A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Front Porch Pulp & Frank Kane
“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep
(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)
So, as I type this, I am 99% moved from my apartment of the past six years, into the small house I bought a couple weeks ago (well, along with the bank…), which I happily call my writer’s bungalow. It has a small loft. I put in my desk (a cafeteria table) and as many bookshelves as I could fit in it. This is truly my happy place.
I started packing up my books in May. I’ve been crazy stressed between house hunting, house closing, and work. And packing. And I have felt oddly bereft, with my books in boxes. Unanchored. For someone who went through a divorce and moved out of his house in 2020 (like that wasn’t a hard enough year by itself!), this was unsettling. I couldn’t look over and see shelves of books. I couldn’t grab one for a Black Gate post.
I have over 2,000 physical books, and I moved all of them with my car, in about 55-60 boxes – yeah, that took a LOT of trips! I’m filling up my bookcases, gradually. Things like installing a washer and dryer, finding my socket set (I swear, that thing vanished), and an inconveniently timed out-of-town work trip, have taken precedence.
But my new house is slowly filling with my fiction and non-fiction collections. And THAT is helping me feel settled again. But in addition to the loft, there’s another terrific writing aspect to my bungalow. A (Black) Gat in the Hand fans (and long-time FB followers) may remember my former house had a terrific back deck, which led to Back Deck Pulp.
My apartment had a nice little concrete slab, facing a lot of trees, and thus was born the infrequent Back Porch Pulp.
Welcome, Front Porch Pulp! I’ve got a nice little railed front porch, facing due east. I catch the sunrise over an open field. That does mean it feels the sun a chunk of the day, but I’ll figure it out. And it does have some shade. It absolutely will make for nice reading sessions in the evenings. I’m really excited to read outside again.
And who do we have for our very first Front Porch Pulp post? It’s Frank Kane: not a familiar name these days. Kane’s first mystery story was his third to find print, in 1944, at the age of 32. It featured hardboiled PI Johnny Liddell. Kane would appear in about fifty short stories, and over two dozen novels. Kane was still writing Liddell when he died of a heart attack at only age 56.
The prolific Kane also wrote for radio (including Casey, Crime Photographer), and TV, where he scripted two dozen of Darren McGavin’s Mike Hammer shows.
I think I’ve mentioned that there are a TON of Pulp ebooks through Prologue Crime. And a bunch are part of Kindle Unlimited. That’s where I first ran across Kane’s name, though there are ebooks from other publishers out there. And several are just 99 cents!
Johnny Come Lately is my first Liddell book. He’s an honest PI, pretty straightforward, though with some sarcasm on call, with an eye for the ladies. A female client with curves seems to have a pretty good chance to secure his services. He has a no-nonsense secretary who keeps the office running and bullies him into doing the administrative stuff. She seems immune to his flirting.
Liddell has no problem giving someone the Mike Hammer treatment. Especially if they shoot first.
I’ve got another book, which I’ll read after this one, and see how Liddell feels after two adventures. I’m a fan of William Campbell Gault’s nice-guy PI, Brock Callahan. Liddell isn’t the same level of nice, but he also has that unspectacular vibe. And nothing wrong with that. I like this book so far.
I think it’s gonna work for me. But I want to get a better handle on Liddell.
So, Front Porch Pulp will be making some Summer appearances. And more in the Fall. And maybe now that I have a true writer’s room, I’ll make some progress on completing some more stories. It’s been awhile since I finished my last Sherlock Holmes ones. And I’m feeling a little hardboiled.
Prior Entries:
Back Porch Pulp #1
Back Porch Pulp #2
Back Deck Pulp #1
Back Deck Pulp #2
Back Deck Pulp #3
Back Deck Pulp #4
Back Deck Pulp #5
Back Deck Pulp #6
Back Deck Pulp Returns!
Bob Byrne’s ‘A (Black) Gat in the Hand’ made its Black Gate debut in 2018 and has returned every Summer since.
His ‘The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes’ column ran every Monday morning at Black Gate from March, 2014 through March, 2017. And he irregularly posts on Rex Stout’s gargantuan detective in ‘Nero Wolfe’s Brownstone.’ He is a member of the Praed Street Irregulars, and founded www.SolarPons.com (the only website dedicated to the ‘Sherlock Holmes of Praed Street’).
He organized Black Gate’s award-nominated ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series, as well as the award-winning ‘Hither Came Conan’ series. Which is now part of THE Definitive guide to Conan. He also organized 2023’s ‘Talking Tolkien.’
He has contributed stories to The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories — Parts III, IV, V, VI, XXI, and XXXIII.
He has written introductions for Steeger Books, and appeared in several magazines, including Black Mask, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and Sherlock Magazine.
You can definitely ‘experience the Bobness’ at Jason Waltz’s ’24? in 42′ podcast.
