Blogcritics

Pulp Pages: "About Kid Deth" by Raoul Whitfield

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 08:13:53 EDT

�Like hell -- they�ll get me!� he breathed.
“The streets were dark with something more than night.” - Raymond Chandler“But he hadn’t seen anything. It was still a toss-up. Gill Nasser -- or Charlie Gay. One of the two had done for Bess Grote. One of the two had bossed the kill of Lou Rands. One of the two had finished off Barney Nasser, perhaps. He wasn’t so...

Pulp Pages: "The Duchess Pulls a Fast One" by Whitman Chambers

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Sat, 5 Apr 2008 09:36:34 EDT

�The Duchess,� a reporter for The Sun, could �produce hunches faster than a cigarette machine turns out coffin nails.�
“The streets were dark with something more than night.” - Raymond ChandlerIn a quick little genderized addendum to Chandler’s dictum, may we assume that down these mean streets a woman, too, must go who is not herself mean? And just as importantly -- for getting the job done -- one who is also intuitive and sly? Among the many...

Pulp Pages: "Pigeon Blood" by Paul Cain

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 12:04:57 EST

Though his output was small, Paul Cain reached a �high point in the ultra hard-boiled manner,� says Raymond Chandler.
“The streets were dark with something more than night.” - Raymond ChandlerA mystery man of noms de plume and pseudonyms, Paul Cain, otherwise known as Peter Ruric, a successful screenwriter born George Carrol Sims in Des Moines, Iowa (1902-1966), got as much cavalier and cryptic mileage as he could out of his shifting identities and...

Pulp Pages: "Hell's Pay Check" by Frederick Nebel

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Tue, 6 Nov 2007 17:23:36 EST

Cardigan lowered his gun. "It�s damned funny that I can�t get a night�s sleep without you guys prowling around here like correspondence-school detectives."
“The streets were dark with something more than night.” - Raymond Chandler Pulp Mag Master or Pip-Squeak for the Slicks? Born in 1903, Frederick Nebel hit an early writing stride by the mid-1920s, not only contributing to the pulp magazines, but making his debut in the March 1926 issue of Black Mask, where he would write, over the...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Pulp Pages: Bruno Fischer - "Smile, Corpse, Smile!"

