Max Collins - Kill Your Darlings

“My outtakes would interest you, huh?” I shook my head. “I don’t know if I could be forced to talk about myself like that; I’m really very modest and shy. How about tonight?”

“Okay-” She smiled; this one wasn’t wry. Which was just fine with me.

“Have you had lunch? I’ve got a cheeseburger on the way.”

“Actually, I haven’t eaten.”

I called a waitress over and Kathy ordered.

Kathy, I should finally get around to saying, was the editor of Noir ; she was the very person who’d been doing those favorable reviews of my books. So naturally I respected her intellectually, being as how she had such high standards and good taste in matters literary (unless she panned my next book, in which case all bets were off). But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was just as attracted to her physically as mentally.

Frankly, feeling attracted to Kathy, young, pert, pixie-fresh Kathy, helped flush the uncomfortable feeling I had about Mae Kane out of my system.

“I really like your magazine,” I said, between bites of cheeseburger.

“You and our thousand or so other readers.”

“You ought to have a better circulation than that.”

“I know. It’s that screwed-up publisher of mine.”

I lifted my eyebrows and put ’em back down. “I’m glad you brought that up, not me.”

“Oh, really?”

“Your publisher. Gregg Gorman. He’s an s.o.b., you know.”

Taking a bite of her own cheeseburger, she rolled her eyes and nodded, swallowed, said, “You’re telling me. But he pays the bills, and stays out of my way.”

“It’s a nice little magazine.”

“If Gregg’d just promote it, it could be a bigger nice little magazine. He’s stubborn; he sells it to the mystery fan market, and won’t bother trying for newsstand distribution. We’ve got articles, fiction by some up-and-coming writers-you wouldn’t like to try a short story, would you?”

“Sure. What’s your word rate?”

Her mouth and chin crinkled in embarrassment. “Half a cent per.”

“Ouch. I always wanted to know what it felt like to be an old-time pulp writer.”

“Now you’ll know. Unless you’re going to back out…”

“Well, I did say yes, so a deal’s a deal.”

Wry smile; rerun of the first one. “Anyway,” she said, getting back on the track of an earlier train of thought, “ Noir ’s a slick little ’zine and Gorman’s getting his books into Dalton’s and Walden’s and other outlets, so I keep nudging him to do something on a bigger scale with my little baby. But he doesn’t.”

“He’s a man of vast imagination; some people see a sunset and just see a sunset-Gorman sees a sunset, and belches.”

She nodded. “That’s Gregg. He’s a paternalistic little shit, is what he is, making passes at me every chance he gets.”

“That’s not something I want to hear about while I’m eating.”

She waved a hand that had a little catsup on it. “Don’t worry, Gregg’s too much of a coward for there to be any gory anecdotes behind what I said. Fortunately we live half a continent apart and get together only rarely, and his come-ons are restricted primarily to the phone. But that’s bad enough, believe me. He comes on to me in the sleazy, chauvinistic way that went out with Gat Garson.”

I’d put Roscoe Kane’s death almost out of mind, for a few minutes; her flip remark brought it back to me, and my face must’ve shown it, because she said, “Oh. I’m sorry. That wasn’t in very good taste, was it? With Roscoe Kane dying last night and everything. I just could never read those stupid books, frankly.”

A wall came up between us.

“I loved those books,” I said. A little coldly.

She didn’t pick up on the coldness. “That’s just ’cause you’re a man. You grew up in the ’50s, and that was your era, and it hits you in a way that just goes right past me. I look at those macho private eye books and my stomach turns the corner, y’know?” She noticed the catsup on her hand and kissed it off; an unconsciously sexy little move. Seeing her do that, I would have had a hard time not warming back up to her. Which proved I was the chauvinistic boor she apparently suspected me of being.

Or did she?

“See,” she was saying intensely, her dark eyes looking at me with a naive sophistication, “your books are worlds apart from that tough-guy tripe. Your hero is sensitive. He thinks of women as persons, not sex objects… he sees women as…” And she looked upward for the word; while she did that I studied the word Noir . “… existential beings trapped in the same absurd world as he is. Don’t you agree?”

I raised my eyes, if not my consciousness. I smiled at her. “Completely. Does this mean separate checks?”

She stopped and her face was a blank for a moment, and then one of her repertoire of wry smiles found its way to her face, and she said, “I sound like a pretentious jerk, don’t I?”

I shrugged. “You sound like somebody who writes reviews for Noir .”

“Is there a difference?”

“That depends,” I said, placing tongue firmly in cheek, “on whether you’re praising G. Pompous Donaldson, or me.”

She shook her head, the smile shifting to one side of her face. “How a writer as sensitive as you can dislike Donaldson, and deify Kane, is beyond me.”

“The last time anybody called me sensitive was when I got my flu shot. And how somebody as insightful as you can fall for Donaldson’s bombastic claptrap is beyond yours truly, Johnny Dollar.”

“Huh?”

“Old radio show. You’re too young to remember it, and too literary to have heard of it. Listen, Donaldson’s guy is named Keats-a private eye named after a poet! Gimme a break!”

“That’s no more pretentious than calling your hero Mallory. That’s a reference to Sir Thomas Malory, and Morte d’Arthur , I assume. Linking your hero to knights, rather obviously.”

“Like hell! It’s my name!”

“Oh. Well, why do you only use one name? You’ve got a first name, don’t you?”

“People call me Mal.”

“But that’s short for ‘Mallory.’ What’s more pompous than signing your work with one name?”

“Using a first initial, a middle and last name; or, God forbid, three names! Look, I have a first name, but nobody, including me, uses it, except on official documents.”

“What is it, then?”

“Something that wouldn’t sound good in print.”

“It couldn’t be that bad.”

“Oh, no?”

“Oh, come on, tell me. What is it? I won’t tell.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Not in Noir? ”

“Nowhere.”

I told her.

It sobered her.

“I see what you mean,” she said. “Maybe just ‘Mallory’ is wiser.”

“Perhaps in the future you’ll learn to trust me. And my comments about Donaldson are also not for publication. Panning one of my peers in print is definitely not cool. Okay?”

“Sure,” she said, sipping at her Coke with a straw, looking fifteen years old, making me glad she was really ten years older. “Still, you seem to have the sort of outspoken notions that Noir readers would get a kick out of reading about.”

“I don’t know…”

“Well, I do. I’d like to interview you, over the weekend, some time.”

“I don’t think so…”

“You can edit the rough copy, censor anything you like, if something you say looks stupid or harsh on paper.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Dinner still on?”

“You’re from Pennsylvania someplace, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. West Mifflin.”

“Maybe I better introduce you to Chicago-style pizza, then. This evening.”