Роберт Беллем - Pulp Frictions

Thanks to the collectors and enthusiasts of pulp fiction on both sides of the Atlantic, who generously helped me with those earlier books and have risen to the challenge once again for this volume, a considerable number of the stories by the early exponents of the hardboiled genre have been saved from the oblivion they would undoubtedly have suffered if left in the pages of the original pulp magazines. And what a loss it would have been — these unique stories with their mixture of rapid-fire action, violence and cynical humour, and especially the wisecracks which Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and their fellow writers turned into an art form. Indeed, I shall always remember the words of one Chandler fan who supplied me with some rare copies of his favourite writer’s stories to consider.

‘I don’t read Chandler for the story,’ he said, with a smile that spoke of hours of pleasure, ‘I read him for the cracks! ’

Peter Haining

Boxford, Suffolk, 1996.

Although the hardboiled school of writing gave the world the tough cop and the mean gangster, it is best remembered for the two-fisted, gun-toting, cynical yet dedigated sleuth, whose territory was the big cities and whose appetites for drink and dames were equal. And with a renewed passion for the genre among readers on both sides of the Atlantic, the hardboiled dick has once again reappeared in the work of authors whose inspiration can be traced back to the pulps where his career began. Spade Hearns is typical of this new breed: a tough private eye who works the mean streets of Los Angeles and is, in all respects, the spiritual son of the immortal Sam Spade. He is the creation of James Ellroy, self-described as the ‘Mad Dog of Contemporary Fiction’ yet regarded by the American GQ magazine as ‘our Premier Crime Novelist’. Whichever may be nearer the truth, Ellroy bestrides the crime genre as an outstanding writer and larger-than-life character.

More than one critic has written that the life of James Ellroy (1948—) has been every bit as bizarre as that of his (usually) ill-fated characters. Born on the fringe of Hancock Park in Los Angeles, he is the son of a freelance accountant who worked in the Hollywood studios, was an incorrigible womaniser and once told his son he had slept with Rita Hayworth. His mother was a promiscuous alcoholic who was found murdered with a nylon stocking around her neck when he was just ten years old. James himself dropped out of school in his late teens, went on the streets, and was thirty-five times arrested for petty crimes. He also became addicted to drugs and alcohol. To get by he slept rough or broke into houses, and was swiftly writing his own death warrant when he discovered crime fiction in the pages of Raymond Chandler’s books and found a purpose in his life. In 1975, he says, he gave up drinking and, two years later, drugs: then he began writing and his first book, a detective novel, Brown’s Requiem, was published in 1981. A series of police procedurals followed about the detective Lloyd Hopkins, but it was with The Black Dahlia (1987), which explored the low-life crime and moral depravation of Los Angeles complete with its police corruption, racial bigotry and sexual perversions, that he leaped to fame and almost literally reinvented the hardboiled novel. Further blockbuster works, including The Big Nowhere (1988), LA Confidential (1990), White Jazz (1992) and, most recently, American Tabloid (1995), have confirmed his position of pre-eminence. Like his fiction, James Ellroy is a big, intimidating-looking man who speaks in a gravelly voice and wears Hawaiian shirts. He has a caustic sense of humour and relishes being outrageous when he is interviewed or signing copies of his books. When I met him during a visit to London to promote American Tabloid, I felt unnervingly as if I was in the presence of Spade Hearns. The meeting confirmed, if I ever needed confirmation, that he was the only writer who could start off this opening part of the book, devoted to the hardboiled dick.

Before Pearl Harbor and the Jap scare, my living room window offered a great night view: Hollywood Boulevard lit with neon, dark hillsides, movie spots crisscrossing the sky announcing the latest opening at Grauman’s and the Pantages. Now, three months after the day of infamy — blackouts in effect and squadrons of Jap Zeros half expected any moment — all I could see were building shapes and the cherry lamps of occasional prowl cars. The ten p.m. curfew kept night divorce work off my plate, and blowing my last assignment with Bill Malloy of the DA’s Bureau made a special deputy’s curfew waiver out of the question. Work was down, bills were up, and my botched surveillance of Maggie Cordova had me thinking of Lorna all the time, wearing the grooves on her recording of ‘Prison of Love’ down to sandpaper.

Prison of Love.

Sky above.

I feel your body like a velvet glove...

I mixed another rye and soda and started the record over. Through a part in the curtains, I eyeballed the street; I thought of Lorna and Maggie Cordova until their stories melded.

Lorna Kafesjian.

Second-rate bistro chanteuse — first-rate lungs, third-rate club gigs because she insisted on performing her own tunes. I met her when she hired me to rebuff the persistent passes of a rich bull dagger who’d been voyeur perving on her out at Malibu Beach — Lorna with her swimsuit stripped to the waist, chest exposed for a deep cleavage tan to offset the white gowns she always wore on stage. The dyke was sending Lor a hundred long-stemmed red roses a day, along with mash notes bearing her nom de plume d’amour: ‘Your Tongue of Fire’. I kiboshed the pursuit quicksville, glomming the tongue’s Vice jacket, shooting the dope to Louella Parsons — a socially connected, prominently married carpet muncher with a yen for nightclub canaries was prime meat for the four-star Herald. I told Louella: She desists, you don’t publish; she persists, you do. The Tongue and I had a little chat; I strong-armed her black bodyguard when he got persistent. Lorna was grateful, wrote me the torch number to torch all torch numbers — and I got persistent.

The flame burned both ways for about four months — from January to May of ’38 I was Mr Ringside Swain as Lorna gigged the Katydid Klub, Bido Lito’s, Malloy’s Nest, and a host of dives on the edge of jigtown. Two a.m. closers, then back to her place; long mornings and afternoons in bed, my business neglected, clients left dangling while I lived the title of a Duke Ellington number: ‘I Got It Bad, and That Ain’t Good’. Lorna came out of the spell first; she saw that I was willing to trash my life to be with her. That scared her; she pushed me away; I played stage door Johnny until I got disgusted with myself and she blew town for fuck knows where, leaving me a legacy of soft contralto warbles on hot black wax.

Lorna.

Lorna to Maggie.

Maggie happened this way:

Two weeks ago Malloy co-opted me to the DA’s Bureau — the aftermath of the bank job was running helter-skelter, he needed a man good at rolling stakeouts, and a citizens’ committee had posted extra reward gelt. The B of A on North Broadway and Alpine got knocked off; two shitbirds — Caucasians, one with outré facial scars — snuffed three armed guards and got away clean. A score of eyeball witnesses gave descriptions of the robbers, then — blam! — the next day a witness, a seventy-three-year-old Jap granny set for internment pickup, got plugged — double blam! — as she was walking her pooch to the corner market. LAPD Ballistics compared the slugs to the pills extracted from the stiffs at the bank scene: match-up, straight across.