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 19:44:01 EDT

“The streets were dark with something more than night.” - Raymond Chandler When it came to the non-nonsense penny-a-word economy and resourcefulness of such prolific pulpsters as Bruno Fischer, a picture would often foretell a thousand words, reliably triggering a torrent fit to thrill for the infamous Weird Menace pulps’ ever-insatiable lust for page-turning melodrama and moral dilemma.In a bit of assembly-line ass-backwardness coming into the publication picture, the noirish stories were sometimes written to go along with artwork already in-house. “The covers were supposed to illustrate a story,” Fischer explained in Lee Server’s reference Danger Is My Business. “However, the covers were sometimes printed in advance, before there was a story. So what the editor did was show me the cover or a drawing - it was usually a picture of a half-naked woman and someone stripping the rest of her clothes off her. And on that basis I wrote dozens of stories.”A not inconsiderable quantity that turned out to be a fraction of Fischer’s creative output during his 1908-1995 lifetime, which saw him write over 300 stories -- the nightmarish tenor of which may seen in such titles “School for Satan’s School Girls,” “Models for the Pain Sculpture,” and “White Flesh Must Rot” -- for the so-called shudder-pulps such as Terror Tales and Sinister Stories, and also for the mags Mask and Manhunt. Also writing as Russell Gray and Harrison Storm, Fischer authored 25 novels, such as The Bleeding Scissors, Murder in the Raw, and The Lady Kills. In any event, what started out as a sideline gig to help Fischer support his new wife and family soon enough captured Fischer's imagination and ambitions to the extent that he gave up his stint as editor of the Socialist Call, the official weekly of the Socialist Party. Fischer had a new calling in his efforts to endure and prevail through Depression-era hard times and beyond.One of the more diversionary yet discerning delvings, the 1948 story “Smile, Corpse, Smile!” may have a title that smacks of one of Fischer’s more sensationalistic tales, but there is a subtle psychological underpinning to it that resonates beyond the retelling, belying its White-Flesh-Must-Rot-o-rama aura. Still, it is a fish tale of sorts, and a whopper of one.Jed, the main character, is a loner enjoying a weekend away visiting his friends, Dave and Laura, but he's more avidly ice-fishing alone at Teacup Pond - he could really do without the whole visiting and socializing routine; all he really wants is the creature discomforts of sitting on a stump and the prospect of his thirteenth pickerel. But Jed’s bump-on-a-log routine is disrupted when he sees, or thinks he sees, a woman’s hand float in the ice below him. Just when he’s ready to chalk off the apparition to bleary-eyed imagination and call it a day, however, he impulsively “got down on my knees and peered. And I saw the face”: It floated just under the surface of the blue water, shimmering as if seen through a veil - or in a dream. Did I say float? No, that gives an impression of being static, and that face was anything but that. Grave black eyes looked up at me. A small red mouth was slightly parted, as if about to speak. Long, fair hair flowed back from a smooth brow. She was rather young , with a small round chin and a rather childish pug-nose.I had never seen anything so unutterably lovely, and perhaps it was her loveliness that was so terrifying.I leaped up. I ran, forgetting that there was ice under my feet, and I sprawled full-length. I lay there, panting, and the coldness of the ice went through my coat, my pants, my gloves. Only it wasn’t the ice. The coldness was deep inside of me.For once, then, something: “It was as if I had found something infinitely precious and then had lost it.” Jed is hooked on an intermittent glimmer, and spends the rest of the weekend trying to shake off the mixed feelings and recapture new sensations as captivation turns to obsession. Meanwhile, he goes on a futile insomnia-fueled search for his presumed revenant on-the-rocks, and his wholesale resentment of women and the hell of other people becomes a “more real and more desirable” singular longing in view of this chilled chimera of “a woman who didn’t exist.”Or did she? Jed is desperate enough to seek out information about a possible identity , and learns that there is indeed a realistic angle to his vision, a tragic set of circumstances anchored in the recent disappearance of a local girl. Refreshingly, there are twists and turns in “Smile, Corpse, Smile!” that keep it from verging, in too pat a manner, into urban legend territory, weird tales division. So boy meets corpse, boy loses corpse... By keeping the focus on the seachange within Jed as he strikes an appealingly ambivalent balance between mental breakdown and ultimate hope, Fischer crafts a note-perfect pulp work as rich in characterization as it is in evocation. Throw back the little ones - "Smile, Corpse, Smile!" is a cohesive, and well-constructed tale that didn’t get away from him.

Gordon Hauptfleisch, alias Neanderthal Hawthorne, is a Blogcritics Books Editor, free lance writer, and book reviewer for the San Diego Union Tribune. He's also an enigmatic visionary of unfathomable secrets and many a guise, or at least he plays one in his delusions of grandeur. His mandate also includes weird bugs. In a previous life he was a leprous horse thief.

Pulp Pages: Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Wed, 30 May 2007 13:35:13 EDT

