots of private-detective novels began to grow increasingly sophisticated.
 
To be sure, there were – and still are – a few around with Ed Noonish premises;
 
but a number of serious (and pretentious) writers began to emulate what Ross Macdonald had been doing for years: using the PI novel as a vehicle for salient commentary on all sorts of social, political, racial, sexual, ecological, and psychological topics. A certain percentage of these writers have achieved critical acclaim and widespread popularity—despite the fact that, almost to a man, they are unabashed imitators of one or all of the so-called Big Three of Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald. Their books are riddled with conventional cops, conventional wisecracks, conventional toughness, conventional violence, and conventional relationships with conventional female characters. They take their detectives as seriously as they take their subject matter, never admitting for a moment that what they are writing is pure and simple pastiche. They have, in short, brought nothing new to the form, the mystique, the Eye.

Only one writer has brought anything new to the Eye in the past thirty years.

His name is Ross H. Spencer.

His detective's name is Chance Perdue.

The first Chance Perdue novel was published in 1978. Under the title
The Dada Caper.

It is full of wisecracks and other conventions.

But it is still unique.

It is unique because Spencer has a gimmick.

Or rather three gimmicks.

His first gimmick is that every sentence is a separate paragraph.

His second gimmick is that he doesn't use quotation marks or commas.

Betsy said did she drink a lot?

I said was Hitler a Nazi a lot?

That is how Spencer writes dialogue.

It is supposed to be funny dialogue

Sometimes it is.

The Dada Caper
is supposed to be a spoof.

Sometimes it is.

She said why you lying cheating philandering Casanova Romeo gigolo any old port in the storm man about town.

That is how Spencer writes sentences without using commas not even to set off clauses like this one or long strings of pithy pointed keen witted right on target adjectives.

His third gimmick is that each chapter begins with an epigraph after the fashion of Mark Twain in
Pudd'nhead Wilson
.

These epigraphs are supposedly written by Monroe D. Underwood.

Who is also known as Old Dad Underwood.

Some of Old Dad Underwood's epigraphs are funny.

. . .going to bed with a good woman can relax a man . . . going to bed with a bad woman can relax a man twicet . . . iffen he is a good man. . .

That's a funny one.

But some of Old Dad Underwood's epigraphs are not funny.

. . .oncet I knowed a feller what smuggled a ham into a synagogue . . . only man whatever got circumcized twentytwo times . . .

That's not a funny one.

All three of Spencer's gimmicks are clever.

One reason they are clever is that they allow him to write a complete novel in less than twenty-five thousand words.

Most writers need a minimum of fifty thousand words to write a novel.

Another reason they are clever is that Spencer doesn't have to spend very much time on plotting.

There is very little plot in
The Dada Caper
.

It is about a Soviet-inspired DADA conspiracy.

DADA means Destroy America, Destroy America.

Anyhow Spencer knew a good thing when he saw it.

So he made Chance Perdue into a series character.

Other novels have followed and more are to come.

But not a lot more.

The problem with gimmicks like this is that they tend to lose their novelty after a while.

Pretty soon readers will start looking for a two-sentence paragraph.

Or a set of quotation marks.

Or a comma.

Or a plot.

And when they don't find any

. . . oncet I knowed a feller throwed a book across the room - . - I heered him say that's your last chance Perdue.

Old Dad Underwood didn't write that one.

I wrote that one.

It may not be an epigraph either.

It may be an epitaph for an Eye.

"Been a long day, sir," I said briskly. "But I'm still hard at it."

"Insulting people?" he growled. . . . "Can't you ever be polite to somebody, Wheeler? Anybody?"

"If I'd known I was supposed to be polite," I told him, "I never would have become a cop in the first place."

-Carter Brown,
The Victim

"You remember that Wall Street philanthropist who was killed by a can of sauerkraut thrown at his head. . . . What a pickle the police were in that day!"

-Elsa Barker,
The C.I.D. of Dexter Drake

T
he policeman (cop, copper, bobbie, nabber, fuzz, pig—choose your favorite slang term) has generally been accorded more respect in Europe than in the United States. This is especially true among fiction writers, who have been inclined to venerate the actions of the professional manhunter over there and to sneer at them over here. Which is why, until the recent upsurge of interest in the American police procedural novel, far more British, French, and Scandinavian mysteries featured police detectives than did American mysteries. And why many crime stories written by Americans have had as their protagonists European police detectives. (John Dickson Carr's Henri Bencolin is just one of the more well known examples.)

