The son of a mechanic and a librarian, Gary Phillips draws on his experiences as an inner-city activist, union organizer, state director of a political action committee, and deliverer of dog cages in writing his tales of chicanery and malfeasance. He has won the Chester Himes Award for his fiction and laments that, even after all these years, his poker playing hasn’t improved. He will enjoy his payment of whiskey for his essay in Books to Die For while smoking a few semi-expensive cigars and contemplating the universe. Visit him online at www.gdphillips.com.
A Stranger in My Grave
by Margaret Millar (1960)
DECLAN HUGHES
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Margaret Millar, née Sturm (1915–94), was born in Ontario, Canada, later moving to Santa Barbara, California, following her marriage to fellow writer Kenneth Millar, who wrote under the pseudonym Ross Macdonald. While, posthumously, his reputation has perhaps overshadowed her own, the situation was reversed earlier in their careers, with Margaret winning the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1956 for her book Beast in View, an honor that eluded her husband throughout his career. Her novels were sociologically ambitious and psychologically acute, particularly in their unflinching yet empathetic analysis of the interior lives of women.
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She was the greatest female crime writer of the twentieth century. She had the psychological acuity of Patricia Highsmith without the disfiguring misanthropy. Her spellbinding plots were a match for any of the Golden Age Queens of Crime in terms of technical construction, but the depth and subtlety of her characterization and her meticulous delineation of class, race, and sexual manners in postwar California left those illustrious ladies for dust. She wasn’t hard-boiled, but the scene in A Stranger in My Grave where Juanita Garcia shatters a door panel with a crucifix while her children weep in fear still chills the blood. She wasn’t cozy, but her prose was consistently elegant and her storytelling deft, confident, and reassuring. She wrote with wit and salt and wry amusement about rich and poor alike, and she never made a dull or an indifferent sentence. She had a particular insight into women on the edge of nervous collapse, and her writing drew a disconcerting shadow line between sanity and its alleged obverse. She had a way with yearning, romantic men, and a bracing, astringent attitude toward the vanities and self-deceptions of her own sex. She generally avoided the use of a series detective, foregrounding instead characters who may themselves be more implicated in the action than they realize, or are prepared to concede. In so doing she was, at the very least, one of the parents of the subgenre we now call domestic suspense. She was a profound influence on the work of Ruth Rendell, Minette Walters, Laura Lippman, Sophie Hannah, and many others who toil in that darkened glade of the forest, whether they know it or not. If Jane Austen had landed in Southern California in the 1940s, reacquainted herself with the gothic conventions she had pastiched in Northanger Abbey, read some Freud, and tried her hand at crime fiction, she might have written like Margaret Millar. And how she could write!
Of a switchboard operator, from Beast in View:
She was an emaciated blonde with trembling hands and a strained, white face, as if the black leech of the earphones had already drawn too much blood.
Of a vain older woman in the same book:
The second drink had brought color to her face and made her eyes look like blue glass beads in a doll’s head.
Of the same woman as a young mother:
. . . the conversation was conducted by Verna Clarvoe, who would chatter endlessly on the I-me-my level. Neither of the children had much to say, or if they had, they had been instructed not to say it. They were like model prisoners at the warden’s table . . .
And of course there is her famous line from How Like an Angel, which, with its sly allusion to a climactic scene of confession and revelation, could form the epigraph to any detective novel:
Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.
A Stranger in My Grave (1960) seems to me her masterpiece, but it emerges from an extraordinarily rich seam of form, including Beast in View, An Air That Kills, The Listening Walls, and How Like an Angel, the finest works of her mature period.
The times of terror began, not in the middle of the night when the quiet and the darkness made terror seem a natural thing, but on a bright and noisy morning during the first week of February.