“The streets were dark with something more than night.” - Raymond Chandler “Come on Pals ... We got tall tracks to make.”As befits his picaresque and desperado-driven tall-tracks tales of crime and life on the run, the biographical details of Edward Anderson’s career itself suggests a by-his-wits, on-the-lam life.Born in 1905 and raised in Texas and Oklahoma, Anderson knocked around the Southwest working as a journalist at several newspapers. Soon enough, though, he turned to fiction, getting invaluable tips from pulp writer John Knox, a friend and neighbor. Anderson sold his first piece, a prizefight story titled “The Little Spic,” to a sports pulp mag, but after that he hit the road in rudderless wanderlust, taking Depression-era hard knocks on the chin and hoboing his way on the rails in scofflaw sprees and a soup kitchen subsistence of odd jobs and hiding from “the Laws.” The colorful write-what-you-know experiences went toward the writing of Anderson’s first novel, 1935’s Hungry Men, about an aimless, out-of-work musician hopping freight trains and finding adventure and love with an unemployed New York typist. As he waited for the publication of the book, Anderson moved to New Orleans and started writing “true crime” stories -- such as “The Mystery of the Man with the Cardboard Box” and “Twin Trunk Murders” -- for sensationalistically-illustrated magazines such as True Detective and Master Detective. In the course of this true crime stint writing these retellings of actual crimes, Anderson also had the opportunity to cross paths with many out-of-the-ordinary personalities, including Louisiana’s official hangman, who had trained for his position by putting a noose on his pooch and letting loose.Perhaps hanging Fido in the interest of career advancement was a contributing catalyst for Anderson’s move away from stories of gruesome murders to a tale -- in his second and final novel, 1937’s Thieves Like Us -- of a Texas-Oklahoma-set bank robbery binge. In a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style mold with a panhandle proletarian bent at odds with Anderson’s downwardly-spiraling later life (until his death in 1969) of Nazi sympathies, anti-Semitism, and crackpot religion, Anderson took a cue from a passage in Hungry Men: “The difference between a bank president and a bank bandit is that the robbery of the banker is legal. The bandit has more guts.” This great-unwashed stance, bordering on forced rationalization at times, is extended in Thieves Like Us to distinguish the somehow deserving bandits -- namely, in this case, Bowie, Chicamaw, and T-Dub -- from the more prevalent thieves like them, like the police, lawyers, doctors, “them capitalist fellows," and politicians who “use their damned tongues instead of a gun.”Of course, with all this resistance from the powers that bedevil, it’s no wonder that the felonious center will not hold in the face of unexpected and haphazard violence. The events that don’t run smoothly include, naturally, the course of true-enough love when circumstance and fate forces into lam-dom Bowie and a scornful but still hopeful young miss, Keechie, as the couple attempts to stay a few steps ahead of the Laws. During their escape we get a visceral evocation of the Great Depression-fed desperation and apprehension, and the idiosyncratically rendered sense of the American Southwest where “The moon hung in the heavens like a shred of fingernail,” and “Crickets in the roadside grass sounded like wind in loose telephone wires.” In addition, the tire-treaded two-lane blacktop slicing through an expansive desert landscape is vividly exemplified: “The highway stretched on like a long ribbon of wet funeral cloth; the rain-drunk weeds of the right-of-way rushing behind.” Really, it is at this midway getaway point in the narrative of Thieves Like Us (made into a 1949 Nicholas Ray film re-titled They Live By Night) that a more compelling and page-turning discernment of hardboiled doom and suspense takes over, along with a little ambivalence. Sure, we appreciate the tough-as-nails bravado of Bowie when he declares, “I never robbed nothin’ that couldn’t stand being robbed.” But a more sociopathic streak breaks through from time to time when his feelings toward Keechie are couched in terms that aren’t necessarily ones of endearment: Strength swelled within him. I can snap her little body. I can break her little body in my grip. Her tight lips yielded until there was only softness and then her breath became as naked as her body.Nothing like a little unease and well-planted seeds of doubt to enliven a honeymoon only just begun, with miles to go before a sly little surprise of an ending -- one that Bowie should’ve anticipated early on, really, with T-Dub’s warning about “sore women and snitches.” But that’s part and parcel of the travels and travails with and of Thieves Like Us. Just be glad you’re along for the ride.

