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Author: Bob Byrne

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #4

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #4

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Gat_HBOmnibusEDITED“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)

Hopefully, by now, you know that I’ve done a slew of Facebook posts under the label, Back Deck Pulp, kind of cross-promoting this column. Especially since last week’s column was BDP #3! Below are some more of my Back Deck Pulp posts, collected by subject matter. I tried to share some interesting info. You be the judge! Here are links to BDP #1, and BDP #2.

 

In 1946, Simon & Schuster put out The Hard-Boiled Omnibus, an anthology of Black Mask stories, put together by the legendary Joseph ‘Cap’ Shaw. It is the Beeton’s Christmas Annual (the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes) of hardboiled. All such anthologies can point back to that initial volume.

HARD BOILED OMNIBUS

The Back Deck Pulp library now includes an original, 1946, hardback copy of The Hard Boiled Omnibus! You better believe there will be a A (Black) Gat in the Hand post on this bad boy! (I didn’t get around to writing that post. Maybe a 2019 special column…)

And I bought it from the current Black Mask rights holder and editor, Matt Moring. Most cool

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #3

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Back Deck Pulp #3

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DBP_DeckBushEdited“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)

Hopefully, discerning reader of this column…

What? No, there is no guest poster this week. I wrote the column. Really? Well, I’m SOOO sorry you’re disappointed that I’m actually writing my own essay for my own column this week. The hardboiled genre is full of setbacks and kicks in the teeth. You just have to overcome.

Anywhoo…as I was saying: by now, you are aware that I put up posts on my Facebook page under the moniker, Back Deck Pulp. They usually relate some tidbit to something I’m reading for this column, and I include a picture – usually taken out on my back deck. Thus, the title. The first two Back Deck Pulp essays were ‘as is.’ I’ve added a little context this time, to help. I hope it does, anyways. So, read on!

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand – Rory Gallagher Sings of the Continental Op (And It’s Great!)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand – Rory Gallagher Sings of the Continental Op (And It’s Great!)

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Gat_GallagherBlinds“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

Somebody asked me if I actually write for this column, or just put up the posts for it. I started explaining the work involved in pitching the concept, recruiting guest posters, editing the posts, promoting the column through Back Deck Pulp posts on my FB page….then I gave up and said, “Yes, I do write this column. In fact, I wrote this coming Monday’s post.”

That wasn’t exactly a bold prediction, since I didn’t have a guest post in hand. Although, my essay on the excellent Joe Gores isn’t nearly done, so there was that. But I got it all worked out in the end!

Rory Gallagher was a world-class guitarist from Ireland who died of liver problems in 1995 at the age of 47. In 1987, he recorded a song entitled, “The Continental Op,” which was included on his Defender album. There’s also a song called “Kickback City” on that album and the lyrics are very much in the style of Raymond Chandler and other pulpsters who depicted the corruption and hopelessness of urban cities. And you could take the story of “Loanshark Blues” and you’d have a pretty good character for a hardboiled PI story. I recommend giving Defender a listen.

But we’re here to talk about his tribute to Dashiell Hammett, “The Continental Op.”

If you’ve come here to A (Black) Gat in the Hand, you probably already know about The Op. While The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon are Hammett’s best-known works, it’s the Op that made him the father of the hardboiled school. In seven years, he wrote over three dozen tales featuring the nameless private eye for the Continental Detective Agency. I don’t think any other PI series has equaled the Continental Op stories.

The Op stories are readily available and are cornerstone hardboiled reading. All of the stories were recently collected in The Big Book of Continental Op Stories.

I cannot give Gallagher enough kudos for writing a song about the Continental Op, then providing a video that absolutely captures the hardboiled, pulp feel. The black and white, graphic novel style is pure throwback. You could almost storyboard a movie from it. Some of the frames fly by so fast, I had to rewatch them several times. But the overall effect works.

Watch the video. Then work through the rest of the post with me. It should be fun.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Andrew Salmon Remembers Frederick C. Davis

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Andrew Salmon Remembers Frederick C. Davis

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Salmon_DavisAcesEditedA (Black) Gat in the Hand continues on with quality guest posts (something’s got to make this column work, and it sure as heck isn’t my writing!) this week, as Andrew Salmon holds forth on pulpster Frederick C. Davis. I knew I wasn’t qualified to write about Davis (though I did hold my own on Norbert Davis!). And since Andrew, author of the excellent Sherlock Holmes Fight Club novels, wrote the introductions to Altus’ Press’ Moon Man collections, I knew he was the guy. So, read on! 

