Category: Hardboiled Detectives

Book Review: THE CASE OF THE VELVET CLAWS (1933) by Erle Stanley Gardner

3/20/2020

I wonder if, after sampling my third Perry Mason book in the series by prolific writer Erle Stanley Gardner, these might not fall under the heading of "guilty pleasures". I suspect that they also operate for me as something one "loves to hate", although I fall far from either extreme on the Perry Mason Gratification Scale. The following critique may step on long-standing fans' toes, but after exposure to Gardner's first Mason caper, 1933's The Case of the Velvet Claws, I am still trying to assess just what my final (admittedly subjective) verdict should be.

Typically, a reading experience isn't this complicated. I read a book, I react to the book, I determine if the book gave satisfaction and how or why it did or did not. But analysis of a Gardner story, at least of the few I have read, doesn't seem that simple. This is because some very enjoyable and inventive strengths – including morally specious but highly clever defense attorney tactics like witness manipulation and sleight-of-hand evidence reveals – share space with a story weakened by unconvincing, superficial characterization and dialogue. Of course the Mason novels are meant to entertain and never pretend to be more than they are, which is in itself a point in their favor. But that odd combination of impressively good and amateurishly bad is something I haven't encountered often in mystery fiction, and it brings me back to the "guilty pleasure" label.

This mix of strengths and weaknesses is already fully formed and on display in The Case of the Velvet Claws, Mason's début case. What's singular about this story is that it doesn't end in a dramatic and contentious court trial like the great majority do: Mason keeps his client, an attractive femme fatale accused of shooting her husband, out of a courtroom despite the fact that Eva Belter has lied to the lawyer (and has even tried to frame him for murder!) every step of the way. George Belter is/was the publisher of Spicy Bits, a gossip tabloid largely existing as a vehicle to squeeze the rich and famous out of some money through business-legitimized blackmail. Because of this, there is a surplus of suspects who might want to see Belter dead, but Mason focuses on one in particular: Congressman Harrison Burke, last seen at a night club with a woman who was not his wife, a woman who happens to be Eva Belter herself.

So we arrive at one of Gardner's strongest qualities as an author, and the greatest personal argument for my continuing with the series. The man is quite brilliant at establishing the plotline (the hook, essentially) and guiding it along through multiple turns and reversals, escalating to a breathless climax. Such literary planning and plotting is not easy or effortless to pull off, and the three titles I have read to date – the others are The Case of the Howling Dog (1934) and The Case of the Counterfeit Eye (1935) – show no slack in their pacing or ingenuity.

Closely connected with pacing is the quality of the twists and tactics themselves. In these early adventures, Perry Mason's maneuvering would be risky in the extreme if it wasn't safely confined to Gardner's artificially created world. Gambits like altering evidence to fluster prosecution witnesses, manufacturing a fake confession to muddy the waters, and manipulating police investigation would result in disbarment many times over. Yet the cleverness of these actions and Mason's ostensibly justified motivations keep the reader flipping pages while suspending judgment. It's an impressive tightrope to walk: Mason is bending the rules, but he argues that he is just trying to even up the odds which are already stacked against his accused client.

For example, in Velvet Claws Gardner has his hero conspire with a friendly pawnbroker to force an admission from a suspect. All Mason needs from Sol Steinburg (a benign but still stereotypical Jewish figure typical of pulp stories of the time) is to "recognize" whichever man Mason brings into the shop with a "That's him, that's the one" declaration. (In other words, lie.) He explains that he will never need Sol to testify in court, but rather he's trying to make the man think he can tie him to a gun purchase. It's a clever ruse, and Gardner gets extra points for the suspect smelling the set-up and pushing back just as hard as Mason is pushing him.

While the plotting and legal legerdemain in Gardner's books are highly enjoyable, characterization, description, and dialogue are (for me) another story. Some reviewers have connected the toughness of the tales with roots from hardboiled detective fiction, and I think that's accurate. But Erle Stanley Gardner is no Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, and the Perry Mason books substitute pedestrian prose for the moody metaphors and flawed figures populating the Hammett and Chandler worlds. In particular, Gardner's overuse/abuse of countless "Mason said" and "asked Paul Drake"-type dialogue tags really slow down the rhythm, especially as they are so often unnecessary in two-person exchanges. Yet they are peppered throughout every single conversation, and these books are filled with two-person dialogue runs.

