Gamblers Don't Win

The Black Mask Library

Series Editor
Keith Alan Deutsch

Managing Editor
Boris Dralyuk

Introduction

Gamblers Don’t Win

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Willis Todhunter Ballard (1903–1980) is the creator of one of
Black Mask Magazine
's most popular series characters, Bill Lennox, the original Hollywood trouble-shooter.

Ballard worked for his father's electrical engineering office after graduating college, but soon moved on to a job as a reporter for a chain of small Midwest newspapers headquartered not far from his birthplace near Cleveland, Ohio.

His career as a professional fiction writer began in 1927 when he started to sell sporadically to the crime pulps, and during a career of almost fifty years he produced 95 novels, about 50 movie and TV scripts, and more than one thousand short stories and novelettes. His stories have appeared in many different pulps as well as
The Saturday Evening Post
,
Esquire
,
This Week
and
McCall's
. Although he concentrated on detective and mystery stories early in his career, his later work was primarily in westerns, for which he won many awards.

Soon after the crash of 1929, Ballard moved to California where he bumped into Major Harry Warner whom he had known in Cleveland where the young Warner brothers had produced movie trailers. Warner gave Ballard a job for $75 a week writing scripts for First National Pictures where Ballard learned how pictures were produced.

After eight months, Ballard made a crack about Jack Warner that Jack heard, and Warner fired him on the spot. But Ballard immediately moved to Columbia where he was given responsibility to bring in very cheap films for under $10,000 each. The only way this could be done was for Ballard to write the script, direct, produce the picture and even move the sets and scenery. The job lasted six months and exhausted him, but gave him the knowledge to write with authenticity in his Bill Lennox stories.

While working for the Warner brothers and for Columbia Pictures, Ballard continued to sell to pulps like
Short Stories
and
Argosy
, but had no great success.

In 1931 while living with his uncle in Los Angeles, Ballard heard a radio advertisement for the early film version of
The Maltese Falcon
starring Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade. He went to see the movie.

In his
Black Mask Magazine
website interview, Ballard recalls that:

Excerpts of dialogue forced themselves through to me. Dialogue the way I had always wanted to write it. I had been trying to please Dorothy Hubbard at
Detective Story Magazine
, a lady who favored the Mary Roberts Rinehart and Agatha Christie styles and types of material…. It was Hammett's dialogue that enthralled me. Hammett's ear for words that sounded the way I thought criminals and detectives should talk. It rang true, the way I wanted mine to do.

The radio advertisement gave a credit to
Black Mask Magazine
, which was the first that Ballard had heard of the publication. He left the theater, walked to the corner, bought a copy of the then-current issue and read it on the ride back to his uncle's. He said he felt “that I was coming home.”

Ballard immediately came up with the idea of a troubleshooter working for a film studio. He could use his experience in the movie world for realistic background. He plotted most of his first Lennox story very quickly on his ride home from the movie theater, and wrote it out in three or four hours that same night. He reported that he mailed it out the next morning.

A week after he mailed the story to
Black Mask
he received a letter from Joe Shaw. The famous editor wanted some changes made, but he sent along a check with the letter, an unheard of generosity for the time. The major change he asked for was that Bill Lennox not carry a gun as other fictional detectives did. No one with sense argued with Shaw. So Lennox went without a gun.

Following that first
Black Mask
sale, Ballard wrote and sold seven more Lennox tales within three weeks! For a time, Ballard sold Joe Shaw more copy than anyone else did, an average of ten stories a year, more than that including characters other than Lennox.

Ballard tried to do about ten pages a day after that first
Black Mask
flush, sometimes more, sometimes less. He tried to work regularly, writing something every day even if he later threw it away.

Twenty-seven Bill Lennox stories appeared in
Black Mask
from 1933 to 1942, and they rivaled the popularity of Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Carroll John Daly during those nine years.

Ballard got along with all the Black Mask boys, and knew Raymond Chandler, Hammett, Horace McCoy, Frank Gruber, and Norbert Davis well. Late in his career he and Robert Leslie Bellem worked on television scripts together.

Bill Lennox lived on, long after
Black Mask
ceased publication, in hardcover and paperback novels:
Say Yes to Murder
(Putnam, 1942),
Murder Can't Stop
(McKay, 1946), and
Dealing Out Death
(McKay, 1947). Much later on saw a fourth book,
Lights, Camera, Murder
(Belmont Paperbacks, 1960).

Ballard was the first cousin of Nero Wolfe creator Rex Stout, with whom he shared a middle name (Todhunter). Ballard wrote as Neil MacNeil, P.D. Ballard, John Shepherd, and the house names Nick Carter and Robert Wallace. W. T. Ballard continued writing westerns late in his life until his eyesight made reading difficult.