“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

Any good pulp author from the glory days of Classic Pulp had to be very good at two things: he or she had to be fast and versatile. And, of course, said pulpsmith had to have some modicum of talent thrown into the mix.

Frederick C. Davis (1902-1977) has all of these – in spades. Known today as the author of the first 20 Operator #5 adventures, one doesn’t hear his name come up when Max Brand, Erle Stanley Gardner, Lester Dent, Walter Gibson, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are being discussed. And yet, you could pick an old pulp at random today and most likely find a Davis story within its crumbling yellow pages.

He wrote hundreds of pulp stories and a lot of them are really, really good. In addition to those Operator #5 yarns, he also created the Moon Man, cranking out 38 tales of the globed gladiator. Throw in Mark Hazard and Ravenwood and his versatility begins to show through.

The Moon Man, long out of print and never collected until recently, had a much more profound effect on comics than the pulp world of yesteryear. It’s long been established that Superman sprang, partially, from Doc Savage and Batman owes much to the Shadow. But few know how much Spider-Man owes to the Moon Man. Not the classic pulp character, the Spider – the Moon Man. Huh? Stay with me.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: William Patrick Maynard’s ‘Shades of Yellow’

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: William Patrick Maynard’s ‘Shades of Yellow’

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Because I find it’s easier to get somebody else to do all the heavy lifting, I secured another guest poster for this week! Fellow Black Gater William Patrick Maynard knows more about Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril genre than anybody else I know. And if you see his credentials at the end of the post, you’ll understand why! Today, he takes a pulpy look at the ‘menace from the Far East’ topic. Read on!

“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

Maynard_WuFangMagEditContext is a challenge in politically correct times that seek to view the past through the myopic lenses of an eternal present. Over 130 years ago, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created an archetype in fiction with his consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. While Holmes lives on at least in name and reputation, most of his antecedents, contemporaries, and successors in the fantastic fiction of the Victorian and Edwardian eras are rapidly fading into obscurity.

While forgotten by the public at large, the traits and exploits of many of these same characters have been disseminated into today’s pop culture icons (James Bond, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and the glut of superheroes that continue to dominate movie screens). What remains of the past is largely through the efforts of pulp specialty publishers and public domain reprint specialists who keep these classic works in print for a niche market that still reads works from a different, simpler, though not always better, world.

Much of this fantastic fiction sprung directly from colonial viewpoints of the British Empire. Among the xenophobic byproducts of colonialism in popular culture was the Yellow Peril, the paranoid delusion that Chinese immigrants were plotting to conquer the West. There was certainly crime in Chinatown: there is always crime among the economically underprivileged, but what made the Yellow Peril thrive as a sub-genre of the thriller was the creation of a brilliant, amoral Chinese criminal mastermind in the same fashion as Conan Doyle’s Professor Moriarty and Guy Boothby’s Dr. Nikola.

Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu became the personification of the Yellow Peril. Without the character’s introduction, the sub-genre would never have prevailed. Fu Manchu took the reading public by storm just before the outbreak of the First World War and remained a bestselling franchise up to the Cold War. Rohmer’s insidious fiend was everywhere: magazines (slicks, not pulps), books, newspaper strips, comic books, radio series, films, the theater, and eventually television.

Holmes and Fu Manchu were certainly among the most influential characters in the first half of the last century. Arthur B. Reeve’s American variation on Holmes, the scientific detective Craig Kennedy was likewise pitted against a variation on Fu Manchu, the diabolical Wu Fang in The Exploits of Elaine (1914), The Romance of Elaine (1915), and The Triumph of Elaine (1915). The Elaine triptych were inspired by the phenomenal success of the 1914 serial, The Perils of Pauline.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Hardboiled Film Noir’ (Part Two)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Hardboiled Film Noir’ (Part Two)

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I reached out to some friends to help me with A (Black) Gat in the Hand, as I certainly can’t cover everything and do it all justice. Our latest guest is author and fellow Black Gater, Joe Bonadonna. Last week, Joe delivered an in-depth look at hardboiled adaptations on the silver screen. So, here’s part two!