There's also a stilted quality to the scenes, which is due in part to the rather flat characterization (this cop is combative; that cop is friendly; Mason is always gruff and in command) and in part due to the sensationalist, hard-to-believe plotlines that Gardner favors. In Howling Dog, for example, I was wearying of a bellicose police chief who seemed to have little depth when he surprised me by saying in response, "I'm commencing to think so." I grabbed onto that word choice and thought it was a nicely observant touch to have a character use a word outside of his presumed vocabulary; I thought it revealed something of the chief's personality, that he was the type of person who prided himself on showing an education even though he had little. But then a few chapters later private investigator Paul Drake also says "I'm commencing to think so," and after that the author lets Mason use the phrase. Perry Mason's fictional world is one where characters speak on the surface (whether lying or telling the truth) rather than engaging in subtlety or subtext, and that's due to the preferences and literary limitations of his creator.

In spite of these traits, Gardner's books are still great fun and easy to digest, and I expect to sample many more of Mason's cases, especially when I'm looking for a fast and light mystery book in between more literary fare. And one can't help but admire an author concerned with providing both flashy entertainment and calculated promotion: at the end pages of Velvet Claws, the loyal Della Street reminds Mason that a new client is waiting in the outer office for him. Says Della:

"It's a girl expensively dressed, good looking. Seems well bred. She's in trouble, but she won't open up."
"Sulky, eh?"
"Sulky? Well, perhaps I'd call her sort of trapped."
"That's because you like her looks," Mason grinned. "If you didn't, you'd call her sulky."
…"Well, maybe she is just sulky."

It may be no surprise to note that the next book in the series happens to be The Case of the Sulky Girl.

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Book Review: THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES OF THE YEAR (1932) ed. Carolyn Wells

11/3/2018

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One of the great benefits of having access to a far-reaching academic interlibrary loan system is that there are many hidden and long out-of-print treasures to be found if you know where to look. Or even if you don't: I stumbled upon the rare 1932 anthology The Best American Mystery Stories of the Year through a keyword search for mystery and was immediately intrigued. (The initial Best American collection had débuted from New York's Tudor Publishing Company the previous year.) I have a fair understanding of the British Golden Age mystery scene in the early 1930s – the most luminous puzzle plotters were active and often brilliant during these years – but beyond the pulps and the hardboiled detective scene, I wasn't sure what American crime fiction looked like at that transformative time.

If this group of stories is representative, I can make a couple simple observations. Yes, the loner detective searching for truth in a corrupt and dangerous world is one genre component, and indeed the anthology kicks off its oversize (at 542 pages) collection with a compact kidnapping tale by hardboiled master Dashiell Hammett, "Death and Company." But the following 19 stories selected by editor Carolyn Wells largely feature protagonists forced to face an outside menace: the two villainous types that recur again and again include the pair or trio of tough-guy hoods primed for violence and the treacherous woman (and in one case, a man) out to seduce and steal from an unwitting mark.

Every story here resolves with a "happy" ending, i.e., the criminals are caught and justice is served. The locale can be metropolitan, but more often the authors set their crime stories in America's underpopulated heartland, and some dramas play out in secluded cabins in the woods while others take to the prairie, exploring cowboy culture and frontier codes of ethics.

Because the book is a relative rarity, I share the list of stories and authors here. One item worth noting is the length of these stories; many average about 30 pages, which feels a little long in several cases. Only a few merit their extra word count, and a couple, like "A Murder at the Monde" by Gelett Burgess, let the reader get well ahead of the story, and one is left waiting for a resolution.

Editor Carolyn Wells, in her introduction, provides some comments that address the shift from omniscient, eccentric British detective to the plodding, nondescript American one.

"The Sherlock Holmes type grew so popular as to become trite, and has been rather obscured by the clear-thinking, slow-moving sort of investigator, whose common sense and general information stand him in good stead when brilliant imagination fails."

