Gun in Cheek (11 page)

The case in which Price, Nikky, and Oswald become involved is a bizarre one indeed. It seems someone is trying to poison Abigail Winship, matriarch of the Winship family and present owner of Winship's Folly, an architectural nightmare built on an isolated cliff "down Monterey way." Abigail's husband, old Kirk Winship, had decided he didn't need an architect when he built his house and thus built it all wrong to start with; then it became a sort of game with him and he continued to build it all wrong; then a gypsy fortune-teller told him that he would die the day the house was completed, so he kept right on building it all wrong; then he stopped building it all wrong, because Abigail was tired of carpenters and plasterers hanging around all the time, and that very day the gypsy's prophecy came true and a falling beam whacked old Kirk into the Hereafter.

When Price, Nikky, and Oswald arrive at Winship's Folly, they find that the house is painted slate gray, with parts of it that are stone or brick showing through the paint "as if the house broke out in places with a sort of ugly rash." They also find chimneys jutting out at unusual angles; staircases that lead nowhere; hallways with unexpected jogs; four kitchens with bright red furnishings, poppy-yellow walls, and bright blue floors; a red-haired Chinese butler named Wyatt; a tortoiseshell cat that laps up cocktails before dinner; a dead parrot named Persis; assorted members of the Winship clan, including one named Philo; a girl plasterer; an apparent ghost; and a howling storm that washes out the only access bridge and isolates them from the outside world. What transpires then are three murders by poison, two disappearing bodies, a poisoned bouquet of roses meant for Price and Nikky, some not very brilliant detective work, some clumsy legerdemain that has no relation to the plot, no help whatsoever from Oswald, a final confrontation during which the murderer blurts out his guilt on the strength of a minor bit of evidence, a thrilling chase that culminates with a falling beam crushing out the killer's life just as it crushed out poor old Kirk's (this is what is known as i*r*o*n*y, or maybe p*o*e*t*i*c*j*u*s*t*i*c*e), and last but certainly not least such memorable passages as:

"I judge a man by his wife," she snapped. "If your wife had been a fluff or a horse, I should have asked you both to leave."

"I haven't quite made up my mind," said Abigail. "But I think I will leave my entire fortune to Cynthia. She enjoys life the most."

Lucy bit her lips. "All right," she shrilled. "Go ahead. I'm afraid for my own life. I'd rather be alive and poor, than dead and wealthy."

Which was sort of obscure.

I was picking up my handkerchief and laying it down on the table. Only when I laid it down, it wasn't anything remotely resembling a handkerchief. It was a little bottle!

I keep quite a lot of "props" in my clothes. A small blackjack, a miniature revolver, a bottle marked "Poison" in big red letters. I use whichever one fits the crime. Do you see? In this case, I thought the tiny poison bottle might break them down a bit.

Aha! I figured. So! There is somebody around up here! Somebody our dear friend Kirk wants to warn of our approach. Dollars to doughnuts it's the ghost of Uncle Peter! But who the heck is this ghost in real life? Maybe the girl plasterer Nikky saw?

I didn't think that was very logical.

"Then you don't think Dr. Hugo stole the cyanide Out of your locked poison cabinet and administered the same to your beautiful cousin, Cynthia, with lethal intent?"

So! He was going to play ball. The hatchet was buried. The pipe of peace was being readied. Hail, hail, the gang's all here!

Darlings!

It was such fun playing cyanide-dead, that I'm going to do a real job of it and jump into the sea from Lucy's window. I want to see what is on the Other Side, and I cannot wait to find out. Don't grieve for me, my pets.

Everything is going to be such fun. Barring those

few seconds it will take to cross from one world to the other!

With all my love,

Cynthia

I wondered why the would-be murderer had hidden the cyanide in the chair. Of course it was a fine opportunity, with the [fabric] slashed by a child's wanton use of scissors. But why not throw the extra cyanide away after he'd pulled off the trick with the teacup?

I decided the murderer had thrown his extra cyanide away!

If he'd had any.

Still another different kind of police detective is Steve Conway, who narrates Earle Basinsky's 1955 tale of murder and sadistic violence,
The Big Steal
. Anthony Boucher in his June 26, 1955, column in the
New York Times Book Review
, had this to say about the Basinsky opus: "Earle Basinsky's
The Big Steal
… has a jacket inscription. "Mickey Spillane says "The kind of book I go for," 'and a dedication, 'For Mickey Spillane who insisted * ' and for Nathan Jr. who suffered.' Those should serve as a better guide to your choice than any review; personally, I'm on Nathan Jr.'s side."

Basinsky was not the only friend or acquaintance of Spillane to receive an endorsement from the begatter of Mike Hammer in the fifties or to attempt to capitalize on Spillane's phenomenal record; at least two other writers, Charlie Wells and David J. Gerrity ("Garrity"), were also touted by the Mick and returned the favor with book dedications. Neither Gerrity, who continues to produce an occasional paperback original, nor Wells, who disappeared from the mystery scene after two novels, had the Spillane knack for raw and stomach-churning violence; Basinsky, however, did. He also had a knack for clichés, a narrative style that only approximates literacy, and a shameless desire to wax poetic every now and then, as in the following "miniprologue" which opens
The Big Steal
:

I am caught between the past and the future like a wriggling worm in a vise. Seen through shimmering quicksilver.

The present is nonexistent, the here and now is never.

I either exist in the past in memory or base my future on what the past has been. But this is useless.

