Two-Fisted Tales: Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (Pocket Books, third printing 1961)

I have mixed feelings about the cover to this late ‘50s/early ‘60s U.S. paperback edition of ‘Red Harvest’. On the one hand, Harry Bennett’s illustration is clearly a great piece of pulp cover artwork, no question. The manner in which it is presented however clearly leaves a lot to be desired. With the painting apparently sliced out by hand and stuck against a decidedly unflattering white and red background, the whole thing is in fact a bit of a disaster area from the design point of view, and doesn’t look terribly appealing.

Furthermore, if you compare the front cover to the tinted detail from the illustration blown up on the back, you’ll get an idea of how brutally Bennett’s art has been squashed down here, and how much detail has been lost in the process of printing it at reduced scale. That great “huh?!” expression on the male figure’s face for instance is totally gone, along with who knows how much else.

(I would also complain that that expression seems entirely out of keeping with the stoic manner in which Hammett’s Continental Op greets the novel’s ever-increasing pile of corpses, but then the scene and characters depicted here by Bennett don’t actually seem to match anything in the book very well at all, so what the hey, right?)

It’s also interesting I think to observe how little Pocket Books chose to play up the fame and importance of this book and its author in their cover copy here. We’re over three decades away from ‘Red Harvest’s initial publication in 1929 at this point, and this edition was in fact printed in the very month of Hammett’s death (January ’61), but there’s still no “..the classic first novel from the celebrated author of ‘The Maltese Falcon’..” type blurb here, and no pull quotes from critics or noteworthy admirers.

Instead, they’ve just stuck a summary of the book’s most lurid and violent moment on the back, bluntly re-worded by an anonymous copy editor - basically treating the storied originator of the hard-boiled idiom in much the same manner as they would some random mug who just sent in an unsolicited manuscript hoping for the best. Which is fine, don’t get me wrong - in fact it’s entirely in keeping with the no nonsense / straight-down-to-business tone of the novel. It’s just… interesting, that’s all.

Could it be, that in the hey-day of more shamelessly populist detective writers like Spillane and Prather, Hammett’s vintage and reputation might have been seen to count against him in the marketplace? As in, perhaps this genre was pointedly NOT being sold to an audience who cared to read an old book that a bunch of fuddy-duddys at the newspapers liked, at this particular point in time?

Be that as it may, it’s fair to say that this hypothetical audience of uncultured brutes would surely not have been disappointed by ‘Red Harvest’, a book which still sparks with barbaric, ill-mannered energy over ninety years after it first hit the streets.

One thing I will say for the presentation of this “perma-book” is that it still remains readable after sixty years and at least one ocean crossing, and having ploughed through it this week, I’m happy to report that ‘Red Harvest’ remains my favourite of Hammett’s novels, half a lifetime since I first gave it a whirl as a teenager.

As violent, action-packed and callously cynical as anything those aforementioned later writers could have come up with, it stands above them not so much through any sense of refinement or literary pretention, but simply because it’s wittier, more stylish, more tightly constructed and more insightful in its unpacking of the ways in which corruption and back-room power games devalue life in America than pretty much any of its author’s subsequent competitors. Essential reading, needless to say.

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For the record, minimal online research reveals that Harry Bennett produced a full set of Hammett covers for Pocket Books in 1961. Most of them fared a lot better than his ‘Red Harvest’ illustration, and the blurb on a few of them at least makes an effort to sell Hammett on his ‘classic’ rep. Other people’s scans can be seen below. 

Unfortunately, I can’t find a decent jpg of his cover for ‘The Glass Key’, but it’s pretty great too. (Apropos of nothing, Bennett also produced an equally nifty set of covers for Chester Himes’ books, which can be enjoyed via Pulp International here.)

Book & Film: Night Moves by Alan Sharp (Warner Paperback Library, 1975)

Strange artefacts from an era before home video allowed viewers to return to their favourite movies at their leisure, movie novelisations (as opposed to tie-in editions of pre-existing source novels, although I appreciate the line between the two can get a bit blurred at times) can often make for fascinating and rewarding reading. Particularly interesting to me are those dating from a curious period in the mid ‘70s in which Hollywood studios (Warner Bros in particular) seemed to believe there was a market for tie-in novels based on quote-unquote ‘mature’ / adult-orientated films, rather than just the more obvious action-adventure and sci-fi franchise stuff which dominated the novelisation racket when I was growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

I’ve found myself dipping into a number of these books in recent years, and though their quality naturally varies, I’ve discovered several which I believe actually surpass the quality of their cinematic counterparts. If I put Alan Sharp’s ‘Night Moves’, based on his own screenplay, into this category, that’s no slur on Arthur Penn’s film, which is excellent. But, as an experienced novelist expanding upon a story of his own creation about which he obviously cared quite deeply, Sharp here gives us a deeper dive into the uniquely despairing atmosphere of the piece, and the ennui-ridden, low key tragedy of its characters.

Though it betrays signs of being written in haste (as well as the inevitable typos, there are a few snowdrifts of incoherence which subsequent drafts would surely have cleared up), this ostensible promo item for Penn’s film feels very much like the definitive version of the story, and the true source of the ‘feel’ the director was trying to put on-screen.

In trying to understand where ‘Night Moves’ is coming from, it’s instructive I think to take a quick glance at a capsule biography of Alan Sharp. Born in Scotland in 1934, Sharp struggled to establish himself as a literary novelist during the 1960s, before apparently packing it in and deciding to try his luck in Hollywood, where he offered his services to the studios, expressing a particular desire to work on undemanding genre fare such as westerns and detective pictures.