Wells' perspective sounds at times fairly dismissive of the value of mystery fiction:

"What is the mystery story? To entertain and to interest, to amuse. It has no deeper intent, no more subtle raison d'être than to give pleasure to readers."

Still, she admits to a practical mental use:

"Many of us are very apt to suffer from mental cobwebs, and there is nothing equal to the solving of puzzles and problems for sweeping them away."

In order for our brains to be dusted off, let's proceed to the stories. They have been curated, with rare exceptions, from the popular U.S. newsstand magazines and journals of the day, including The Saturday Evening Post, The American Magazine, Collier's, and even Cosmopolitan and The Ladies' Home Journal. They arrive here with the same ratio of mostly good-to-occasionally poor that multiple author anthologies provide. I will single out a few of the most effective stories and examine a couple themes or plot points that seem to connect various ones.

For example, no less than four stories incorporate the scenario of a captive or compromised protagonist sending a coded message to the outside world, and one which needs to be interpreted correctly by outsiders in order for help to arrive.

Will Payne's "One Chance in a Million", Faraday Keene's "Diffycult Hill", and Ben Ames Williams' novella-length (at 73 pages) "The Crutile" all present the coded message plotline, but the best of the group is arguably "Dirty Work at the Crossroads" by Elinore Cowan Stone, one of two women author contributors. This last story concerns a distressed doctor's curious prescription to a drugstore proprietor, complete with a Latinate message. "One Chance in a Million" is notable for the genuine menace that the author creates: a lawyer, the only living witness with knowledge of a will-altering codicil having been signed, will be tossed from a balcony onto the cement below unless he can figure out a secret way to summon help.

Females seducing males in an attempt to steal jewels or obtain money is another favorite storyline here. "An Expert—In Gems" by Everett Rhodes Castle follows a predictable pattern of attempted theft and tables turned, while Rita Weiman's "Tragic Eyes" takes a more interesting path, as a femme fatale tries to put a sympathetic U.S. Senator (are there any of those left?) into a position of blackmail, only to be foiled by the congressman's acumen and intelligence (I ask the same question again). "The Stubborn Heiress" by R.T.M. Scott offers a male golddigger – here, an ersatz nobleman – and the (male) detective must convince a smitten woman that the imposter's intentions are less than honorable.

Every author has a unique writing style and storytelling manner, and in a couple tales that authorial voice manages to get in the way. "The Man in Seat Twelve" by James Warner Bellah is one such example, as the story is both overlong and filled with hasty sketches for scenes and characters with no definition. I still don't know what to make of "Manner" by Thomas Beer, an odd story of a businessman who is either proud of or ashamed of his son, who seems to be autistic. I think the son, Lion, solves a crime by accident, but I'm not certain.

More entertainingly, Samuel Hopkins Adams takes the overstuffed approach to tell the fevered story of "The Seven Curses": a car accident victim drags himself to the bushes of a haunted house, and then watches a trio of robbers try to break in only for two of them to die an agonizing death. Fortunately, the wounded man shares a hospital room with the third robber, and the strange truth comes out. "The Seven Curses" has a Grand Guignol energy that's appealing, and Adams shows a penchant for clever clueing, but it's all a bit breathless and hard to believe.

Wilbur Daniel Steele. Image from Wikipedia.

The most interestingly unconventional mystery story may be "The Body of the Crime" by novelist Wilbur Daniel Steele. The author's 1925 short story "Blue Murder" was included in The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century (2000) and I feel that story has the same challenge as "Body": Steele is one of the most ornate and opaque prose writers I have come across in the mystery genre. His writing is the opposite of a practitioner's like Dashiell Hammett; whereas Hammett wants his prose to be spare and to never intrude upon the tempo or tone of the story, Steele clogs every sentence with a stilted, affected combination of word choice and attitude. Here’s an example, describing a mother, father, and son enjoying each other's company on a pleasant day:

What a sight it was for the evening sun to see, level and bloody rose beneath the eaves of the chestnuts! Dan Kinsman, bemused, commencing words and swallowing their ends on half-choked chuckles, even as his eyes, quick for once, kept slant track of Vivian's every oddly exuberant gesture. Daniel, beatified, accepting wonders with a new omnivorous trust. And Vivian Kinsman, unbelievable, a princess freed from some evil enchantment in exile, returned to her kingdom, leading them.