Hardboiled Film Noir: From Printed Page to Moving Pictures (Part Two)

“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

Bonadonna_CainDoubleEDITEDAnd now, on to Raymond Chandler, one of the two writers who inspired my Heroic Fantasy, the other being Fritz Lieber, another pulp magazine maestro. Considered by many to be a founder of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, Chandler had been an oil company executive who turned to writing after he lost his job during the Great Depression.

To me, his prose is pure poetry, his use of simile and metaphor, his imagery and turn of phrase are top notch. His novel, The Big Sleep, was turned into a motion picture in 1946, starring Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe. His Lady in the Lake (1947) became an interesting vehicle for Robert Montgomery (the father of Bewitched’s Elizabeth Montgomery.) Farewell, My Lovely was first filmed as Murder, My Sweet (1944), starring Dick Powell. Chandler’s novel, The High Window, was filmed twice: first as Time to Kill (1942) and again in 1947 as The Brasher Doubloon. Chandler also had a lucrative career as a Hollywood screenwriter.

In 1944 he scripted (along with director Billy Wilder) James M. Cain’s masterpiece, Double Indemnity, wrote an original screenplay called The Blue Dahlia (1946), and co-wrote (along with Whitfield Cook and Czenzi Ormonde) the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), which was based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, the author of The Talented Mister Ripley and Ripley’s Game.

 For me, the 1940s also gave us the last of what I consider to be the truly great gangster films of Hollywood’s Golden Age. High Sierra, released in 1941 and based on the novel by W.R. Burnett, was a departure from the usual gangster epic, in that it portrayed a much more sympathetic criminal, Roy Earle (played by Humphrey Bogart.)

Bogart also played the character of Vincent Parry in Dark Passage (1947), which was written for the screen by David Goodis, who adapted his own novel. Another film, based on the play by Maxwell Anderson, was 1948’s Key Largo, the perfect blend of old-school gangster and the new wave of film noir, and it was a tour de force for Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Claire Trevor.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Hardboiled Film Noir’ (Part One)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Joe Bonadonna’s ‘Hardboiled Film Noir’ (Part One)

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I reached out to some friends to help me with A (Black) Gat in the Hand, as I certainly can’t cover everything and do it all justice. Our latest guest is author and fellow Black Gater, Joe Bonadonna. And Joe delivered an in-depth look at hardboiled adaptations on the silver screen. In fact, he covered so much ground, it’s gonna be a two-parter! So, let’s dig in! 

Hardboiled Film Noir: From Printed Page to Moving Pictures (Part One)

“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

Prologue

Bonadonna_HardboiledAnthologyCrime does not discriminate. From city streets and slums to quiet suburbia, from the mansions of the rich to the boardrooms of the powerful, crime is alive and well. It can be found in dance halls, beer halls and gambling halls . . . speakeasies, seedy gin joints, smoke-filled pool halls, dive hotels, and wharf-side saloons. Crime exists everywhere, and writers and filmmakers have been telling stories about crime since Gutenberg invented the printing press.

This article deals mainly with American pulp fiction, novels and films, and a few theatrical plays, too. I’m going to give a little background history on the source material for these films and on some of the writers who penned the original stories upon which they were based.

Long ago, long before television came along, the film industry turned to books, magazine stories, theatrical plays, and radio shows for their source material, as well as original screenplays. Movie moguls bought the rights to numerous best-selling novels, mined the pages of pulp magazines, comic books, and even newspaper comic strips.

Many films made during this period were Saturday matinee serials such as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, and The Shadow. Dick Tracy was actually given a series of stand-alone films, and of course we had Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan.

Most of these serials were the “comic book” films about pulp fiction superheroes, caped crusaders, masked avengers, and magical crime fighters. Many others films, however, were turned into “programmers,” as they were sometimes called: B-pictures with low budgets, made by up-and-coming directors, and featuring actors who had not yet attained A-list status.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Thomas Parker’s ‘Pulp Repurposed – They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?‘

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Thomas Parker’s ‘Pulp Repurposed – They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?‘

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Gat_RobinsonCoverClassicFellow Black Gater Thomas Parker and I have been exchanging our thoughts on the various topics covered here in this column. I mentioned Horace McCoy’s Jerry Frost, head of Hell’s Stepsons, sort of a Seals team for the Air Texas Rangers (also fictional). McCoy is, of course, best-known for his novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?. Which I’ve never read. Nor have I seen the movie. So, I asked Thomas. if he’d like to write a guest post on that book. And boy, did he! Read on.

