Black Gate

The 20th century is one long run of wonder elements. Radium dominated the early years, when the magic of X-rays – seeing through solid objects! – created a worldwide sensation. Uranium and atomic power followed after World War II and then it was silicon’s time as driver of the computer age.

Forgotten today is that selenium once stood as high as these three, especially in the years around World War I. Headlines called it the “Mystery Metal” and the “Magic Eye,” that it would “Revolutionize Aerial Warfare” and “Make Blind See” and maybe even be a “Cancer Cure.” Selenium had the property of transforming electromagnetic radiation – visible light, in this case – into electricity, almost as much a miracle as penetrating hands to see the bones underneath.

“Selenium is also used in the observation of the transit of Venus and eclipses of the sun, to light and extinguish buoys automatically, to guide, and explode torpedoes, for measuring X-rays, and in the glass industry,” explained a 1913 Harper’s Weekly article that was widely reprinted in newspapers.

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“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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Probably the quickest and most thorough technological disruption in history was the introduction of sound to movies. A novelty when a few short scenes were included in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, sound had almost completely taken over the industry by 1930 despite the at times desperate battle against the cost of changing by both movie studios and theater owners.

The havoc wreaked over Hollywood is the stuff of a thousand books. Performers, especially those dozens of stars who migrated from Europe to share in the movie boom of the 1920s, saw their careers disappear because of their accents or some other failing in their speaking voices. Writers who until that time could make do with plot outlines lost their jobs to stage writers accustomed to creating atmosphere from pure dialog. Cameramen found their expressively mobile cameras confined to soundproof booths whose heat could make them faint if a take too took long. Practically every craft got turned upside down and shaken hard – just as America started sinking into the Great Depression.

One allied but non-Hollywood aspect of the business got hurt worst of all, an entire profession wiped out in a matter of months. Who got the blame? Robots.

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