Джо Горес: Cases

The central characters of all novels lurk inside their creators’ psyches, otherwise they couldn’t emerge on the printed page. But Pierce Duncan, the protagonist of Cases, is — dare I say it? — a special case.

Dunc stole my grandfather’s name and much of my early life. He claimed that, like me, he was raised in Rochester, Minnesota, graduated from Notre Dame in the summer of 1953, and worked his way west through Las Vegas to Los Angeles, where he dug graves, wheelbarrowed cement, and fell in love for the first time.

Eventually, like me, he got to San Francisco and became a private detective with the L.A. Walker Company (he called it Edward D. Cope Investigations) at 1610 Bush Street. He and I both lived in Ma Booger’s rooming house at 1117 Geary just up from Tommy’s Joynt. Dunc’s first week as a P.I. was my first week, most of his investigations were really mine.

Cases began in my office storeroom when I unearthed three forgotten notebooks from the early fifties, plus the case files and field reports from my first months at L.A. Walker. I even found the old snapshot, taken on the day of my arrival in Eagle Rock from Las Vegas, that we have used as our author’s photo.

Cases became real through the generosity of others.

First, always and forever, is Dori, wife and lover, the largest soul I have ever known, who works with me on all of my novels. But with Cases it was a virtual collaboration.

Fellow writer Dick Lupoff dug out the week-by-week Hit Parade songs from the ten months covered by the novel. Bill Malloy, editor in chief of Mysterious Press, furnished expertise on the blues, jazz, and bop musicians of the era. Along with my agents, Henry Morrison and Danny Baror, Bill also bought me the time I needed for the novel at no small personal expense.

Tim Gould worked the internet for material to strengthen my memories of the red-light district in Juárez, and of Van de Kamp’s pioneering Los Angeles drive-in restaurant. Sportswriter Royce Feour shared his memories of the early prizefighting scene in Las Vegas. Frank Glover of the Sutro Library found me a list of such marvelous old San Francisco phone exchanges as ORdway, TUxedo, and Mission. Pat Holt triggered many forgotten detective memories with her wonderful book about P.I. Hal Lipset’s pioneering San Francisco years, The Bug in the Martini Olive.

In Cases I have tried to mix fact and fiction so thoroughly that nobody — not even myself — can now untangle them. I have also tried to honestly re-create the language, raw prejudices, hopes, dreams, despairs, sentimentality, violence, and social and marital attitudes of America’s early fifties as seen through the eyes of a somewhat naive twenty-one-year-old man.

Portions of Cases previously appeared in markedly different form in three long-defunct magazines: Manhunt, last of the pulps; Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine; and Rogue, one of the early slick-paper Playboy clones.

It was the summer of ’53, he was twenty-one years old and thought himself gloriously drunk in the doorway of an empty boxcar clanking through the hot southern night. Sweat gleamed on his face and trickled down between his shoulder blades. He raised his voice in song:

In a far corner of the boxcar another voice also was raised, not in song. “Hey, shut the hell up.”

He drained the last of the half-pint and threw the empty out into the darkness. After what seemed a long time he heard it shatter somewhere behind them. It didn’t take much to get him high, he wasn’t really a boozer: first time he ever got drunk had been just two years ago, on a bottle of seventy-nine-cent dessert wine. There had been grape skins in it. For a month afterward he’d gotten sick every time he saw a billboard advertising liquor.

“I said knock it off!” Same voice, pissed now. “Goddamn brakeman hear you, it’s all our asses.”

The train was starting up a grade into some cracker town he didn’t know the name of, the engine straining, the click-click of the wheels slowing against the joins of the rail sections. The wind blew rich swampland into his face.

There were sudden scrabbling sounds from the corner of the boxcar, the thunder of charging feet. But he grabbed his duffel bag and was out the open doorway, floating, crunch! already running when his heavy hack boots hit the cinder right-of-way beside the tracks, still belting out his song:

He ran a dozen paces abreast of the moving train, slipping on the ties but keeping his feet. When he got himself stopped, still upright, he could see the pale retreating angry faces in the boxcar doorway. He cupped his hands to yell after them:

Chuckling, he trudged toward the thin cluster of lights half a mile ahead. Too bad he’d had to jump off the train, but running was better than fighting. This way he could get something to eat before trying to catch another rattler. Tonight, for sure, miles to go before he’d sleep. When he had covered half the distance into town, it started to rain.

A big man came from the still-open diner to pick his teeth by the light from the front windows. Yellow highlights gleamed on his black rain slicker as he moved down the street and around the corner and out of sight.

The dishwater-blond waitress, alone behind the counter, reached under it for a movie magazine she placed open between her elbows on the red linoleum top. She leaned swaybacked with her behind stuck out while she read. The counter’s wooden edging had been chipped and carved by generations of pocketknives. Most of the stools had rips in their imitation-leather seats.

When the man off the night freight came in and shook water from his army fatigue cap, she straightened quickly, blushing at being caught goofing off. His fatigue jacket was wet-darkened across the shoulders. The walk in the rain had sobered him up. He was not tall, but wide and blocky. He grinned at her.