The tension established at the outset of the novel is characteristic of Millar’s work: an atmosphere of gothic dread is invoked and promptly domesticated at the breakfast table of Daisy, “a pretty dark-haired young woman wearing a bright blue robe that matched her eyes, and the faintest trace of a smile. That smile meant nothing. It was one of habit. She put it on in the morning with her lipstick and removed it at night when she washed her face.” Daisy sits with her husband, Jim, who is reading items from the newspaper to her as if she is an invalid or a child. When the previous night’s dream suddenly convulses her with terror, Jim offers her milk, and warns her to take better care of her health.
No, it’s too late for that, she thought. All the milk and vitamins and exercise and fresh air and sleep in the world don’t make an antidote for death.
Millar later revealed the one-sentence idea that had originally set the book in motion: a woman dreams of visiting a cemetery and seeing, engraved on a granite tombstone, her name, the date of her birth, and the date of her death four years previously. Write your way out of that one, kiddo.
Any notion of the diminishing returns that often follow what we would now call such a high-concept pitch are happily absent: the working through of the story is organic and natural, if every bit as complex as one of her husband’s novels. The traumatic effect of an event Daisy has confused with her death is gradually confronted, and a tightly wound blood knot of sex, race, and the fight for survival unravels, breathtakingly, on the very last page, in a manner that is electrifying and unbelievably moving.
I mentioned her husband. She was married, of course, to Kenneth Millar, better known as Ross Macdonald, who, of course, just happens to be the greatest male crime writer of the twentieth century: two Canadians (one by birth, the other by upbringing) who saw California plain, two titans of the genre. No wonder the house was said occasionally to have echoed to the sound of slamming doors. Their success as writers and their evident happiness, for the most part, in each other’s company was challenged by the arrival of their daughter, Linda, a lost girl whose short and often unhappy life is a disarming presence in their books and often appears to have been foreseen in their pages.
At the time of this writing, none of Margaret Millar’s books are in print in the United States. It is more than time to rescue the reputation of this great American novelist. She deserves the kind of reissue program that Richard Yates and Dawn Powell have received in recent years. Yes, she is that good.
Declan Hughes is the author of the Ed Loy PI series: The Wrong Kind of Blood, The Color of Blood, The Price of Blood, All the Dead Voices, and City of Lost Girls. His books have been nominated for the Edgar, Shamus, Macavity, Theakstons Old Peculier, and CWA Dagger awards. The Wrong Kind of Blood won the Shamus for Best First PI Novel, and, in France, the Le Point Prize for Best European Crime Novel. Declan is also an award-winning playwright, and the cofounder and former artistic director of Rough Magic Theatre Company. His plays include Digging for Fire, Twenty Grand, and Shiver. Visit him online at www.declanhughesbooks.com.
A Night for Screaming
by Harry Whittington (1960)
BILL CRIDER
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The word “prolific” may have been invented for Harry Whittington (1915–89), who published more than 170 novels under a variety of pseudonyms, at one point publishing eighty-five titles in one twelve-year period. He was called the “King of the Pulps,” and the titles of his novels possess an admirable frankness: Desire in the Dust (1956), Backwoods Tramp (1959), Strip the Town Naked (1960), God’s Back Was Turned (1961), and Cora Is a Nympho (1963). Highly regarded for the
pace and plotting of what his publisher Stark House describes as “lurid and brisk noir,” Whittington adopted the pen name Ashley Carter late in his career, and wrote a series of Southern historical novels.
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The decade of the 1950s saw the death of the pulp magazines. They had a good run, but by 1960 only a handful of titles remained. What took their place? Digest magazines for one thing. Men’s adventure magazines for another. But the main replacement for the pulps was the original paperback novel. Beginning with Gold Medal Books in 1950, the market for original paperback fiction exploded. Gold Medal’s first print run for most titles was into the hundreds of thousands, and any number of paperback writers sold millions of books. Some, like John D. MacDonald, Lawrence Block, and Donald Westlake, went on to hardback success, but the majority of the writers who specialized in that field saw most of their work published only in paperback and never attained hardcover fame, even though they were equally deserving of it. Jim Thompson and David Goodis, pretty much ignored during their lifetimes, have come to the fore recently, while others remain mostly unknown. One of the best of them, and my particular enthusiasm for nearly fifty years, is Harry Whittington, and one of my favorites of his novels is A Night for Screaming.