“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

A while back our own Hardboiled Bob Byrne gave us a run-down of the May, 1934 issue of Black Mask, which featured a story by Horace McCoy, a writer whose fame rests solely on his 1935 novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? which probably more people know from the fine 1969 film version starring Jane Fonda than from actually having read. McCoy’s novel is an ambitious piece of work, and with it he was clearly seeking to extend himself beyond the boundaries of commercial pulp – and yet, the mark of Black Mask and its ten and fifteen cent brethren is everywhere in the book. In They Shoot Horses Don’t They?, pulp atmosphere and pulp devices are deployed, but with a deadlier intent than any found in the pages of Dime Detective. Call it pulp repurposed.

In what amounts to a manifesto for the American pulp style, Raymond Chandler famously declared (in his 1944 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder”), that Dashiell Hammett had started the ball rolling because he

gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily use for these purposes.

In other words, Hammett and those who followed him were realists, in both style and substance – at least as compared with proponents of the unbearably artificial (in Chandler’s estimation, anyway) English school like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and the American S.S. Van Dine, the creator of amateur sleuth Philo Vance, dismissed by Chandler as “the most asinine character in detective fiction.”

If the American pulp style praised by Chandler consists of realistic characters with realistic motives using realistic means to commit crimes in contemporary urban settings, then They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? must be considered a prime example of the form, even more so than Chandler’s own Philip Marlowe stories, with their stainless hero and romantic patina.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: MORE Cool & Lam!!!!

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: MORE Cool & Lam!!!!

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Top of the Heap-small“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

Last week’s post was on Hard Case Crime’s upcoming reissue of The Count of Nine. Since I was in a Cool and Lam mood, I went ahead and re-read the prior reissue from Hard Case, Top of the Heap, which was only the third book from the imprint. I recommend reading one of my prior posts on the Cool and Lam series to help provide some background for this post. You can find them here, here, and here (last week’s).

As usual, a client is not up front with them, but he pays well, so also as usual, Bertha doesn’t care. Donald is always a little cautious, but business is business and he quickly delivers results. Once again, Bertha does nothing. But Donald keeps digging and the client stops payment on the check. Bertha is pissed at Donald.

As always, there’s a lot going on and Donald has angles everywhere, heading up from Los Angeles to San Francisco for most of the case. He’s actually less cagey with the police than he usually is, but the bay area’s Lieutenant Sheldon doesn’t think so and wants Lam picked up and brought to headquarters.

A dead gangster’s moll, a dead businessman, missing bodies, a wounded gangster, mining companies, an undercover gambling joint, a yacht club: you need a scorecard for this one.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: More Cool & Lam From Hard Case Crime!

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: More Cool & Lam From Hard Case Crime!

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CoolLam_CrimeHCC

“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

In 1938, Erle Stanley Gardner was struggling with his Perry Mason series, though it was successful and he’d written about a dozen books. His agent had died and he clashed with the man’s widow (she took over the business) to the damage of his reputation and ability to sell to other markets.

The prolific pulpster and novelist decided a new approach. He would write a book about a mismatched pair of private eyes and send it to his publisher under an assumed name. I like this guy!

Following his usual pattern, he churned out a novel in three months and send The Bigger They Come to William Morrow & Company. Nobody knew it was written by Gardner. After it was accepted, Gardner told the president, Thayer Hobson, that he was actually A.A. Fair. It remained a secret for some time.

Gardner wrote thirty Cool and Lam novels in thirty-one years (The second one was rejected by the publisher). He was already putting out four novels nearly every year when he started this series, along with much other writing: both fiction and non. I wrote about the series here.

Bertha Cool is a big, profane, money-centric, tough as nails woman. She brought the undersized but brainy Donald Lam into the agency she got from her husband when he died. Lam proves to be a money maker and indispensable to the business and forces his way into a partnership. It’s a mismatched paring that works perfectly on the page, though I don’t know how Lam puts up with her.

On October 23rd, Hard Case Crime is reprinting The Count of Nine, the eighteenth book and out of print for almost forty years. It had earlier reprinted the thirteenth book, Top of the Heap. And Hard Case published, for the first time ever, that rejected second novel, The Knife Slipped. 
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