Black Gate

“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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“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

“I’m proud of what I can do in my field. And I’m proud of the field. I don’t need any false additions to that. If I could write like John Cheever, I’d write like Cheever. Unfortunately, I can’t, so I write as well as I can and as fast as I can. And some of it is good.”

That was William Campbell Gault, of whom Frederic Brown wrote, “…this boy Gault can write, never badly and sometimes like an angel.”

William C. Gault was a quality pulpster in the forties and fifties who created two top notch private eye series’ in paperback. Gault won an Edgar Award in 1952 for his first novel, Don’t Cry For Me. He said that it was out of print two months after it came out. Writing juvenile sports novels was more lucrative for him and in the sixties he focused on them, rather than mysteries. Gault, well-respected in the hardboiled genre, hasn’t received the popularity he is due.

“Hibiscus and Homicide” was the first of two stories featuring Hawaiian detective Sandy McCane and appeared in the October, 1947 issue of Thrilling Detective. “Waikiki Widow” followed in March of 1948 in Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine.

In the first story, McCane is hired to find a missing singer/dancer by her boyfriend, Juan Mira, an undersized, former boxer. Gault drew heavily on this story for his 1955 novel, Ring Around the Rosa/Murder in the Raw; the first of several to star Brock ‘The Rock’ Callahan.’

McCane is an honest, diligent private eye who gets drugged and finds himself framed in bed with a dead girl next to him. Never a good thing, right? He keeps at it, connecting with a childhood friend who grew up into a beautiful blonde. And she’s rich!

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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

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

I met Frank Schildiner through our mutual love of Robert E. Howard’s writings and I recruited him to write the Solomon Kane entry in Black Gate‘s Discovering Robert E. Howard. We share a lot of reading interests, such as John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee and… hardboiled stories. Frank is a leading light in the New Pulp movement and he appreciates pulp and hardboiled works from ‘now and then.’ So, I was happy when he decided to write about Max Allen Collins’ best-selling hardboiled PI, Nate Heller. Without further ado, I’ll turn it over to Frank!

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“I was off-duty at the time, sitting in a speak on South Clark Street drinking rum out of a coffee cup.” Nathan “Nate” Heller, True Detective

Can you get more noir than that opening line? Welcome to the word of modern hardboiled fiction, Max Allan Collins style. The road is long and twisty, but the trip is ultimately satisfying to all lovers of this style of fiction. True Detective’s star, Nathan Heller is one of the heirs to a tradition established by such luminaries as Hammett, Chandler, and Cave.

Collins established his hardboiled credits back in 1977 when he took over the daily writing of the long-established daily comic strip, Dick Tracy. His work is still considered one of the reasons the strip continued after many storyline missteps throughout the 60’s and 70’s. One of his first acts was ending the sci-fi elements as well as removing the pseudo-hippy heroes that inhabited the strips.

When we meet Nate Heller, he is a morally ambivalent plainclothes police officer residing in Al Capone’s Chicago. He got his job on the department by asking a banker uncle to pull strings – a typical move in the moral cesspool that wracked the city’s politics. Heller’s position as a detective came as a reward for his willingness to lie for the Chicago mob in a murder case.

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Some years back, Black Gate photog Chris Z gifted me with a fabulous pocket guide no Goth Chick should be without; How to Survive a Horror Movie, by Seth Grahame-Smith. As all horror fans know, not just anyone can do this. For instance, if you’re part of the “popular crowd” (i.e. cheerleaders, prom kings, etc), you have pretty much the same chance of surviving as a red shirt in a Star Trek episode. But savvy and street-wise people, if not the most attractive until you find out they’ve got the brains, are usually the last ones standing.

Smart and competitive wins out over cute and fashion-forward every time, and finally, finally, there’s a way for us geeky kids to be triumphant without having to live through Camp Hideaway.

A big thanks to our friends over at Blood Disgusting for the heads up that USAopoly has just released Trivial Pursuit: Horror Movie Edition, an all-horror version of the trivia game that includes 600 questions and covers 100 years of the horror genre.

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