Hurrah for a writing loft and a front porch! May both see a great deal of occupation. (For cutting the sunlight when it’s too intense, recommend electric screens. Turn a porch into a screened-in porch when you want, and leave it unencumbered when you want, too.) And that bungalow appears charming in all the best ways; good choice, and congrats.
Looking forward to hearing what you think of Johnny Liddell after the second book. He sounds like a promising character, but those often change a bit, after an author gets comfortable writing them.
Turns out that second Liddell was just a short story (which the Pulps often called ‘novella’ back in the days, but it was short. I think it may have had a direct sequel, which seems reasonable given how it ended.
I’ll find a couple more of the 99 cent ebooks and see how Lidell does over time.
I read a Johnny Liddell several years ago, in a Dell paperback edition with a nifty Robert McGuiness cover; I couldn’t tell you which one it was. I thought it was a perfectly reasonable sub-Chandler, and I enjoyed it enough to plan on reading another, not that I ever have.
For me, the best of the second/third rank Chandler imitations was Marvin Albert’s Tony Rome (originally published as Miami Mayhem). I thought it was terrific, and I’ve always wanted to read the other two Tony Romes, Lady in Cement and My Kind of Game, but I’ve never been able to find them. I’ve given up hoping that Black Gat or Stark House will reprint them. (Hey – a quick check shows that someone – Compass Rose Publishing, whoever they are – reprinted both at the beginning of this year! Thanks, Bob – you’ve just cost me forty bucks!) The Frank Sinatra Tony Rome movie was ok but not as good as the book.
I found out about a lot of these guys through an awesome anthology that I’ve had for decades, called The Great American Detective. It was edited by William Kittredge and Steven Krauzer. I don’t know who they were, but they knew the private eye genre and their introductions to the authors and stories are first rate. I have it in a 1978 Signet paperback. It’s well worth seeking out.
I see there are some ebooks for Tony Rome. I might check one out.
Don’t know that anthology.
I just shelved my anthologies. It feels good to have them out. Along with Hammett, and Thompson, and Michael Stone, and…
The Thrilling Detective blog seems to have the goods.
https://thrillingdetective.com/2022/05/31/my-bookshelf-the-great-american-detective/amp/
“William Kittredge (1932-2020) was born in 1932 in Portland, Oregon, and grew up on a ranch in Southeastern Oregon’s Warner Valley in Lake County. He earned his undergraduate degree in agriculture from Oregon State University, and at 35, retired from ranching to entoll at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa, where he completed his M.F.A. The Great American Detective appeared in 1978, but it was bhis 1987 collection of essays, Owning It All, about the modern West, that really made his name. He followed that with Hole in the Sky: A Memoir. He was also co-producer of the movie, A River Runs Through It. He received numerous awards including a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His essays and articles, mostly about the West, appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Esquire, Time, Newsweek, and newspapers The Washington Post and The New York Times. He taught creative writing at the University of Montana in Missoula for 30 years and received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Montana Book Festival in September 2017.
Steven M. Krauzer (1948-2009) was an American author and screenwriter whose credits include Cocaine Wars (1985) and Sweet Revenge (1987). He was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1948, and began his writing career in high school as a general reporter and sportswriter for the Manchester Union Leader. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from Yale University in 1970, Krauzer explored the depiction of good and evil in detective fiction in his 1974 Master’s thesis in the English Literature program at the University of New Hampshire. He moved to Missoula, Montana in the mid-seventies, where he met University of Montana creative writing professor William Kittredge. Together they collaborated on The Great American Detective, and under the joint pen name of Owen Roundtree, they wrote the Cord series of westerns. Krauzer’s pseudonyms included Jokemeisters, Johnny Dee, the house-name Terry Nelsen Bonner for the Making of Australia series, J. W. Baron for the Blaze series, and Adam Lassiter for the Dennison’s War series. And as “Don Pendleton” he was responsible for several early Executioner novels, including Double Crossfire (1981) and Terrorist Summit (1982).”
Congrats on the move and that sweet front porch! “Front Porch Pulp” is a great name, it speaks of earlier days when more people read for pleasure. I saw a couple of McGavin “Mike Hammer” episodes years ago. Sorry about the divorce. As a widower I know something about your life getting turned upside down. Thanks for the post and Happy Reading!
I’ve been watching some of Stacy Keach’s first series as Hammer. I prefer it to the second time through.
I’ve never seen McGavin. I suspect overall it’s pretty dated. But I should check out his Hammer.
BTW – Keach reads a bunch of the original Spillane audiobooks.
Another guy(s) reads most of Max Allen Collins’ Hammer continuations.
I’m not crazy about the one guy I’ve heard, in general. But anybody other than Keach doesn’t sound right to me, either.