Роберт Беллем - Pulp Frictions

Nothing changed in Fulwider’s face. His voice became almost lazy.

‘Oh, oh, you’ve been peekin’,’ he said very gently.

I said disgustedly, ‘Just what kind of a sap did you and your gang take me for? Your clean little town stinks. It’s the well-known whited sepulchre. A crook sanctuary where the hot rods can lie low — if they pay off nice and don’t pull any local capers — and where they can jump off for Mexico in a fast boat, if the finger waves towards them.’

The Chief said very carefully, ‘Any more?’

‘Yeah,’ I shouted. ‘I’ve saved it for you too damn long. You had me doped until I was half goofy and stuck me in a private jail. When that didn’t hold me you worked a plant up with Galbraith and Duncan to have my gun kill Sundstrand, your helper, and then have me killed resisting some arrest. Saint spoilt that party for you and saved my life. Not intending to, perhaps, but he did it. You knew all along where the little Snare girl was. She was Saint’s wife and you were holding her yourself to make him stay in line. Hell, why do you suppose I tipped you he was out here? That was something you didn’t know!’

The dick who had tried to make me put up my gun said, ‘Now, Chief. We better make it fast. The Feds—’

Fulwider’s jaw shook. His face was grey and his eyes were far back in his head. The cigar twitched in his fat mouth. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said thickly. Then to me: ‘Well — why did you tip me?’

‘To get you where you’re no more law than Billy the Kid,’ I said, ‘and see if you have the guts to go through with murder on the high seas.’

Saint laughed. He shot a low, snarling whistle between his teeth. A tearing animal growl answered him. The door beside me crashed open as though a mule had kicked it. The big police dog came through the opening in a looping spring that carried him clear across the cabin. The grey body twisted mid-air. A gun banged harmlessly.

‘Eat ’em up, Voss!’ Saint yelled. ‘Eat ’em alive, boy!’

The cabin filled with gunfire. The snarling of the dog blended with a thick, choked scream. Fulwider and one of the dicks were down on the floor and the dog was at Fulwider’s throat.

The girl screamed and plunged her face into a pillow. Saint slid softly down from the bunk and lay on the floor with blood running slowly down his neck.

The dick who hadn’t gone down jumped to one side, almost fell headlong on the girl’s berth, then caught his balance and pumped bullets into the dog’s long grey body — wildly, without pretence of aim.

The dick on the floor pushed at the dog. The dog almost bit his hand off. The man yelled. Feet pounded on the deck. Yelling outside. Something was running down my face that tickled. My head felt funny, but I didn’t know what had hit me.

I got the dog off Fulwider and I saw where a stray bullet had drilled the Chief’s forehead between the eyes, with the delicate exactness of pure chance.

The standing dick’s gun hammer clicked on a discharged shell. He cursed, started to reload frantically.

I touched the blood on my face and looked at it. It seemed very black. The light in the cabin seemed to be failing.

Then all the lights went out very slowly, as in a theatre just as the curtain goes up. Just as it got quite dark my head hurt me, but I didn’t know then that a bullet had creased my skull.

I woke up two days later in the hospital. I was there three weeks. Saint didn’t live long enough to hang, but he lived long enough to tell his story. He must have told it well, because they let Mrs Jerry (Farmer) Saint and her dog go home to her aunt. I never saw her again.

There were a lot of new faces around the City Hall, I heard. One of them was a big red-headed detective sergeant who said he owed me twenty-five dollars but had had to use it to buy a new suit when he got his job back. He said he would pay me out of his first cheque. I said I would try to wait.

Los Angeles was the locale for another highly popular hardboiled dick, Dan Turner, known as the Hollywood Detective. Set against the backdrop of the film studios, his cases in the main involved people in the business, ranging from movie moguls to pretty young starlets who got mixed up in every kind of crime from theft to blackmail and even murder. All Dan’s stories were told in the first person, showing him to be a flippant, tough man of action, irresistible to women, although he treated them all with the same kind of casual brutality he dished out to anyone who crossed or threatened him. The Hollywood Detective made his debut in the June 1934 issue of Spicy Detective Stories, a pulp with even more lurid and suggestive covers than its contemporaries. The text of Dan’s slam-bang adventures was illustrated with pictures of beautiful girls constantly wrestling to keep on their flimsy clothing, and as a result the stories became so popular that at their peak they were featured in no less than three pulps as well as a monthly, Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, solely dedicated to his particular brand of showbiz sex and violence. No other private eye enjoyed quite such fame.

The racy dialogue and titillation of the Dan Turner stories attracted a number of unexpected admirers, including the famous humorist S. J. Perelman, who wrote an article about the sleuth in the New Yorker in which he described him as ‘the apotheosis of all private eyes — out of Ma Baker by Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade’. Perelman, who later wrote a wonderful spoof on the whole hardboiled genre entitled ‘ Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer’, featuring a detective called Mike Noonan, was not one of those who complained about the stories under the mistaken impression that they were intended to be taken seriously. He shared the more commonplace view as expressed by the pulp historian Stephen Mertz when writing the epitaph to the Dan Turner saga in the summer of 1950. ‘The whole series,’ he wrote, ‘provided Bellem with an ongoing vehicle for constantly twisting fresh, irreverent, funny angles out of the Hammett/Chandler tradition.’

Robert Leslie Bellem (1894–1968) in all probability knew Los Angeles even better than Raymond Chandler, having lived there since the early 1920s, working as a newspaper reporter, radio announcer and occasional film extra. Thanks to this inside knowledge, and the fact that he kept his descriptions of places to the minimum in favour of rapid-fire action, the authenticity of the milieu he describes is never in doubt. Like so many of the pulp writers, Bellem was enormously productive, often writing all the stories in Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective under various pen-names, as well as finding time to contribute to other crime and mystery magazines. After the demise of the pulps, he turned naturally to scriptwriting for TV and wrote for a number of shows including Dick Tracy, 77 Sunset Strip and Superman. (By coincidence, at the time of writing, plans have been announced in Los Angeles by Fries Distribution Co. to film a Dan Turner series for TV.) Today, the Hollywood Detective’s fame may be somewhat less than that of his contemporaries, but his importance to the genre has been acknowledged by several authorities, including pulp historian Ron Goulart who referred to him in 1988 as ‘a blownup version of Race Williams and anticipation of Spillane’s Mike Hammer’. The horrifying opening scene in the case of the ‘Dead Man’s Head’, from Spicy Detective Stories of August 1935, is something of an anticipation, too — in particular, of one of the most gruesome moments in that classic movie about Thirties crime, The Godfather Part II.