Pulp Pages: Pick-Up by Charles Willeford

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:11:00 EDT

“The streets were dark with something more than night.” - Raymond Chandler “When you’re an orphan at the age of eight,“ Charles Willeford once said, “you realize that you’re the next one to die. You’re vision of life is colored by reality rather than pipe dreams.” Still, in Willeford’s 40-year writing career in an array of genres -- fiction, poetry, journalism, screenwriting, autobiography, literary criticism -- and life as hard-luck urchin, Depression-era drifter, career soldier, seamy-side carouser, and unconventional college teacher, it’s a skewed vision, replete with pitch-black humor.Indeed, it’s a droll noir that becomes immediately apparent with such works as Cockfighter, a book about the sport of cockfighting based on Homer’s Odyssey; Honey Gal, about an ex-accountant and novelist who pretends to be the new minister at an all-black church; and 1953’s High Priest of California, a tale about a psychotic and violent used car salesman that was rejected by Fawcett’s Gold Medal Books as “too weird.” Nevertheless, High Priest, the first in what would become Willeford’s San Francisco trilogy (ending with Until I am Dead, later retitled Wild Wives), found a home with a lower-tier imprint of Universal Publishing and Distributing, which came up with a pulp-fic perfect blurb of sordid sorts: “The world was his oyster - and women his pearls! A roaring saga of the male animal on the prowl!”The oddly fascinating Pick-Up came out the following year on one of Universal’s seedy sex lines, Beacon Books, who announced it in similarly sensationalistic fashion: “He holed up with a helpless lush. A story that builds to a shattering climax!” If nothing else, that serves as a succinct summation of Pick-Up’s structure, though the devil’s still in the details - boy still meets girl, but it’s not of the time-honored “meet-cute” manner that you see in the movies: ... I lit two cigarettes and passed her one. She sucked deeply.'My name is Harry Jordan,' I said solemnly. 'I’m thirty-two years of age and when I’m not working, I drink.'Her laugh closely resembled a tinkling bell. 'My name is Helen Meredith. I’m thirty-three years old and I don’t work at all. I drink all of the time.'Harry, once a talented artist, now an habitual barfly trying to hold down a job as a San Francisco coffee-shop counterman, is in the midst of his downward spiral into depression, self-destruction and self-deception, while Helen, having just run away from her marriage and from her domineering mother, is just starting hers. It doesn’t help that, as they begin their affair, Henry sees himself as “worse than nothing, a dark, faceless shadow, alone in the darkness,” and that, compounding the problem, Helen “always took my moods as her own.” Though tenuous bouts of tenderness and twisted love keep them together, it’s mostly a match made in hell as they move in together, commencing a vicious cycle of insignificant triumphs and bigger failures - of cruelty, violence, a couple of botched suicide pacts, stints in the mental hospital, and, finally, murder.Well, not quite “finally,” after all. The homicidal aftermath brings in the bigger nihilistic guns and shadowy ruminations about “the nothingness” of life, but before a concluding plot twist that's either inspired or way out in left field or a little of both, many gaps in the lives of Henry and Helen are bridged that help illuminate their backstories while adding to their tragic cast. And sometimes you get the cynicism with the elucidation. As Henry says: I was bored with my dull life. I didn’t want to remember anything; all I wanted was peace and quiet. The silence that Death brings, an all-enveloping white cloak of everlasting darkness. By my withdrawal from the world I had made my own little niche and it was a dreary little place I didn’t want to live in or tell about.That Charles Willeford is able to so deftly tell about this nourish niche is testament to his power and craftsmanship as a writer. We may not want to live in this “dreary little place” either, but Willeford makes it a compelling, affecting, and sometimes absurd world to visit for vicarious thrills and enthrallment.

