Max Collins - Kill Your Darlings

“It’s by Kinstler,” Weinberg said. “He’s a big-time portrait painter now, you know-his paperback covers are getting collectible.”

“I believe it.”

“Imagine,” Weinberg said, “having a painting by somebody who did both Gerald Ford’s portrait and Gat Garson’s.”

“I don’t think I can afford it.” I was holding the painting in my hands, which were shaking-Gat seemed to be moving; I could almost hear the gun going KA-CHOW ….

“I was going to ask two hundred for it. Unless you wanted it, in which case I’d settle for one seventy-five. Of course, that was before Roscoe Kane died on us.”

“ Now what do you want?”

“One seventy-five.”

“It might be worth twice that, now that Roscoe’s gone.”

“I brought it here to offer you for one seventy-five. Do you want it or not?”

I handed the painting back to him-and wrote him out a check.

“Keep it for me till I’ve been around the room, would you, Bob?”

“Sure,” he said-shrugging, as if this deal couldn’t have meant less to him. But he’d gone out of his way to be nice to me, and had managed to confirm the rumor that some dealers were human, after all.

Kathy and I walked along, glancing at the various tables of colorful paperback and pulp covers.

“Did you notice how much the ‘doll’ Gat’s holding onto in the painting looked like you?” I asked her.

“I was afraid to point it out without sounding like an egomaniac,” she admitted. “That’s some pretty girl in that painting.”

“Don’t you mean pretty ‘woman’?”

Her smile went crinkly on me. “No, Mal. That was definitely a girl.”

“You, on the other hand, are…”

“Definitely a woman. But is that so bad?”

“You don’t hear me complaining.”

We each picked up a few books as we wandered through the adjacent rooms-she bought an extra copy of guest-of-honor Donaldson’s most recent novel, Poisonous Wine , to get an autograph later; and I found a couple of novels I’d been looking for by Jim Thompson, an underappreciated crime novelist of the ’50s whose bleak books made James M. Cain seem like Louisa May Alcott. Phyllis White, the widow of the ’con’s namesake, Anthony Boucher, and a regular, treasured guest of the Bouchercon, was chatting with Otto Penzler at the Mysterious Press table. Kathy and I stopped so I could pick up the Spillane collection Penzler had recently published and I exchanged smiles with Otto and Mrs. White. Tim Culver had joined Cynthia at the autograph table; they were cordial to the fans, but I still sensed a tension between them.

Then we came to the Mystery House table. Various Gorman publications were on display-including that slipcased set of Carroll John Daly that both Tom Sardini and I had sprung for by mail-and so was Gorman.

So much for dealers being human.

I hadn’t noticed him come in, which was like failing to notice a garbage scow pull into your marina. I must’ve been caught up in that deal with Weinberg and the painting, and Gorman must’ve been uncharacteristically close-mouthed for the past few minutes, because normally his loud and obnoxious voice would have carried like a bad smell in a small room.

“Well,” he said. “It’s Mallory. The asshole.”

He wasn’t a big man, at least not tall; maybe five-eight. He had a beer belly and a goatee in which flecks of his last half-dozen meals hung on like bad memories. His hair was a washed-out, colorless red and thinning, and his nose was roadmapped darker red. His eyes were little dark beady things that looked out from under bushy eyebrows like bugs hiding under weeds. His thick upper lip curled up under the mustache part of the goatee and revealed teeth as yellow as the sun, but not shining.

“I love you, too, Gorman.”

He poked a thumb at a chest ensconced in a pale green sweater polka-dotted with vague foodstains and strained to the point of looking threadbare over the protruding belly; one of the collars of the paisley shirt beneath the sweater poked out like a knife, the other was tucked in. For a guy worth half a million easy, he was hardly a page out of GQ .

“Anytime you want a piece of me, say the word, asshole. We can step outside now, if you like.”

“All right,” I said.

He just stood there behind his table with a nervous, fallen expression, trying to figure out what to do since I’d called his bluff.

Then he grinned, lamely. “You’d fall for anything, Mallory. You’re that big a sucker.”

“Oh. I get it. You were just kidding. You don’t want to go outside and beat me up.”

“I got better things to do.”

“Like swindle people?” I said.

He bristled. “That’s a serious accusation, asshole. You… you better be able to back that up.”

I looked at Kathy, whose presence Gorman hadn’t yet acknowledged despite her being the editor of one of his publications, and said, “You want to hear why the king of Publisher’s Row, here, doesn’t like me?”

Caught between me and her boss, Kathy just looked blank, managing to swallow once, but not to say anything.

I went ahead: “There was an old mystery writer named Raoul Wheeler. He wasn’t the greatest mystery writer in the world, but he did a series of short stories back in the ’40s about a character who was the forerunner of James Bond. Erik Flayr, a secret service man who battled larger-than-life villains.”

Kathy was nodding; she’d heard of Wheeler and his creation.

Despite her knowing most of this, I wanted to say it all; some people were gathering, and not all of them knew the Raoul Wheeler story.

“Wheeler was one of those writers like Carroll John Daly who are historically important, mentioned in all the reference books and such, but who didn’t really make it. The Flayr character had a brief period of popularity in the pulps, and Columbia Pictures even made a serial about him; but that was it for Wheeler-his moment of glory. Then came the James Bond boom in the ’60s and some of the mystery-fiction historians remembered Wheeler’s work and started dropping his name. But none of Wheeler’s Eric Flayr stuff got brought back in print, during the Bond boom, because Wheeler had never done Flayr novels, just short stories, and publishers of paperbacks like to do novels, not short-story collections….”

The rest of Gorman’s face was gradually turning to the same shade of red as his nose.

“Wheeler finished out his career writing soft-core porn and confession-magazine stuff, never amounting to much… but he had a certain pride in Eric Flayr. He lived in Clinton, Iowa, Wheeler did, near me. I heard he was living there and I drove up to meet him. He lived in a two-room flat and he was ill-dying of cancer, in fact. A frail little man with a mustache. Skinny. But he was a nice old guy, with lots of stories about people he met in the pulp days-Hammett, Chandler, Daly, Fred Nebel, Frank Gruber, all those guys-and he had a complete collection of the Thrilling Detective Adventure pulps with his Eric Flayr stories in them. One afternoon, he gave them to me. A gift. A legacy.”

Gorman began talking to his flunky, that teenaged kid with acne on his neck and a plaid shirt. Pretending to ignore me, and the small crowd that was gathering.

“I was an innocent back then-this was maybe six years ago. All I knew about Gregg Gorman was that he was reprinting rare, important mystery fiction, for the hard-core mystery fan market. So I wrote him a letter. Told him I had a complete run of the Flayr stories. Suggested collecting them into a book. Gorman called me-he came on a little strong, but I figured that was just the difference between Chicago and Port City, Iowa. What did I care if he was obnoxious, as long as he published a collection of Wheeler’s stories-which he said he intended doing. In fact, he’d had the idea before I even came to him, but had been stopped by the rarity of this particular pulp-even top collectors like Blackbeard and Pronzini didn’t have a complete run of Thrilling Detective Adventures between them! So he was very grateful.”