“Gamblers Don't Win,” one of forty-three stories Ballard wrote for
Black Mask
, was published in the April 1935 issue.

Keith Alan Deutsch

Bill Lennox, Hollywood trouble-shooter for Consolidated Films, finds that it is not so easy to clean up at the races when all bets are on murder!

BILL LENNOX, trouble-shooter for General-Consolidated studio, stared thoughtfully at his program. The third race was just coming up. The horses were already on parade, the bright silks of their riders making color splotches against the gray-green background of the distant hills. Nancy Hobbs, pert and chic, plainly pleased with Lennox, said, “It's a nice place.”

Lennox nodded as he looked around the clubhouse lawn. “Nice, and all the movie bunch are here, to be taken.” His voice was cynical.

She smiled slightly. “You're here, too, aren't you?”

He said: “I had to be here, Honey. Spurck decided that what he needed was a racing stable. He's got one, and one of his horses starts in the feature this afternoon. If I hadn't been here to see the nag perform, Sol would never have recovered. There he is now.” He pointed with his program to where Sol Spurck, head of the West Coast studios of General Consolidated was standing in one of the front row boxes. “Look at him. He's having the time of his life.”

The girl looked in that direction, shielding her eyes with one hand. “Next you'll be telling me that you don't like races.”

“Sure I like them,” Lennox told her. “I think the horses are swell. It's the people I object to, the chiselers, the touts, the gamblers.”

She said: “But they aren't going to have any out here. They're being very careful to keep them off.”

Lennox's lips twisted slightly. “I'll admit they're being careful, Honey. I'll admit they've got a better class of horses here than they ever had on the Coast before. I'll admit that this track is run on the level and that the racing commission is making every effort to keep the sport on the highest plane possible, but there's easy money connected with racing, and you're bound to have some chiselers. Come on. Let's walk around and have a look. This is a nice plant.”

He linked his arm through hers and they crossed the lawn towards the grandstand entrance. Several people spoke to them, others waved. It seemed to Lennox that Hollywood had moved
en masse
to the track. Movie capital had helped build it. Movie capital had helped bring racing back to California after some twenty years, and the picture people were entering the new sport with enthusiasm. Spurck was not the only producer to buy horses, and any number of actors had followed suit.

They left the clubhouse and threaded their way through the thronged betting shed. A tall, well-dressed man with black hair and a hawk's nose stopped Lennox. “Hello, Bill.”

Lennox let his surprise show. “Hello, Claude. Long time, no see.”

The man's white teeth flashed. “I heard you were out here. How's every little thing?”

“Not bad. What do you think of the plant?

“As nice as any I've seen.” The crowd carried them apart and the girl asked, with interest, “Who was that?”

Lennox gave her a twisted smile. “That was one of the boys I've just been talking about. That's Claude Custis. He used to be a big-shot New York bookie. He's a bigger shot gambler now, and bad.”

She said: “He doesn't look bad. He looks like a gentleman.”

“Claude's a gentleman.” Lennox's grin was sour. “I doubt if he ever said ain't in his life, but he's bad, any way you take him. I wonder what he's doing out here.”

“Probably came out for the climate.”

“More likely the easy money. Claude doesn't know there is a climate. There's no percentage in climate, and Claude plays percentages. Well, it's not my lookout.” He pushed on through the crowd to be stopped a few minutes later by a heavy, red-faced figure. “Hello, Floyd! Looks like old-home week.”

Detective Captain Floyd Spellman grinned. “Hello, Nancy! You're in bad company.”

“She is since you came,” Lennox told him. “What are you doing out this way?”

Spellman moved heavy shoulders. “Looking around. It's a swell joint.”

“I'll guess it burns you up to see them betting legally,” Lennox suggested.

“Yeah.” Spellman grinned. “Well, I gotta be getting back to town. I just came out to give it the once-over.”

Nancy asked: “Could I bum a ride? I've got a story to finish, and Bill can't leave until after Spurck's horse runs.”

Spellman said: “Sure. I'll take good care of her, Bill.”

“You can't take good care of yourself,” Lennox told him, “but Nance can take care of both of you. See you tonight, Kid.”

He watched them move away through the crowd, then turned and walked slowly back towards the clubhouse.

S
PURCK'S
horse was in the fifth race, a gelding with powerful shoulders and beautiful stride, a distance horse. Lennox watched him through glasses as they paraded to the post. The horse had a good record at Chicago and Detroit, no Derby winner, but certainly not a plater; he should win from this field without much trouble. The field was small, only seven, and they were at post hardly a minute.