Pulp Pages: Black Friday by David Goodis

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 09:36:25 EDT

Pulp Pages spotlights the best of hardboiled and noir fiction of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. “The streets were dark with something more than night.” - Raymond Chandler “David Goodis didn’t write novels, he wrote suicide notes,” mystery writer Ed Gorman once wrote. "He was a sad, suffering guy and he was able to get that sadness and suffering down on paper."It was almost as if he couldn’t wait for early ambition to dissipate so he could take up pen and pine. Born in Philadelphia in 1917, he graduated from Temple University and published his first novel, a literary work entitled Retreat From Oblivion, when he was 21. Embarking on a more pragmatic and profitable route after its commercial underperformance, Goodis started to turn in prodigious amounts of stories to the pulp magazines, taking up writing novels once again in 1946 with Dark Passage. Made into a movie with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Dark Passage became Goodis’ dark passage, in effect, to Los Angeles as a scriptwriter and uncharacteristic Hollywood hobnobber. That is, until, homesick and nursing some wounds from an earlier brief and soured marriage, he retreated in 1950 back into ostensible oblivion to the family home in Philadelphia, where he lived with his parents. Making a living now meant turning to the paperback publishers, including Fawcett Gold Medal, which had just started publishing paperback originals rather than hardcover reprints. As one of the reliable "Gold Medal boys" that included John D. MacDonald and Bruno Fischer, Goodis wrote such forbidding works as Cassidy’s Girl and Of Tender Sin, and for Lion Books such noirish novels as The Burglar and Blonde on the Street Corner, in addition to 1954’s Black Friday. The ever-prolific Goodis imbued these books with his own inherent melancholy and despair; the downtown street life seediness he was drawn to; and such autobiographical details as his relationship with his schizophrenic brother, the after-effects of his divorce, and love of jazz and boxing. “Paperbackdom’s bard of Skid Row, poet laureate of the American Failure Story” -- as writer Lee Server portrays Goodis in Over My Dead Body -- died at the age of 49 in 1967. And if his despondent succumbing to cirrhosis of the liver had indeed rendered his distressing but self-deprecating writings as prolonging-the-agony “suicide notes” of sorts, Black Friday’s tense, tortured and ultimately tragic storyline is signaled in and sustained from the start, from the very first line: “January cold came in from two rivers, formed four walls around Hart and closed in on him.”Circumstances in Philadelphia have trapped main character Al Hart, an educated and once affluent New Orleans artist on the run from murder with mitigating circumstances. And sometimes trying to escape the mired-up obsessions and fear of his own making - a dread he realized whenever he gave in to the urge to look back, when “all he could see was the streets and the houses on both sides of the street and the empty pavements. That was all. That was what had been chasing him. The emptiness.” But it was all just an anxiety-ridden reprieve from a reality that demanded his capture. So when the runner stumbles, and Hart chances upon a criminal gang and becomes more and more embroiled in their activities and secrets, he opts for the relative security this set-up and refuge brings. At whatever cost. To uphold the impressive charade that he’s on the lam for murdering his brother for money alone -- forget the humane considerations entailed -- Hart now needs to pass himself off as a professional heister. The gang, now expanded yet variously and initially wary and distrusting, juggles for psychological equilibrium as they hole up in a house in preparation for a home robbery and elaborate art theft. The plans call for Hart’s actual art expertise, but what wasn’t figured on is the jockeying for romantic position that comes along with the introduction of two trademark pulp-fiction femmes, fatale or not, who have the ability to blow Hart’s cover. One is a brassy moll “more solid than soft, packed into five feet five inches and molded majestically,” and the other a sweet out-of-place victim of circumstance with an “out of the ordinary face. The eyes were pearly violet. The eyes were ninety-nine percent of her.” While a hard-pressed Hart completes the love triangularity at play, he finds it in his interest to prove, unwillingly, his pulp-frictional tough-guy mettle by helping Charley, the gang leader, decapitate and cut into incinerator-ready pieces a fatally injured gang member. Hart’s a “professional” now, so there should be no reason for him to resist such expedient measures. Nonetheless Goodis finds a unique and drolly diversionary way to handle the absurdly violent and gruesome task: The sounds of the hack-saw and the knife were great big bunches of dreadful gooey stuff hitting him and going into him and he was getting sick and he tried to get his mind on something else, and he came to painting and started to concentrate on the landscapes of Corot, then got away from Corot although remaining in the same period as he thought of Courbet, then knowing Courbet was an exponent of realism and trying to get away from Courbet, unable to get away because he was thinking of the way Gustave Courbet showed Cato tearing out his own entrails and showed “Quarry,” in which the stag under the tree was getting torn to bits by yowling hounds, and he tried to come back to Corot, past Corot to the gentle English school of laced garments and graceful posture and the delicacy and all that, and Courbet dragged him back.And Charley said, “Hold him higher up.”With his eyes shut tightly, Hart said, “Tell me, Charley, did you ever do this before?”“No,” Charley said.Women and wise-guys, complications and implications. Hart sets in for the set-up, to pull a job that happens to fall on a Friday the 13th, a day that has the potential to be, as Charley puts it, a Black Friday - for certain people a “day that never ends. They carry it with them all the time. Like typhoid carriers. So no matter where they go or what they do, they bring bad luck.”Hart could almost feel the four walls of January cold closing in more and more…

