Max Collins - Kill Your Darlings

“What we need is Gat Garson.”

“I’ll settle for Mallory.”

I touched her wet face and found my way out.

“Bouchercon, Chicago-Style” was the official title of this year’s ’con, though the nickname “Crime City Capers” had appeared on the advance flyers. Chicago, the “fabulous clipjoint” as mystery writer Fredric Brown had dubbed it, was the perfect setting for a mystery convention: the place where the Outfit was born and John Dillinger died, site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, home of the Untouchables, setting for the Gat Garson tales. A fitting spot for mystery writers, critics, publishers and fans to gather, and discuss crime and punishment, fantasy-style.

Bouchercon was founded in 1970, in honor of New York Times critic Anthony Boucher, who had died in 1968-actually, “Boucher” was a pseudonym of Anthony Parker White. White was an author of science fiction, and classical, puzzle-style whodunits of the sort Cynthia Crystal was inclined toward, and which interested me about as much as lace doilies and Gilbert and Sullivan revivals. But Boucher was a well-respected critic, and had done perhaps as much as anyone to legitimize mystery fiction, and his was a fine name to grace this annual mystery convention.

The convention rotated annually from a city on the West Coast, to an eastern city, to a midwestern city. The state of my finances had thus far kept me from attending any but those in the Midwest, and I’d missed the last one of those, in Milwaukee, blowing my chance to meet Mickey Spillane, whose appearance had by all accounts been a show stopper. Spillane, like Roscoe Kane, had rarely had a kind word said about him critically, and, despite his massive man-on-the-street popularity, hard-core mystery fandom hadn’t treated the Mick well, either, as one crowd rallied around the Agatha Christie puzzle school, and the other around Hammett and Chandler, the tough-but-literary mystery school, of which Spillane was thought to be a bastard offspring. Since Kane was thought to be a bastard offspring of Spillane, you can guess how the critics treated Gat Garson-when they treated him at all.

It would’ve been nice to have seen Spillane honored at a Bouchercon, since Anthony Boucher’s New York Times reviews had been among the most brutal of the many anti-Spillane critiques. Seeing Roscoe Kane-and Gat Garson-being honored at this year’s Bouchercon, receiving the Life Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, no less, would have been a sweet sort of justice, since Boucher had trashed Kane and Gat Garson in a manner that made his Spillane reviews seem complimentary.

Boucher was an astute critic, but he was wrong about Spillane (and came to admit it, in his later reviews) and he was wrong about Roscoe Kane (though that he never admitted). With Roscoe dead, the honors would still come, and probably would be more effusive, as posthumous honors tend to be; but there would be a hollow ring to them. Honoring the dead is so easy. And so pointless.

Or is it? At least a writer, even a paperback writer like Roscoe Kane, gets a grab at the brass ring of immortality. You never know; something you write just might last… assuming that all of us, including our books, aren’t turned to radioactive dust any second now, of course. Short of that, the writer, any writer, even the popular-fiction writer like Roscoe Kane-following the tradition of such popular-fiction writers as Shakespeare, Dickens and Dostoevsky, crime writers all-has an honest (if long) shot at living on through his words.

On the other hand, royalty checks made out to the author’s estate are not this author’s idea of a good time.

“Is this a private conversation or can anybody join in?”

I looked up.

She was small-petite, even-and her straight, shoulder-length hair was the dark brown you mistake for black if the light isn’t hitting it just right. Her eyes were the same color.

“Was I talking to myself?” I said, embarrassed. I was sitting alone in a booth in the Artistic Cafe, just up Michigan Avenue from the Congress; I’d wanted to get away from the hotel and the Bouchercon guests, and from past experience I remembered the Artistic, in the Fine Arts Building, where young actresses and ballerinas, in tights and leg-warmers and other form-fitting artsy-type duds, often wandered in for coffee. The Artistic was a good place for me to sit and think, and if thinking got old, be distracted by young actresses and ballerinas in tights.

“You were moving your lips,” she said, sitting down. She had a pixie face, pert, cute; she’d have made a great hippie, ten or fifteen years earlier.

“Was I making any audible sounds?” I asked.

“Just a sort of murmur,” she said, her lips doing a wry little dance around the words as they came out.

But she wasn’t a dancer, or an actress, at least not one here to use one of the Fine Arts Building studios. She had on a Noir sweatshirt-black deco letters barely visible on dark blue-and her designer jeans were snug (not that there’s any other kind). Noir was a mystery fanzine I had subscribed to a while back, because somebody had told me the editor’d been reviewing my books favorably; that sounded like my kind of reading, so I sent them a check. So what if Gregg Gorman was the publisher.

Anyway, I figured she was here for Bouchercon, and said, “I figure you must be here for Bouchercon.”

“Shrewd deduction,” she said; the corners of her mouth went up, and the rest of her mouth was a wavering line, making a terrific wry smile. She had a great mouth, this girl. Whoops, make that “woman”: I could tell right off she wouldn’t appreciate being referred to as a girl.

“Do I know you?” I said. “Or is that wishful thinking?”

“Do I look familiar?”

“I’ve seen you before, or somebody who looks a lot like you. Maybe a movie star or something.”

“Brother. Hope that isn’t dialogue you’re trying out for your next story-you usually give that guy in your books better lines.”

I managed a grin. “Things I say often seem more clever on the printed page.”

“The movie star line won’t.”

“Maybe you’re right. So. You know who I am.”

She grinned back at me; she had a thousand smiles, this one, all of them terrific, most of them wry. “Don’t be too proud of yourself. It’s my job to know who you are.”

I snapped my fingers. “Kathy Wickman!”

She nodded; pointed to her Noir sweatshirt, giving me a great excuse to take a look at how the word Noir rolled with the flow of her. She had the sort of breasts Gat Garson would no doubt describe as “pert, perfect handfuls, straining for their independence”; I, of course, would find a less sexist way to put it, though I can’t think of one at the moment.

“It doesn’t take that long to read the word Noir ,” she said, with a one-sided wry smile. Make that 1001 smiles.

“I flunked Evelyn Wood,” I explained; I extended a hand across the table and we shook hands-hers was slim, cool, smooth. Mine was-who cares?

“You may remember, I dropped you a note about your first novel,” she said. “I just had to comment, personally, on that chapter about your hero’s rites of adolescence.”

“That was a nice letter; thanks.”

“The letter you wrote back was nice, too. That chapter really hit me; kind of unusual to find it plopped down in the middle of mystery novel.”

“That chapter was all true, every word of it,” I said. “I couldn’t use everything that really happened, actually-some of the things my real first love pulled on me outstrip anything the fictionalized one in my book did.”

“Really? Say-why don’t we get together for dinner, sometime over this Bouchercon weekend? I’d love to hear the stuff that didn’t make it into that chapter.”