Part of the reason for this dichotomy is that the modern police agency is European in origin: the French Sûreté was formed in 1811, the London metropolitan police force was organized by Sir Robert Peel in 1829. These agencies were not only well established before similar operations were begun here but also highly romanticized in popular writings. The adventures of Francois Eugene Vidocq, the reformed thief and forger who became the first chief of the Sûreté and later wrote a much glamorized autobiography called, in the United States,
Vidocq, The French Police Spy
, were famous on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-1800s and had a profound influence on early writers of crime fiction, beginning with Poe himself, who more or less modeled C. Auguste Dupin on Vidocq. This influence, as Julian Symons points out in his excellent critical history, Mortal Consequences, was not because of any deductive skill on Vidocq's part; during his tenure at the Sûreté , he began a card-index system and took impressions of footprints, and made such observations as that many criminals appeared to be bowlegged; but these were the limit of his contributions to police procedural methods. "Vidocq's importance," Symons says, "rested in his nature as the archetypal ambiguous figure of the criminal who is also a hero. The interpenetrations of police with criminals, and the doubt about whether a particular character is hero or villain, is an essential feature of the crime story."

Nonetheless, an aura of mystery is not the chief reason the European policeman became such a popular figure here and abroad in the twentieth century. The chief reason, conversely, is the European—and in particular, British—esteem for representatives of law, order, and the preservation of existing social and moral attitudes. Beginning with the rise of the middle class and the age of Dickens, such representatives, by their very election or appointment to lofty positions, were considered to possess any number of virtues, not the least of which was an acute intelligence. This attitude persisted until the general disillusionment that followed (or preceded, depending on your point of view) the Second World War in Europe. When a detective-story writer introduced a police detective, it was automatically assumed by the reader that he was a man of intellect and keen capabilities.

The same is not true in this country. Rampant police corruption in the cities, Western peace officers of the Wyatt Earp ilk who were little better than outlaws themselves, the pioneer spirit of self-reliance and personal rather than public code of ethics, and story weeklies and dime novels that mostly painted law-enforcement officers in unfavorable colors all combined in the late nineteenth century to create a wholly different police image in American minds. By the time the twentieth century arrived, the police were symbols of authority to be feared, scorned, or at best tolerated, but seldom to be revered. Mystery writers, naturally, reflected this attitude in their work; private investigators and gifted amateurs were much preferred to hardworking, honest cops as detective heroes. It became standard practice to depict the police as bumbling comic figures or as sadistic halfwits whose primary function was to be outsmarted and made fools of by the private individual. To some extent, the stereotypical dumb cop, with his penchant for ungrammatical sentences and the third degree, has survived in mystery fiction to the present.

Most bad mysteries treat the police in this fashion—sometimes unconsciously, in those books in which a cop is supposed to be the hero. The authors, by their very ineptitude, imbue their police detectives with all the negative and/or chuckle-some traits of those who are treated as anti- or nonheroes in other mysteries and thus achieve the exact same effect of ridicule.

A case in point is Cortland Fitzsimmons's
70,000 Witnesses
(1931), which features a cop named Kethridge. Fitzsimmons wrote a number of sports mysteries in the thirties and forties, utilizing hockey, baseball, and football, among other sports, as background;
70,000 Witnesses
is the first of these. It deals with college football as it was played in 1930, a markedly different variety of football from the one we know a half-century later. Teams quick-kicked on first down, for example, even with good field position; they also received the kickoff after scoring a touchdown. Even more interesting are behind-the-scenes differences: coaches admitting to paying for the services of some players and seeming proud of the fact; players openly gambling on the outcome of games, sometimes even betting on their opponents to win, without anybody becoming upset or even wondering if these players might not decide purposely to miss a tackle of two or maybe commit a convenient fumble if the score got too close. Fitzsimmons implies that no one is concerned about the gambling because "college boys will be college boys," and besides, none of America's fine young manhood would dream of doing anything illegal on or off the field.