For there are X factors over which I have no control and I cannot foresee the future even dimly, much as one would try to see the bottom of a stream through muddy swirling water.

Yet I live in the future.

Trapped there by what has happened in the past knowing nothing of the present.

This is the story.

The story involves the theft of $400,000 in ransom money, which the police have recovered after killing a kidnapper (who had previously murdered his kidnap victim), but which mysteriously disappears en route to the police station. Conway, in charge of the suitcase in which the money was supposed to have been placed, is accused of the theft. Ostracized by his police cohorts, deserted by his wife and friends, he sets out on a personal odyssey to retrieve the missing money and find the person or persons who framed him.

The opening chapter depicts Conway being viciously beaten with a rubber hose by his former police buddies, who are not only willing to believe him guilty on the basis of circumstantial evidence but who take delight in whipping hell out of him; the final chapter depicts Conway deliberately shooting a wounded man in the belly and watching him die because the man butchered Conway's dog. In between, there are various beatings, shootings, and slashings, a beautiful dope addict with whom Conway falls in love, a variety of thugs, some crooked cops, and such dialogue as:

As the drapes swirled close behind him, the man

with the bandage turned and jammed a gun in my stomach. "Okay, let's have it pal."

"Have what?"

"The heater, pal. The one you use so well without squeezing the trigger. This time I wanta make sure. My face still feels like it was caught in a revolving door . -

"That's right, chum, a gun can be mighty rough even without bullets. . . . And another thing . with you this close I could make you eat your own gun and you wouldn't even know what happened."

He moved back two steps. "Okay, you go first. This time I got a itchy trigger finger."

Which brings us to a fourth kind of cop—the wisecracking type who, like his private-eye counterparts, spends more time pursuing horny females than murderous felons. And it also brings us to a phenomenon almost as impressive as Mickey Spillane himself: an Australian named Alan G. Yates, better known as Carter Brown.

Spillane, of course, is the bestselling mystery writer of all time, with close to 100 million copies sold of a mere 20 novels and 6 collections. Second place is a toss-up between Erle Stanley Gardner and Yates, whose 200-plus novels under the Carter Brown pen name have sold in excess of 60 million copies in the English speaking world.
 
"Inspired" by the success of Spillane, or so he once claimed in a television interview, Yates began publishing mysteries in 1953, after a not very sparkling career as a salesman, publicity writer, and film technician; his first 50 or so books appeared only in Australia, first from Transport and then, in late 1954, from Horwitz Publications of Sydney, which continues to the present as his primary publisher. It was not until 1958 that the Carter Brown novels crossed the Pacific to the United States, when a package deal was arranged with New American Library (Signet Books). Brown was an instant success in the booming paperback market of the time, and from 1958 until the mid-1970s, he amassed the bulk of his impressive sales figures from among the American audience.

Yates created a number of series characters in the fifties and sixties, the first of these being the well-endowed private eye with the unlikely name of Mavis Seidlitz. Other of his heroes include a private cop, Rick Holman, who operates out of Hollywood; a randy San Francisco lawyer with the appropriate name of Randy Roberts; and a Hollywood scriptwriter, Larry Baker, and his besotted partner Boris Slivka. But Yates's most successful creation, the detective whose escapades first interested NAL in Carter Brown, is Al Wheeler, a lieutenant with the sheriff's office of Pine City County, an obviously fictional locale in southern California.

One of the reasons for Wheeler's success here is that he is an American character operating in a more or less recognizable American setting. (The same is true, to a lesser extent, for the success of Mavis Seidlitz et al.) Foreign writers have not often managed to create believable American characters or to capture an authentic American flavor in dialogue, action, and background; but with the exception of a dubious command of American slang, Yates has shown a remarkable facility for Americanizing his books. Frequent trips to this country no doubt helped, as did an uncanny ability to, as he put it in the aforementioned television interview, "think like an American."

An uncanny ability to think sophomorically hasn't hurt, either.

The key to an evaluation and appreciation of the Carter Brown novels is that word "sophomoric." Everything about them may be described with the same adjective—sophomoric plots (of the type television viewers have been treated to regularly on such shows as Charlie's Angels), sophomoric humor, sophomoric dialogue, sophomoric sex, and even sophomoric violence (reckoning from the point of view, say, of a Spillane addict). The books are all quite short—of less than fifty thousand words—and so fast-paced and formularized that they can be read in less than half an hour. After which they will promptly be forgotten. Anyone who has read more than one Carter Brown novel will be hard-pressed to synopsize the plot of any of them.

Sex, to be sure, is the main ingredient of each and every Brown title—no more so than in the Al Wheeler series. Wheeler is a very horny cop. He is forever bantering with beautiful women, ogling their breasts, leering at their behinds, pawing at their clothing and bare flesh, and/or thinking about rolling them in the hay. Sometimes he attains that primary objective; sometimes he doesn't. In that respect, at least, the series is true to life.

This is Wheeler about to make a conquest:

I lay back against the cushions as her arms tightened around my neck and that nuclear fission started again as her lips met mine. I didn't know how long that clinch lasted—who puts a stopwatch on ecstasy? But finally, she wasn't kissing me anymore.

I knew how she felt. Sometimes you just have to stop for a moment and take a deep breath. I slid further down Onto the couch and waited patiently. "You may kiss me again, honey-chile," I murmured. "Let me drink the magnolia-blossom from your lips!" (The Victim)

And this is Wheeler bantering about sex:

"Appearances can be deceptive, you know that? I mean, you look very virile indeed, Al, but maybe it's all a big fake?"