Pulp Pages: "Something For The Sweeper" by Norbert Davis

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 16:15:22 EST

Pulp Pages spotlights the best of hardboiled and noir fiction of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s.“The streets were dark with something more than night.” - Raymond Chandler When the going gets tough, the tough get chilblains: “Jones limped up to the high counter and leaned on it with his elbow, looking as mysterious and hard-boiled as possible in view of the fact that his feet were hurting him more and more all the time.”The characterization of the unassuming and self-deprecating detective in Norbert Davis’ short story “Something for the Sweeper” -- as a proverbial knight whose armor has lost a bit of its shine -- is typical of the amusing mysteries of this unsung but prolific and versatile writer. Though he was adept in writing darker war stories, adventure tales, and westerns, it was the distinctively droll mystery and detective stories submitted to the pulp magazines in the 1930s and 1940s that set Davis apart. The no-nonsense Black Mask published Davis’ more noirish and violent pieces, but his more whimsical and laugh-out-loud efforts found a home with other pulp pubs such as Dime Detective.As the Illinois-born Davis found success with ever-increasing outlets for his short stories, he skipped out on taking the bar exam after finishing law school at Stanford. Instead, he moved to Los Angeles, for a time living a few doors down from Raymond Chandler, who was a big booster of this wit-steeped word-slinger. Davis joined up with other pulp masters to form a writer’s group called the Fictioneers, and got cracking on the wisecracks while sharpening the sardonic slang and simile-stamped cynicism that is part of the curriculum in the school of hardboiled knocks.But far from being a parodic take on tough-guy lit, Davis’ case-hardened but breezy style carried more than enough substance in plot, theme, and characterization. In addition to a couple of magazine features, the Bail Bond Dodd series and the Max Latin novellas, Davis’ humor fueled, starting in 1943, three hardcover novels: Mouse In The Mountain, Sally’s In The Alley, and Oh, Murder Mine. Unfortunately, disappointing sales may have contributed to his despondency over his career before his suicide in 1949.Norbert Davis lives on, however, in his many writings -- the nuanced, near-noir quirkiness, too, as attested to indeed in “Something For The Sweeper,” from 1937. After all, our protagonist P.I. Is named “just plain Jones, J.P. Jones." "See," he goes on, "my mother had a lot of kids, and she always thought she ought to give them something fancy in the way of first names on account of there being lots of Joneses around.” As you might guess, after names such as Horatius, Alvimina, and Evangeline were depleted, mom’s imagination conked out and apathy kicked in for the twelfth child, our hapless hero. Of course, Jones has to explain that too may times than he cares to explain, including on his current case, which sounds simple enough - he’s been hired to find a man, Hendrick Boone, who’s inherited a lot of money from his dead and long-estranged brother. His first obstacle comes when he goes to Boone's house and finds only his wife and daughter, both of whom seem a little defensive and jumpy before they even know what they‘re defensive and jumpy about. "Oh, but he didn’t do it!” Mrs. Boone declares, preemptively. “Really he didn’t … He couldn’t have, you see. He’s been in the hospital, and his condition is very serious, really it is, and he couldn’t have done it.” The interrogation of sorts continues: 'Done what?' said Jones.She moved her hands a little, helplessly. 'Well -- whatever you think he did. Was it -- windows again?''Windows?' Jones asked.'I mean, did you think he broke some windows, like he usually does?''He makes a habit of breaking windows?'She nodded. 'Oh yes. But only plate glass ones.''Particular, huh? What does he break windows for?'Her sallow face flushed slightly. 'He sees his image. You know, his reflection. And he thinks he’s following himself again. He thinks he is spying on himself. And so he breaks the windows.''Well, maybe it’s a good idea.' said Jones. 'Is he ever troubled with pink elephants?'Things eventually get straightened out, and we learn that a tipsy Mr. Boone had had a falling out years ago with his rich brother when he broke the plate glass window in his brother’s living room. Then the daughter, Sarah, enters the picture, a little too unabashedly inquisitive about what will happen when the old man quickly “drinks himself to death” with the money. When she learns that the income will go to her mother, she says, “It would, hey? That’s something that needs a little thinking about.”Not just an off-hand remark, off course, and it is at this point that Davis starts mixing a little murder with his Thurber-esque tendencies. As Jones heads out to the hospital to see Mr. Boone, the wheels are set in motion for an unpredictably convoluted and quite entertaining series of twists and turns, gumshoeing and sleuthing, mistaken identities, and killers lurking in the shadows. And then along came Jones, cracking wise and cracking another case…