Swallowing words with half-choked chuckles? Accepting wonders with a new omnivorous trust? Even if Steele were influenced by an earlier generation of descriptive-leaning writers, there's an arduous translation that this reader must make to even imagine what the scene is to be. I mention all this because "The Body of the Crime" is an extremely good story, and it could have been a minor masterpiece if overwriting and strange word choices weren't consistently getting in the way.

"Body" involves a boy, Daniel of the newfound omnivorous trust, who views his father differently after his mother dies. Daniel can remember a traumatic experience that occurred involving his father when he was three years old, but he cannot recall the details. So he returns to his childhood home and begins a sort of vision quest, depriving himself of food and water and sleep until his mind will unlock the closed door guarding that memory. It's a gripping story with a satisfying dénouement, and it also speaks to the precarious relationship of fathers and sons, and of lies told out of love that inevitably harm. But the writer's baroque tone makes the story much less accessible than it should be.

I'll conclude by mentioning two of the strongest stories in this collection, and coincidentally they are both grounded in American Western culture. I am not especially a fan of the Western genre, but like any genre there is always the opportunity to use its elements to tell a successful and engaging story. "McQuestion Rides" by Ernest Haycox finds a sheriff visiting a ranch house as he tries to find a killer whose identity is unknown. The storytelling here is swift and sharp, and there's a very satisfying human observational component.

And "An Ounce of Curiosity" is one of several stories that constant journal contributor Clarence Budington Kelland would write featuring the sardonic frontiersman Scattergood Baines. While the psychology of the tale is rather simplistic – along the lines of a sadist to animals must be the killer – Kelland's wry American humor shines through on every page. Here's a sampling, where the elderly detective deflates an excited vigilante who has likely been chasing the wrong suspect in a robbery:

"How d'ye know this feller you're chasin' done the deed?"
"Sanford said it was him."
"Recognize him plain, eh?"
"The feller was wearin' a red handkerchief over his face."
"Knew him by a strawberry mark, mebbe?"
"No, but he said it was him. And folks seen him a-comin' down Sanford's lane."
"With the pliers [the assault weapon] into his hand?" suggested Scattergood.
"Didn't have no pliers, but he was a-runnin'."
"With thutty-eight hundred dollars in his hand?" said Scattergood.

The one true outlier in this collection belongs to Edmund Pearson. His analysis of a true crime involving a girl murdered outside the wall of a monastery in 19th century France is unlike anything else presented here. I enjoy and appreciate Pearson's contributions to historical crime recording, but "The Petal of the Red Geranium" is a minor effort compared with his many other stories, and the murder's unsolved status leaves the reader on a rather restless note.

For me, many of the stories here were worth reading, and the anthology provides some insight into the themes and values of popular mystery fiction in 1930s America. I'm always grateful to read work from forgotten authors, and in some instances – such as with Clarence Budington Kelland and even with the frustrating Wilbur Daniel Steele –the cobwebby stories encourage some rigorous dusting and a call for further investigation.

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Book Review: THE DROWNING POOL (1950) by Ross MacDonald

7/22/2018

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Just last month I tried Ross MacDonald's 1949 crime story The Moving Target, which marked the début of his series private detective Lew Archer. Everything about Target was solidly impressive: a twisty plotline, memorably hard-boiled narration and dialogue, characters both highborn and low, flawed to the point of contemporary tragedy. These same elements are found in the 1950 follow-up The Drowning Pool, which is still impressive and manages to deliver a moodier atmosphere and a story with even more shadows and skeletons.

Archer receives an office visit from a woman named Maude Slocum, and after some coaxing she reveals her problem: she has intercepted an anonymous note addressed to her husband accusing her of extramarital exercises. Fearing there may be more to come, Maude asks Archer to find the writer and deal with the matter. But she gives the detective a very short – practically strangling – leash: he is not to talk to any of her acquaintances as a detective and she won't answer whether the accusation in the letter is true.