Whittington did many things well, but what he did best was to take his protagonist and put him (or her, in some cases) in a really bad situation, one from which escape seems impossible. But as bad as things might appear for the protagonist in the beginning, they get even worse. And worse. And then worse still. There’s nothing new in piling trouble on trouble, I know. Writers have been doing it since Homer wrote The Odyssey. But Whittington is a real expert, and he carries it off in book after book, though nowhere better than in A Night for Screaming.
The first-person narrator of the novel is Mitch Walker. Walker’s an ex-cop, so he’s been around, but there are some things that give problems to even the toughest of men. Walker’s been accused of murder, though he’s not guilty. Unfortunately for him, he’s the only one who believes in his innocence, so he has to go on the run. When the book opens he’s in a small town in Kansas, the last place in the world where anybody might expect him to be. Or so he thinks, until Fred Palmer shows up and almost spots him. Palmer is Walker’s former partner, and he’s a very good detective. He’s also someone who’ll be quite happy to shoot Walker on sight. In fact, Walker suspects that Palmer would be glad to see him dead.
To escape Palmer, Walker signs up to work at Great Plains Empire Farms, a huge operation where a man can hide out in safety, where the hired hands get a dollar a day, and where nobody asks any questions. Not everyone there is a hired hand, however. A good many of the workers are prisoners from the local jail. They work for free.
The farm might be a good place to hide, but it’s far from being a paradise. The overseers are brutal, and the work and living conditions are no better than those on a prison chain gang. Walker can take it, however, as long as he knows that he’s safe from Palmer.
The owner of the farm is Bart Cassel, and he’s the big man in the county. He likes Walker and lets him know that there’s plenty of opportunity for Walker to move into a much better job at the farm. There are other opportunities, too, as Cassel has a plan to help Mitch make a lot of money. Besides the plan, Cassel also has a beautiful wife of whom he’s murderously jealous. The wife, Eve, appears to like Walker as much as her husband does, though in quite a different way. She has plenty of problems of her own, and she also has some interesting proposals for Walker.
At this point you might be thinking, Haven’t I been on this ride before? No, you haven’t. Maybe you’ve been on similar rides if you’ve read James M. Cain or many of the paperbacks from the 1950s, but I can promise you that you’ve never been on one quite like this. Whittington takes familiar elements and makes them seem fresh and new even now, more than fifty years after the book’s original publication.
Part of it is in the plotting. Whittington once wrote an essay based on a talk he’d given. The title was “Baby, I Could Plot,” and he wasn’t bragging at all. He was just stating the facts, and he proves it again and again in books like A Night for Screaming. The setup might not be anything out of the ordinary, but before you get to the end of the novel, at least in this case, you’ll have survived several neck-snapping twists, three or four of which come in the last sixty pages or so. When you do get to the end, you’ll be wrung out like an old washcloth.
And let me tell you, you’ll get to the end in a hurry. Starting this book is like stepping on a jet plane but without the hassle at the airport. Once you start, there’s no getting off until you reach the end of the journey.
Another Whittington virtue is characterization. He doesn’t write about supermen. Nothing comes easy for his characters. Mitch Walker might be a former cop, but he’s as likely to make mistakes as anyone, and he makes more than one in the course of A Night for Screaming. And when you cut him, he bleeds. He might figure things out eventually, but as with most of us, it takes him a while. The minor characters are vivid, too. The waitress in the first chapter has only a walk-on, but she practically steps off the page, as do several others.
Finally, there’s the emotion. Whittington gets under the skin of his characters so well that their sweat drips on the page. Their fear and pain blaze right through the covers of the book, and for the time you’re reading about them, you’re right there with them.