Pulp Pages: Rendezvous in Black by Cornell Woolrich

Gordon Hauptfleisch — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:23:23 EST

Pulp Pages spotlights the best of hardboiled and noir fiction of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. “The streets were dark with something more than night,” Raymond Chandler once wrote. Cornell Woolrich, in his suspense noir classic Rendezvous in Black, takes it a step further by penetrating and calibrating that night where “the darkness changed only to another darkness.”It’s a pessimistic viewpoint that may have grown out of Woolrich’s early life in New York City, where he was born in 1903 to soon-divorced parents. In the 1920s Woolrich wrote two critically well-received but commercially disappointing Jazz-Age novels, and experienced emotional devastation with a failed love and a brief, annulled marriage. With the advent of the Depression and with few career prospects Woolrich, living back with his mother in a Manhattan residential hotel -- where he would die a recluse in 1968 -- started writing for the pulp magazines. Developing a taut and psychological intensity with over 100 stories, Woolrich was well-prepared to convey his dark themes of revenge, murder, and doomed romance when in the 1940s he began writing hardcover crime novels that often put him in the same league with Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. His so-called black series include such books as The Bride Wore Black, Black Alibi, Black Curtain, and Black Path of Fear. One of the most nightmarish is 1948's Rendezvous in Black, with a stark and menacingly poetic and often elegiac tone commensurate to the consideration, “How could a thing that was so good become so bad ... how could a thing that was so right become so wrong?” That anything could be so good, and so right, was beyond question in the everyman and girl-next-door engagement of Johnny Marr and Dorothy, who first met “when she was seven and he was eight. And they’d first fallen in love when he was eight and she was seven. Sometimes it happens that way.”And sometimes what is so bad and so wrong happens instead. When Dorothy suddenly, on a May 31st -- the night before their wedding day -- dies in a freak accident involving a low-flying charter plane and a group of drunken men, Johnny’s life is shattered. And no matter that only one man, unknown, is to blame, a now maniacal Marr plots vengeance on all five men. But if “revenge is a dish best served cold,” Woolrich chills it down several degrees further as his cold-around-the-heart character doesn’t content himself with just killing each suspect. He wants them to live and endure the same mental anguish as -- on May 31st of each year -- he exacts retribution upon their loved ones, leaving taunting notes that ask, “Now you know what it feels like. So how do you like it?”In Rendezvous in Black’s accumulative, page-turning race-against-time, the twists and turns have their own twists and turns, and a reader can go for several pages of uncertainty as to which one of several possible scenarios is being played out, and by whom. Speaking of characters, it is a mark of Woolrich’s devilry-in-the-details craftsmanship that even the secondary personalities are as carefully considered and nuanced as the main protagonists and antagonists; surprisingly perhaps, Woolrich displays a keen and sympathetic understanding of women. In any case, the only sure thing in this tense, any-which-way-but-lucid cat-and-mouse game -- the pursuer is a seeming bumbler of a Colombo-like detective -- is the portentous and perennial despair of darkness and shadow that allows for no shades of gray. Each rendezvous is truly a date with a dimming destiny bearing down by any means necessary: “A train of death. A cavalcade of doom. Dozens of black cars, scores of them; shaking the rails, shaking the night…” Even ostensible refuge and escape may comprise wasted effort: “And now they were on a ship, coursing deep water, crossing an ocean between two worlds. The eternal darkness was still around her…” Then it closes in: “Night came on in her heart. One by one, all the lights went out. It got cold, and a wind from nowhere knifed at her. Her step didn’t falter; outwardly there was nothing to show that, within her, the whole world was going down into blackness.” Into, indeed, a dark with something more than night, a darkness that changes only to another darkness.