Doug Allyn: The Best American Mystery Stories 1997

Spade’s is a bleak vision of life, and an isolating one. In the stories that follow, Hammett seems to be looking for a way to find connection without denying the world as he, and Spade, understand it. But there were things Hammett seemed unable to say, or had no language to say it with, and the later work suffers, though it may also have suffered from booze and Lillian Hellman. Whatever limited Hammett, it remained for Raymond Chandler to liberate the American detective story from Hammett’s desert place.

Chandler infused the American detective story with a life-giving romanticism. In his hands the detective story became a story of a hero (in Northrop Frye’s categories, high mimetic) who is superior to other men, though not to nature. Marlowe moves through the sun-blasted streets of Los Angeles, where the butt end of the American dream is sniped out against the end of the continent. He knows everything Spade knows, but he insists on and is tough enough to maintain a high romantic readiness, a deliberate and undeceived sentimentality. The plot doesn’t matter much. When we have forgotten the stories, we remember Marlowe. Things do not always come out all right. He cannot restore the grand design. But he remains intact. What comes out all right is Marlowe. It is he who matters. In his romanticism and his courage and the full density of his creation, he provides at least a temporary stay against confusion.

Obviously much has happened in American mystery stories since Chandler. Women have found a comfortable and invigorating place within the form. The story of the hero has diversified in gender, in race, in locale, in sexual preference. But, as you will see in this collection, the stories remain the story of the hero’s “adventure in search of a hidden truth.” They are stories about a hero “fit for adventure” in a time when stories of far bluer blood are still stuck in that bleak comer of the wasteland where Spade took Hammett.

This is no small thing.

Robert B. Parker

“Hey, Axton, we gonna drive all night? I need to use the facilities, you know? I promise I won’t run.”

I glanced at Cootie Keyes. He was a hail jumper, a small-time dope dealer, a user, a snitch. Not one of nature’s noblemen. Still, he was worth twenty-five hundred bucks to the Saheen Bail Bond Agency back in Detroit, plus the mileage I’d run up on my old Buick driving down to Knoxville to pick him up. And he hadn’t been much trouble. So far.

“We’ll take a break at the next place I see.” I said. “But only if they’ve got chicken.”

“Very funny,” he said gloomily, staring out into the rainy Indiana night. He’d been hiding in a chicken coop when I rousted him. Which was appropriate. Cootie looked a bit like a chicken: scrawny neck, a beak nose, no chin to speak of. He even had a few scraps of feathers in his hair.

The neon sign said THE 3-В BARRELHOUSE, BURGERS, BEER ‘N’ BLUES. I wheeled into the half-filled parking lot.

“С’mon, Ax,” Cootie whined. “I was thinkin’ maybe someplace nice. It’s my last night of freedom, man.”

“I’m not on an expense account, Cootie,” I said. “Of course, if you’d rather wait in the trunk...”

“Okay, okay, I’m cool,” he said. “How about takin’ the cuffs off? It’s embarrassing.”

“No chance,” I said. “Besides, from the looks of this place, half the people in here may be wearing cuffs.”

I was wrong. The old log building was surprisingly pleasant inside, massive dark pine tables and chairs, checkered tablecloths, and a magnificent old Wurlitzer jukebox from the fifties pumping out roadhouse blues from the same era. Home sweet home.

We sat in the shadows at a corner table. Cootie kept his hands out of sight while we ordered cheeseburgers and beer from a surprisingly young and sweet waitress.

Most of the customers were college types, gathered at the far end of the building near a small bandstand. Some of them had Fighting Irish jackets, and it occurred to me that this place was probably only twenty miles or so from Notre Dame.

The burgers were great, flame-broiled, dripping with their own juices and homemade mustard. Cootie and I tore into them like wolves, and I made a mental note to remember the 3-B’s. Not that I’m likely to forget it now.

A small combo took the stage, took a moment to tune their instruments, then ripped into their opening number without so much as a “howdy, folks.” They were blues dynamite, jamming on a hard-driving Elmore James shuffle, “Dust My Broom.” The lead guitarist was a woman and a killer player, passionate and precise. And they weren’t even warmed up yet. I was truly sorry I was only passing through... and then she started to sing.

I froze, my beer mug posed in midair. I knew that voice. I’d know it anywhere. Cheryl Vanetti. I glanced sharply at Cootie, but he was busy making carnage of his burger, oblivious to the music. He was young enough that he might not have heard her anyway. Or remember, if he had. But I wasn’t likely to forget her. She’d helped kill a friend of mine.

It was back in the eighties. Detroit was still Murder City then. I was a lot younger and hadn’t gotten my private eye ticket yet. So I bounced in clubs or collected cash from folks who weren’t altogether sure they owed it. And in those days, I still had friends. Danny Liebman was one. A chubby Jewish kid from Grosse Pointe who’d parlayed a master’s in economics and a passion for music into a hole-in-the-wall dive a few blocks from the University of Detroit. He called the Place Yo Mama’s, a thoughtful touch, since the rumor was that he’d conned his mother into putting up most of the money for it.

Mama Liebman’s investment was paving off, though. Danny hired a young chick singer with a halfway decent band behind her. Cherry and the Pit. They were drawing a yuppie college trade six nights a week. It wasn’t my scene, the crowd was too young even then and the music was white bread, but I’d filled in as a bouncer there a few times as a favor to Danny, and I’d collected a few bad debts for him from guys who’d forgotten how to add up a bar tab. We couldn’t have been more different, Danny and I. He was a Detroiter, born into old Dodge motor money, and I’d drifted up to Motown from a Mississippi dirt farm looking for work a few years before.

We both loved music, though, and we whiled away many an early morning after Yo Mama’s closed listening to scratchy old 78’s of Big Mama Thornton. Tampa Red, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Danny was heavy into old-time bluesers and did his best to turn me on to them, too. It might have worked eventually, but my business got in the way and our lives separated for a while, the way they do when you’re young. Or any time, for that matter. Stuff happens.

I hadn’t seen him for a few months when he called me out of the blue and said he needed to see me at the club the next day. Emergency.

Business at Yo Mama’s was slow that afternoon. Two U, of Detroit sophs were trying to score with a barmaid old enough to mother ’em. Three coeds with cropped hair, no makeup, and Goodwill duds were sharing a back booth and a pitcher of beer, arguing earnestly about things academic. They looked familiar. Either I’d seen them around or there’s a trio like them in every college bar every afternoon.

A deafening delta blues jam was thumping over the house sound system. I didn’t recognize the singer. Robert Johnson? Leadbelly? Definitely one of Danny Liebman’s precious dead bluesmen. The guy’s wailing was unintelligible, but it was a safe bet his life wasn’t going very well. No wonder the joint was nearly deserted. I limped across the postage stamp dance floor to the office, rapped once, and went in.