Harry Whittington didn’t pretend to be the Great American Novelist. He was happy to be the King of the Paperbackers, to give readers a few hours of rousing entertainment, to make them feel and suffer and triumph along with his characters, to give them a book that practically comes alive in their hands. Few could do it as well, and A Night for Screaming is the living proof.
Bill Crider is the author of more than fifty published novels and numerous short stories. He won the Anthony Award for Best First Mystery Novel in 1987 for Too Late to Die. He and his wife, Judy, won the Best Short Story Anthony in 2002 for their story “Chocolate Moose.” His story “Cranked” from Damn Near Dead (Busted Flush Press) was nominated for the Edgar Award. His latest novel is Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen (St. Martin’s). Visit him online at www.billcrider.com.
The Woman Chaser
by Charles Willeford (1960)
SCOTT PHILLIPS
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Charles Willeford (1919–88) was a prolific writer of poetry, prose, and criticism, although he is best known among mystery readers for his four novels featuring Detective-Sergeant Hoke Moseley of the Miami Police Department, one of which, Miami Blues (1984), became a successful film directed by George Armitage. Written at the end of his life, they provided Willeford with his first real taste of public acclaim, but he died of a heart attack shortly after writing the final Moseley book. Willeford’s principal strength was his characterization, and he was particularly astute about men and male sexuality. His credo was: “Just tell the truth, and they’ll accuse you of writing black humor . . . ”
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i. A Self-Made Man
Orphaned as a small child, Charles Willeford ran away from his grandmother as a young teenager when he realized that she couldn’t afford to take care of him anymore. After spending a good chunk of the Great Depression jumping freights, he joined the army, eventually serving as a tank commander in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war he served in the U.S. Air Force and taught himself to write. (Two of his best books are memoirs—I Was Looking for a Street and Something About a Soldier—and neither one contains a molecule of self-pity, just sharp-eyed, sardonic self-observation.)
He was as self-made as any great writer ever was, and the self-made man is a staple cliché of the American mythos. Yet Willeford was as undeluded about the true nature of the American dream as any writer since Twain, Mencken, or Bierce. His antiheroes cheat, brawl, lie, and seduce their way, unencumbered by notions of fair play, through a postwar American landscape Norman Rockwell never painted, a savage bear-baiting pit that would have made Frank Capra wet hi
s pants in horror. Willeford thought it was funny.
ii. Richard Hudson, Self-Made Artiste
Years after its publication, Willeford dismissed The Woman Chaser as a quickie, written for money, but I have to believe that this was an offhand remark, carelessly made. It bears all the hallmarks of his best books, and it’s an exhilarating read. More significantly, it harkens back to an earlier work that must have had some serious significance for the author. The Woman Chaser features a narrator who bears such a startling resemblance to Russell Haxby, the protagonist of his first published novel, High Priest of California,8 that it’s been suggested the later novel could be considered a sequel. Both characters are callous cynics accomplished at the art of heartless seduction, both car salesmen whose profession has informed and confirmed a bleak view of human nature. They even share a set of initials. And then there’s the matter of artistic ambitions and talents.
Any number of Willeford protagonists have a secret artistic skill that’s completely self-taught and inexplicable: Frank Mansfield, the voluntarily mute narrator of Cockfighter, plays the guitar brilliantly onstage without ever having received a minute’s worth of instruction. In The Burnt Orange Heresy, art critic Jacques Figueras discovers to his own amazement that he can paint. In High Priest, Haxby takes it upon himself to rewrite Ulysses, just for laughs. In The Woman Chaser, Richard Hudson dances an impromptu and virtuosic pas de deux with his ballerina mother—a scene whose queasily incestuous overtones became even more cringe-inducing when committed to celluloid by Robinson Devor in his very faithful 1999 adaptation. (Taking this creepy vibe several steps further, Hudson deflowers his stepfather’s sexually aggressive teenaged daughter Becky. As he sees it, he’s doing the kid a favor.)