Archer compromises, and introduces himself into Maude Slocum's moneyed world as a talent scout for a movie studio. Maude's socialite husband James is an amateur actor performing the lead in a new play by friend and director Francis Marvell at the Quinto Theatre. While eavesdropping on a rehearsal, Archer witnesses a behind-the-scenes struggle between handsome grifter Patrick Reavis and a teen girl who turns out to be Maude's daughter Cathy. Maude, James, and Cathy are all living on the estate of James's mother, Olivia Slocum, a wealthy woman who is not generous with allowances for anyone, personal or economic.

On the night of a house party, playwright Marvell pulls from a darkened swimming pool the lifeless body of matriarch Olivia, a woman who never went swimming and feared the water. Pat Reavis's cap is found in the bushes nearby, and Reavis himself had legged it off the property right at the crucial time, hitching a ride with Archer into town. The detective finds himself quickly enmeshed in an escalating series of events, as one death begets another and lives built on play-acting and lies bring brutal consequences.

For a story with water (and oil) at its heart, The Drowning Pool ironically develops through a calculated slow burn of plot and character. For the first third of the story, Lew Archer is less of an actor and more of a fly on the wall, observing his client's comfortable but unsatisfying lifestyle and the restlessness of those surrounding her. It is a quiet, introspective approach that I have heard MacDonald will continue to use throughout his series, with later entries emphasizing themes of social amorality and bankruptcy and minimizing traditional hard-boiled action. When the murder of Olivia Slocum kicks off events that bring Archer into conflict with Chief of Police Ralph Knudson and a corpulent oil magnate named Kilbourne (and his sadistic henchman Melliotes), the book's mood switches quickly from contemplative to grimly active. Before the story is finished, characters will be shot, burned, drugged, beaten, and tortured, all in the name of greed and vanity.

I think it is this shift in mood and plotting that makes me feel The Drowning Pool falls just a little short. MacDonald's writing here is excellent; he uses his main character's wary first-person loner detective viewpoint just as well (if not better) than Raymond Chandler does, and the fact that once more Archer takes a case that brings him face to face with petty people and moral decay immediately makes the reader simpatico with Archer's objectivity. It's the only way to escape getting poisoned yourself, by money or sex or power. But The Moving Target felt more balanced, maintaining its pace masterfully from start to finish. (I also enjoyed the concept of looking for an unloved and unworthy kidnapping victim more than looking into a family whose members assure mutual misery for each other.) Notably, it is Pool that most Internet readers agree is the superior of the two; there is an excellent review posted by Max Cairnduff on his site Pechorin's Journal.

One other detail: Ross MacDonald's writing is indeed so strong and enjoyable that I adopted a reading practice that I had never tried before. For this title, I found the audiobook online but gave myself a 50-page print book lead in the story. I would then listen to recent chapters, a couple at a time, as I read through the book, finishing the pages first and the audio account a close second. This was a really satisfying approach, as the audio let me revisit and appreciate those lines and plot twists as the story was still unfolding. And the lines and twists are worth the review, full of intelligence and cool observation. I end with this example – Max C. includes the same paragraph in his review – where Archer surveys Nopal Valley, a town that has "benefited" from a landscape-changing oil boom:

The oil wells from which the sulphur gas rose crowded the slopes on both sides of the town. I could see them from the highway as I drove in: the latticed triangles of the derricks where the trees had grown, the oil-pumps nodding and clanking where cattle had grazed. Since 'thirty-nine or 'forty, when I had seen it last, the town had grown enormously, like a tumor. It had thrust out shoots in all directions: blocks of match-box houses in raw new housing developments and the real estate shacks to go with them, a half-mile gauntlet of one-story buildings along the highway: veterinarians, chiropractors, beauty shops, marketerias, restaurants, bars, liquor stores. There was a new four-story hotel, a white frame gospel tabernacle, a bowling alley wide enough to house a B-36. The main street had been transformed by glass brick, plastic, neon. A quiet town in a sunny valley had hit the jackpot hard, and didn't know what to do with itself at all.

I'm looking forward to the next Lew Archer crime story, The Way Some People Die.

