Роберт Беллем - Pulp Frictions

Ella Salanda ran across the room. She knelt, and cradled Donny’s head in her lap. Incredibly, he spoke, in a loud sighing voice:

‘You won’t go away again, Ella? I did what you told me. You promised.’

‘Sure I promised. I won’t leave you, Donny. Crazy fool.’

‘You like me better than you used to? Now?’

‘I like you, Donny. You’re the most man there is.’

She held the poor insignificant head in her hands. He sighed, and his life came out bright-coloured at the mouth. It was Donny who went away.

His hand relaxed, and I read the lipstick note she had written him on a piece of porous tissue:

‘Donny: This man will kill me unless you kill him first. His gun will be in his clothes on the chair beside the bed. Come in and get it at midnight and shoot to kill. Good luck. I’ll stay and be your girl if you do this, just like you always wished. Love. Ella.’

I looked at the pair on the floor. She was rocking his lifeless head against her breast. Beside them, Gino looked very small and lonely, a dummy leaking darkness from his brow.

Donny had his wish and I had mine. I wondered what Ella’s was.

The man who played a major role in introducing the tough cop into hardboiled fiction as a central figure was William J. Flynn, who had been a lawman himself for years as the former head of the United States Secret Service. Just as Joseph T. Shaw had given special prominence to hardboiled dicks in the pages of Black Mask, so the thickset, pugnacious Flynn encouraged writers to his pulp magazine (which started publication as Flynn’s in 1924 and then became Detective Fiction Weekly in 1928) to write about lawmen who were a match for gangsters and every bit as Sough as the private eyes. It was a theme he had begun to explore himself as early as 1922, with a series entitled ‘Peabody Smith, the Famous Investigator of the US Secret Service’, obviously based on his own experiences, and it was one that clearly appealed to several of the writers whose contributions began to reach his desk — the versatile Max Brand, Arthur B. Reeve (creator of the Scientific Detective, Craig Kennedy), Cornell Woolrich (of whom more later) and MacKinlay Kantor.

‘Mac’ Kantor, who was destined to win a Pulitzer Prize for his Civil War novel Andersonville (1955) and acclaim as a Hollywood scriptwriter, is also credited with a landmark in the hardboiled genre by writing one of the first cop series in the pulps. The stories were about two brothers, Nick and Dave Glennan, who worked for the New York Police Department. Dave, the elder of the two, was a hard-nosed detective, effective but rather set in his ways, while Nick, fifteen years his junior, was quicker-thinking and more direct in his style. The tales about these two and their investigations into murders, robberies and the activities of the city’s criminals appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly during the early Thirties and, despite their popularity, have rarely been reprinted since.

MacKinlay Kantor (1904-) was born in Iowa and began his career as a journalist on the Daily News in Webster City, followed by a spell as a columnist on the Des Moines Tribune. In 1930 he moved to New York where he worked on his early novels and contributed with increasing success to Detective Fiction Weekly. He also had several brushes with the very policemen he was writing about. On the first occasion, he was driving his car, still bearing its Iowa licence plates, when he was stopped by a group of New Jersey cops on the look-out for a number of mid-western gangsters on the run, including the notorious John Dillinger. A year later the same thing happened — although Kantor confessed this time that he had been speeding — and he found himself facing two of the same men. Fortunately they recognised him — and also the fact that he was a writer they enjoyed reading in Detective Fiction Weekly. Instead of a ticket, he was invited back to the precinct station so that the whole group could regale him with cases for future plots. A third occasion, when he was actually seeking inspiration for a story about the Glennan brothers, proved far more disturbing, as he later explained: ‘Once on the outskirts of Westfield I parked in a quiet lane near a deserted estate and went into a trance, trying to rustle up a plot for another Weekly story. The next thing I knew there were cops with drawn revolvers standing on both sides of the car. They wanted to know what I was doing there. I told them honestly, “Trying to think up a unique way of murdering a man,” but I almost laughed on the other side of my face before I was through explaining!’

Kantor, of course, later turned to novels of historical fiction, becoming one of the most widely read American writers with classics like The Voice of Bugle Ann (1935), Gettysburg (1952) and Story Teller (1967) — in recognition of which he was made Consultant in American Letters to the Library of Congress in Washington. However, he always retained an affection for his pulp stories about the Glennan brothers, which he believed had ‘a kind of sharpness and pungency’. Here is one of the best, in which he has apparently made use of his own brush with the law to recount the brothers’ manhunt for a desperate gangster.

Inspector Bourse looked very tired. He had been awake all night, and he was not as young as he had been in the days when he wore a grey helmet and sported a walrus-moustache.

The two young men and the two blowsy, over-dressed women crowded close around him as he sat crouched in the deep, gaudily upholstered chair.

Bourse asked, ‘How’s your watch, Ricardi? And yours, Nick Glennan?’

Coonskin cuffs slid back from two husky wrists, and for a moment there was silence.

‘Eight-eight, sir.’

‘That’s me, Inspector. Eight-eight.’

‘You ladies’ — he slurred the word — ‘got your guns in your pocket-books?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then,’ said old Inspector Bourse, ‘I’d like to know what’s keeping you. Go to it. Don’t give ’em a break. They never gave a break in their lives, least of all Hemingway. And remember them vests. Shoot ’em in the kisser.’

Said one of the women, whose name was Cohen, ‘That reminds me—’

‘Shoot him in the pants,’ nodded the old chief, ‘the coat and vest is mine. All right, gentlemen.’

They went out through the kitchen, and a uniformed patrolman opened the rear door. They went down two flights of bleak stairway and crowded into a red and black taxicab which had been waiting at the alley entrance with idling motor. Nobody said anything. The driver seemed very husky for a taxi driver — he should have been able to command an occupation more fitting to one who scaled two hundred and eight pounds and whose shoulders were all steel and wire.

At the Balmoral Street end of the alley, the taxicab turned left, and left a second time at Dorchester Avenue; now it was heading east and parallel to the alley where it had stood waiting a moment before. This block was lined almost solidly with apartment buildings of the less-than-first-class variety, though here and there an old residence stood out solidly, resisting the cheap encroachment of red and yellow brick walls.

‘Right here,’ said the youngest, handsomest man, and the cab slowed to the kerb in front of Number 1441.