Max Collins - Kill Your Darlings

The ’con registration desk was a long banquet table against the wall at the top of the escalator. The two young women and the young man behind the table were mystery fans enlisted for this dirty work, and they were eagerly chattering about the mystery writers they’d been meeting. They put me in my place by having obviously never heard of me. I had prepaid, so all I had to do was check in, pick up my plastic name badge, pin it to my sweater and be humiliated by the lack of recognition. Bouchercon was under way for me.

The dealers’ room (which actually sprawled over several rooms adjacent to the large Gold Room, site of most of the ’con’s major activities) hadn’t been open long and some of the dealers were still in the process of setting up. The Mystery House table was one of the latter, and one of Gorman’s flunkys was doing the setting up, a thin, acned kid in a plaid shirt; the enormous pleasure of seeing Gregg Gorman himself would have to wait.

Friday was never a terribly active day at a Bouchercon-only the professional writers and diehard fans who’d flown or driven in from here/there/everywhere would be around; Saturday would find Chicago-area fans flocking to a complete card of activities-speakers, panel discussions, movies-and Bouchercon, Chicago-Style, would be in full swing.

Still, there were probably twenty-five or thirty people wandering about the room, and the number of dealer tables was probably nearly the same. I bumped into Sardini and Murtz, both of whom carried ever-growing stacks of books they’d just bought, each commenting about having to go home after the ’con and immediately write and sell something to make up for what they’d been spending. Some of the dealers were hawking new books by the likes of Donald E. Westlake, Joe Gores and Lawrence Block-as well as studies and biographies on writers like Rex Stout, Dorothy Sayers and John D. MacDonald. And of course there were books by the writers who’d be appearing at the ’con, which gave fans a chance to pick up copies to get autographed. Cynthia Crystal was sitting at a table doing just that with her Hammett bio, for a cluster of fans of various ages and sexes (all wearing glasses-see what reading gets you?). Several dealers were carrying my books, and I thanked them for their support; most dealers are mystery fans as well, and a couple had copies of my two novels tucked away for an autograph, which I gladly gave them. If only the guy at the Port City 7-Eleven who always insisted on seeing my ID before cashing my checks could see me now…

The major attraction of the room, however, was old books: hardcover editions in dustjacket, with prices routinely in the forty to one hundred dollar area- The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, a surrealistic cover depicting a little idol with blood on it; Galatea by James M. Cain, a purple cover with a picture of a water tower. The appeal of all this was a bit beyond me. I’ve never been a collector, anyway not the type who has to have first editions and the like (a novel’s a novel-it doesn’t matter to me what’s on the cover or what edition it is, so long as it’s in English). But I did get a kick out of seeing the rare old paperbacks from the ’40s and ’50s, with their garish covers.

I had done my collecting years and years ago, in secondhand stores where I’d gotten dog-eared paperbacks of Spillane and Prather and Roscoe Kane and the like with gloriously tacky covers, babes and bullets and blood-what more could an impressionable teenager ask? And I’d paid a nickel or a dime apiece for them. The dealers here were asking (and sometimes getting) ten dollars and up. It wasn’t unusual to see a paperback ( The Marijuana Mob by James Hadley Chase; Five Murderers by Raymond Chandler) go for thirty dollars or more.

And all the Roscoe Kane first edition paperbacks-which yesterday would have brought perhaps five dollars per-were marked twenty-five dollars and up. Dying can do wonders for a guy’s career. Gat Garson would’ve cheerfully shot the dealers who’d indulged in this overnight grave robbing; Gat wasn’t around, so I shot them for him-using dirty looks for ammunition, instead of.38 slugs. Not that any of them noticed, or anyway cared.

I caught up with Kathy and her Noir sweatshirt at a table where a lavish paperback selection had every passerby’s eyes popping out at the bright colors and sexy, gory subject matter. This particular dealer was a guy I knew-Bob Weinberg, a bearded guy with glasses and a sense of humor so dry you didn’t laugh till a day later; his prices today were, as usual, not out of line. And he hadn’t raised his Roscoe Kane prices, either. I complimented him on that.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. He wore a green sweater and cream button-down shirt and gray slacks, a conservative contrast to the excesses of the covers of his wares, spread out before him like a kitsch banquet. (Do real men eat kitsch?)

“It’s just refreshing to run across a dealer who isn’t a ghoul.”

“Dealers are rumored to be human,” he said, as if not entirely in agreement with that notion. “I do have a Roscoe Kane item you might be interested in. In fact, I brought it with you in mind.”

“I have all the books, Bob. And I don’t have the patience to go after the short stories in the pulps.”

“No, this is something special. I think you’ll like this. Let me check with my wife and see where we put it.”

Bob’s wife was his business partner.

Meanwhile, Kathy was looking at the cover of a Kane book called Hearse Class Frail .

“Don’t tell anybody,” she said, “but I have to admit I like these covers.”

This particular one portrayed a beautiful busty blonde in a negligee looking out her bedroom window where, in the blue darkness of the night, Gat Garson was punching out several thugs.

“You don’t like the books,” I said, “but you like the covers.”

She shrugged. “It evokes an era. And I have to admit something…”

“Feel free.”

“I never read one of these Gat Garson things all the way through. Maybe if I got into one…”

“I’ll buy you a copy of one of his better ones.”

“That’d be nice. I’d like to give Roscoe Kane another try.”

“As a gesture to me.”

She gave me wry smile #764. “Maybe I’m just trying to keep on your good side. I’m counting on that interview with you.”

“Your publisher might have some objection to your running an interview with me, you know.”

“Gregg gives me free editorial rein. The interview’s still on, then?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“After you take me out to dinner, that is.”

“Right. I’m all for bribing journalists before they interview me; it’s good for my image.”

“What image is that?”

I scowled at her. “The Gat Garson of the ’80s.”

Weinberg was back and he had a big twenty-by-twenty-five piece of bristol board covered with a protective sheet of tissue paper through which I could, barely, see something-something I liked very much.

“I don’t collect that stuff,” I said, not very convincingly.

“It’s up to you,” Weinberg said. Not the hardest sell.

“It’s beautiful,” Kathy said, something like awe in her voice.

And so it was: the original cover painting to Murder Me Again, Doll , my favorite Gat Garson novel; the very painting that had adorned the cover of the novel’s original publication in 1958, which I had read a battered used copy of in 1961, the first Roscoe Kane novel I ever read, the book that gave me Gat Garson fever.

The painting showed Gat on a fire escape, a lithe brunette beauty in a negligee huddling next to him as he fired his.38 down toward several armed thugs climbing up toward them. It was a night scene, blue tones shattered by bursts of red and orange from Gat’s gat.