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Book Review: THE MOVING TARGET (1949) by Ross MacDonald

7/7/2018

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When it comes to hardboiled detective fiction, I have always been more of a tourist than a resident of those dark alleys and dangerous streets. There is much to admire in this largely American crime literature form, and its two most influential and innovative contributors, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, deliver novels that work as both instantly accessible pulp fiction and a thoughtful exploration of nihilism and hope. The loner detective, navigating a world where everyone lies and danger and death are just part of the landscape, embodies the existential questions of Sartre and Camus even more than he does the puzzle-and-justice ethos of Conan Doyle and Christie.

As much as I enjoy Hammett's sober, this-side-of-cynical tales of men with personal codes of honor confronting a fully corrupt and selfish world (Red Harvest and the story "The Gutting of Couffignal" are personal favorites) and Chandler's elevation of pulp to tough guy poetry, I wasn't actively looking for another hardboiled writer to discover. Fortune and a little online searching brought me to The Moving Target, the first of eighteen mystery novels by Ross MacDonald to feature detective Lew Archer. I listened to the audiobook of Target, and as soon as it finished I tracked down a print copy from the library and read it immediately. That's never happened before.

What was so appealing that I immediately wanted to revisit this book? Simply put, it's MacDonald's writing that surprised me and stirred my admiration. I knew that, if a writer wanted to deliver a hardboiled crime story, he shouldn't try to reinvent the genre. All of the tropes, from solo detective to wealthy client to femme fatale, are effective to start and maintain the tale. At the same time, if he merely tries to imitate Chandler and Hammett, then the work will likely feel slight and uninspired. With Lew Archer, MacDonald strikes the perfect balance. His detective is independent, quick-witted, and appropriately pessimistic about the human race, but he also demonstrates an educated, distanced perspective through his first-person observations of people and situations that quickly wins over the reader.

Lew Archer is still a bit of a cipher – in this genre, it's nearly always the criminals who are described in detail, in part because they are seen through the lens of a detective narrator who wants the spotlight directed off the rock-turner and onto the wriggling creatures underneath – but MacDonald builds empathy for Archer because of the character's wit, his desire to bring order to a chaotic world, and his ability to analyze these desperate people and understand them (often better than they understand themselves).

MacDonald's own understanding of the genre is immediately apparent on the first page, as a taxi drives working-class Archer toward the seaside estates of the wealthy and the privileged: "The light-blue haze in the lower canyon was like a thin smoke from slowly burning money." Once there, Elaine Sampson engages the detective to find her missing husband, not out of concern but because he may be spending money on someone else that she had earmarked to inherit. The case quickly becomes complicated as the businessman's disappearance leads Archer to an alcoholic Hollywood starlet past her prime, an oily entrepreneur who employs a bodyguard with a vicious streak, and the missing man's restless daughter, Miranda. When a ransom note appears and a drop-off turns deadly, Archer needs to separate artifice from reality to reveal the true motive of each person he meets, despite the façade.

Ross MacDonald's writing here – especially the narration and point of view he gives his protagonist – is observant and perfectly pitched. It's a quality that looks easy to create but is not, as the wrong note or overdescription can easily tip into parody. And yet Archer is sympathetic, and the reader trusts that perspective. His complicated response to Sampson's daughter, a mix of physical attraction and avuncular protectiveness, is captured in a line like this one, as they drive along a windy and winding mountain road:

Once or twice on a curve Miranda leaned against me, trembling. I didn't ask her whether she was cold or afraid. I didn't want to force her to make a choice.

Honoring its title, The Moving Target's plot is constantly in motion, with one lead progressing naturally to the next. It manages not to strain under its own weight, which sometimes occurs with Chandler's stories, and although one final character twist is telegraphed just a little early, it's a very satisfying tale of double-crosses and crimes of opportunity. Most of all, it's a novel delivered by a writer who is smart enough to recognize that the hardboiled detective genre can be liberating and not limiting if used as a canvas to explore the weakness and vulnerability of humans, wealthy and working class alike.

I already have MacDonald's second Lew Archer novel, The Drowning Pool, waiting to be read.

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Book Review: THE CASE OF THE VELVET CLAWS (1933) by Erle Stanley Gardner

Book Review: THE BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES OF THE YEAR (1932) ed. Carolyn Wells

Book Review: THE DROWNING POOL (1950) by Ross MacDonald

Book Review: THE MOVING TARGET (1949) by Ross MacDonald

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