Gun in Cheek (31 page)

Siggy is a pretty cool customer, all right. In short order, he fires several flares at the schooner, and soon the whole boat is aflame. There are cries of pain and horror from the Mafia goons still trapped aboard, but Siggy is unmoved.

"Men hate to die," observed Siggy. "Even those who enjoy killing." He pelted several more flares at the schooner, which was now a mass of flames. "And the virtue of phosphorous," he added as someone with his shirt on fire plummeted into the water, "is that it burns quite nicely under water."

(This is the fifth atypical quality: not only are two running gun battles unheard of in Gothics, but so is such coldbloodedness on the part of a supposedly sympathetic character. Even Devon tacitly condones it.)

The novel ends with Devon and Drake on their way to Argentina, where they will live off his stolen Mafia money. Devon is aware that "she might have to renew her wedding vows in many countries under a variety of aliases," but that's aces with her. "As long as Drake was hers, her world would sing. . . ."

This is the sixth, final, and most amazing atypical quality of all—the one thing, more than any other, which makes
Bride of Terror
the tour de force it is.

Devon does not get Casa del Cielo, or any other casa.

The heroine does
not
get a house!

Girdle, Madam!"

Do you believe that those who live violently rarely die in bed? Is it true that he who takes the sword ends with it?

You've never given it much thought? I didn't, either, until the day Fate hung a delayed fuse on me and blasted my little world into a million pieces.

—William L. Rohde,

Help Wanted—for Murder

Twice I heard the swish of that sap and one of those times it cracked my shoulder. The arm appended thereto, as they say in court, became as useless as a sarong in Siberia. . . . A purple comet with a fiery, lashing tail zoomed around the periphery of my skull and I seemed to fall from a great height . . . a floating downward into a tar pit that had been excavated to a depth just short of Hell itself.

—Chester Warwick,

My Pal, the Killer

T
he paperback original was born in the United States, along with a lot of other "illegitimate" infants, during the Second World War. It only achieved legitimacy several years later, while in its teens, after a prosperous but much-maligned childhood that may or may not have left it permanently traumatized. And it was in its twenties before it threw off the onus of "second-class citizen." But by then it had already taken heinous revenge by fathering a couple of little bastards of its own, not the least of which were the soft-core and hard-core sex paperbacks of the sixties and seventies.

Until 1944, all book-length fiction first appeared between hard covers or as serials in magazines. (Dime novels, which flourished in the 1800s and in the early years of this century, were never books so much as pulp magazines in book form.) A large number of the more successful hard-back mysteries, Westerns, and general novels from 1920 onward were gobbled up by the budding paperback industry during the war. But none of these soft-cover publishers seemed willing to gamble on originals. It took an enterprising—and ultimately failed—New York City outfit called Green Publishing Company to break the ice.

The first of Green's line of originals, Vulcan Books, began in 1944; the second, Five-Star Mystery, commenced in 1945. A total of twenty novels was published under these two imprints before the company's demise in 1946. Each was approximately 45,000 words in length, of digest size, written by an unknown or, in the case of Kendall Foster Crossen (who later wrote the Milo March novels under his pseudonym of M. E. Chaber), on assignment, and usually of dubious merit.

Outstanding among them, from an alternative point of view, is
You'll Die Laughing
, an "impossible crime" tale by Bruce Elliott, amateur magician, free-lance writer, and men's magazine editor. Picture, if you will, a weekend house party in the mansion of a wealthy individual who likes to play practical jokes on his guests—a place called the House of Jokes. One night the guests hear a clap of thunder, then a gunshot from inside the host's bedroom, one of three adjoining bedrooms on the second floor; when they investigate, they find the room empty of habitation, the bed gone, the rug rolled against one wall, and the chairs smashed. A few moments later, they hear a noise in the second of the three rooms, and one of the guests comes out holding his head and complaining that he has been drugged. And a few moments after that, in the third room, they find the body of the host, Jesse Grimsby, shot to death.
 
How did the body get from the first room to the third? How did the murderer disappear, and where did he go?

The answers, which are doped out by Lieutenant Brissk of the New York Homicide Squad, are based on the principle of a magician's three-compartment trick box. The box contains only two compartments, not three, which can be slid back and forth within the box's frame, thereby forming a third compartment at either end If the two movable compartments are pushed all the way over to the left, you have the third compartment on the right; if the movable compartments are pushed all the way over to the right, the third compartment is on the left.

Now you can determine how the murder was done. The killer committed his crime in one of the movable rooms, shifted himself and the body by means of a sliding mechanism, and thus made Grimsby's "bedroom" seem empty. The chairs were broken and the rug rolled up for the following reason: "The outer box, or the house, as in our problem upstairs, had to be a trifle bigger. That leaves a space between the real wall of the house and the wall of the inner sliding rooms. In that space, the killer stuffed as much of the furniture as was possible! That's why the chairs had to be smashed! When the inner rooms were moved, the carpet and chairs fell out of their hiding place and onto the floor. You see, the outer wall of the inner room is at this moment the wall between the first and second rooms!"

As to the
raison d'être
for the sliding rooms, the device exists in the house because of Jesse Grimsby's penchant for practical jokes; at one time, he liked to shuttle his guests back and forth in the night, in order to disorient them. None of the current guests knew about this, we're told, except for the murderer—this in spite of the fact that a couple of the current guests are relatives of the deceased jokester. And as for the clap of thunder, it wasn't thunder at all; it was the noise of "the two inner rooms sliding across the real floor to its new and seemingly impossible position!"

One wonders what John Dickson Carr would have made of all this.

Elliott's character motivation is in the same league with his plotting. So is his dialogue.

She said slowly, working it out as she spoke, "Then you were right and my nymphomania is psychical and not physiological as I thought. . . - I'm a fool.

I've been riding the whirlwind and I've reaped—nothing. But now—the compulsion is gone. It's been seventy hours since I've drugged myself and I'm still sane. My mind hasn't cracked as I always thought it would. Bread pills! Bread pills! And they did the work just as well, because I believed they were my nirvana. If belief can do that, belief can also mean the end of my bondage."

Poor distribution, as well as disinterest on the part of the reading public, put an end to Green Publishing's ambitions. But other publishers were soon ready to take up the gamble of doing originals in the postwar boom. The most successful, begun in 1949, was Gold Medal Books (Fawcett Publications), which claimed dozens of million-seller titles during the ensuing decade. Others had varying degrees of success; they included Pyramid, Lion, Handi-Books (which had been doing reprints since 1942), Croydon, Falcon Books, and Uni-Books (the publisher of, among other items, a science-fictional mystery by David V. Reed called
The Thing That Made Love
). Among the short-lived shoestring operations was an outfit known as Farrell Publishing Company, the perpetrator of three originals in 1951 under the "Suspense Novel" imprint. (They also published a moribund jack-of-all-fiction magazine,
Suspense
, "inspired" by the radio and TV show of the same title, which lasted five issues in 1951 and 1952.)

The last of the Suspense Novels is
Naked Villainy
, by Carl G. Hodges, and is worthy of consideration here for two reasons. One is that it is of minor historical interest:
Naked Villainy
is the first novel to use real members of the Mystery Writers of America organization as characters, predating Brett Halliday's
She Woke to Darkness
by three years and Edward D. Hoch's
The Shattered Raven
by eighteen. One of the book's fictitious characters is a writer of pulp whodunits, a fact that leads the narrator, police lieutenant Wick Davis, to a meeting of the Chicago chapter of MWA. Among the more recognizable names mentioned—recognizable, that is, to anyone who reads and collects old paperback originals—are Milton K. Ozaki, W. T. Brannon, and Paul Fairman. (Hodges, himself a writer of pulp whodunits, was also a member of the Chicago chapter in the early fifties.)

The second reason
Naked Villainy
is worthy of mention is the presence of such dazzling passages as:

A fuzzy voice I'd recognize in three feet of water drifted up to me. "Lieutenant, this is Tuffy. I got a hot one for you on the radio. . . . Some dame. Somebody cracked her skull with a thundermug."

"What?"

"That's what I said. A thundermug. One of them things they have under the bed where there ain't no bathroom. One of them crocks with handles on both sides."

"What will they think of next!"

It was then I saw coagulated blood on the left temple and clotted matter that had seeped from the bullet hole into the coverlet.

I knew the man was dead.

Hope flared in her dark eyes as she grabbed the rope I had tossed to her drowning brain.

Then I felt damp fresh air hit the back of my neck and I knew somebody had opened the door. Before I could see who it was, somebody stuck a red-hot poker in my ear and all my brains ran out of the hole. My bones turned into macaroni and I sank down into a gooey mass of tomato sauce that looked like blood. Then somebody began rubbing the end of my nose with sandpaper and there was a big balloon of pain tied to my ear.

The one unforgettable exchange in the book is when Wick trades some banter with a frowzy blond B-girl in a bar. In front of the blond are five empty martini glasses, each with an olive in it, and in her eyes, as the song says, is that old come-hither stare.

I looked back at the glasses. "Five will make you dizzy."

She stared at me. Then her red mouth gashed open and she said, "The price is right, but my name is Daisy."

Of all the publishers doing originals in the early fifties, the one with the most impressive list of alternatives would have to be Ace and its line of Double Novels. These glorious post-pulp pulp mysteries (and Westerns and science fiction) came two to a package, back to back and bound so that the half you weren't reading was upside down: "turn this book over for a second complete novel." Carl G. Hodges was one of their writers; so were such stalwarts as Michael Avallone, Frank Diamond, Chester Warwick, Russ Winterbotham ("J. Harvey Bond"), Mel Colton, Bob McKnight, Louis Trimble, and James Hadley Chase.

But Ace's single greatest achievement was the publication in 1953 of a novel entitled
Decoy
, by a writer—actually, a collaborative team of two writers—known as Michael Morgan. To read one page of this fascinating work is to marvel at the talents of its creators, C. E. "Teet" Cane and Dean M. Dorn. For they were truly blessed with genius.

According to the biographical sketch on the jacket of
Nine More Lives
(Random House, 1947), the only other full-length mystery novel by Michael Morgan, Teet and Dean were a pair of Hollywood movie flacks who began collaborating on pulp stories after the war. (At least two Michael Morgan novelettes were published in Dime Detective and one in Mammoth Detective; they, like Nine More Lives, are almost but not quite as bad as
Decoy
.) Teet did the writing and Dean served as a leg man (?) and gimmick creator. Dean's gimmicks are pretty wonderful, but Teet's writing is what lifts Decoy below the ranks of all the others. The man was a poet laureate of the absurd.

The plot of
Decoy
is both complicated and farcical and does not lend itself well to simple summary. It has to do with an unofficial Lonely-Hearts Club/gigolo/blackmail racket in Hollywood operated by a villainess called the Duchess; but another gang from the East Coast, led by a mysterious "Mr. Upstairs" who goes by the name of King Lazarr, is trying to muscle in on her crowd. In the middle of this mob warfare is one Bill Ryan, hero and narrator (of Nine More Lives and the Morgan pulp stories, too), who is a Hollywood stuntman. He is also a dumb cluck, by his own testimony on at least a dozen occasions throughout the book.