This being the post-‘Easy Rider’, pre-‘Star Wars’ 1970s however, the genre films being produced were often far from conventional, and the distinctive authorial stamp present in the small number of Sharp scripts which made it to the big screen (including Peter Fonda’s excellent ‘The Hired Hand’ (1970) and Robert Aldrich’s revisionist western ‘Ulzana’s Raid’ (1972)) has often been noted.

Essentially, ‘Night Moves’ is exactly the book I would have expected this man to write, complete with eerie parallels to another U.K. ex-pat whose unfulfilled literary ambitions fed into the career-defining work he produced within the L.A. / Hollywood pulp fiction milieu, Raymond Chandler.

Though Chandler’s work is never explicitly referenced in ‘Night Moves’, his influence hangs heavy over both the celluloid and paper incarnations of the project. The moral ambiguities contemplated by Private Investigator Harry Moseby as he is paid to track down the wild-child daughter of a dysfunctional, implicitly abusive, Hollywood family directly echo those faced by Philip Marlowe in Chandler’s ‘The Big Sleep’. But, like Robert Towne’s similarly themed script for ‘Chinatown’ (released by Warner Bros a year earlier), Sharp’s story veers further into realms of uncertainty and darkness, evoking the foggy, depressive atmosphere of Chandler’s later masterpiece, ‘The Long Goodbye’.

The big difference here though of course is that, whereas Chandler’s Marlowe was essentially a cipher - more of a one-man Greek chorus or a vehicle for the authorial voice than a fleshed out, human character - the complicated ins and outs of Harry Moseby’s background and psychology instead become Sharp’s main focus.

Whereas Penn’s film is recognisably a detective story from the outset, briskly following the familiar A, to B, to C pattern of Moseby’s investigation as viewers mentally take notes and try to keep up, Sharp’s prose prefers to let these details of names, dates and places hang in the background - just the ambient noise of our character going about his day-job. His thoughts, which we share, remain elsewhere as he contemplates his own problems, and his uncertain place in the world.

It is only in its final twenty pages that the novel finally (reluctantly?) ratchets up the pace and becomes a thriller, with guns and dead bodies and murders to avenge. Up to that point, Sharp has taken things slowly; time has been given more of a chance to stretch out than would have been possible in a commercial movie, even in the free-and-easy 1970s.

Repeatedly during the story, Moseby tells people that he has no idea why being a detective appeals to him so much, or why he ended up pursuing such a shady profession. One key detail lost in the film is the fact that Harry’s detective agency barely breaks even. It is his wife Ellen’s interior décor business which pays the couple’s bills, thus making a mockery of his dishevelled, “just doin’ my job” attitude to his work.

Meanwhile, the leisurely detail Sharp gives us on Moseby’s day-to-day travails make the reasons behind his anachronistic choice of career abundantly clear. For all the squalid, ethically dubious activity his profession requires of him, he enjoys being a detective. It allows him to travel to random places, and to hang around in them for extended periods of time, essentially not doing much. He can get lost in his thoughts, replay chess games on his portable board and observe his surroundings – all whilst still feeling like his activities have ‘purpose’.

The job allows him to meet interesting people, and to enjoy the frisson of a bit of low level antagonism and physical threat which perhaps reminds him of his football days. And, most importantly, it allows him to leave his ‘real life’ responsibilities left far behind; the passages in the book which describe Harry flying to New Mexico and Florida, dropping out of the sky into a new, strange world, his marital strife temporarily forgotten, are beautifully observed.

In both book and film, we get a sense of there being a chasm separating Harry’s ‘detective’ life (in which he can fool himself into thinking he’s solving problems, overcoming entropy) from his ‘real life’, as an aimless dude with thinning hair who’s just hit forty and discovered that his wife is cheating on him, whilst his hopes for the future slowly slide beyond his reach. People – women in particular – keep reminding him of this division, and it bugs him, like a twinge of conscience.

Sharp’s essential point seems to be that, if you make your private eye a three dimensional figure, complete with the kind of problems and failures faced by each of us in our day-to-day lives, there is no way he can navigate his way toward ‘solving the case’ in the way Chandler’s archetype demands – particularly not when he find himself alone amid the nebulous, poisoned atmosphere of Watergate-era L.A., laying deceit, half-truths and half-baked armchair psychiatry on him wherever he turns.

And, let’s make no bones about this, I love the way that ‘Night Moves’ – in both of its incarnations – taps into that bottomless well of lost, disenfranchised downer vibes which seems the have to consumed American culture in the mid-1970s, and just lets the waters flow. I’ve not yet come up with a satisfactory name for the very particular aesthetic unique to this place and time, but suffice to say, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by it as I get older, and ‘Night Moves’ provides a key touchstone for this particular ‘feel’.

When Moseby, having just discovered he is being cuckolded, takes a diversion on the way home and sits, lost in his thoughts, watching the surfers on Malibu’s Zuma beach, I can’t help but imagine Neil Young in his beach house somewhere down the way, laying down the album of the same name with Crazy Horse. Or of Donald Cammell freaking out in his hideaway up in the nearby hills, or characters from Steely Dan songs, sliding seedily down the boulevards, looking for their next big score. Forty-five years down the line, the weird, ugly and desperate is transmuted into magic.

Whereas these ‘70s downer narratives usually tend to focus on the disillusionment of former hippie / counter-culture types though, Harry Moseby most definitely does not find into that mould. As a former football pro, his character, insofar as we can read it in societal terms, seems to represent the American male who has unthinkingly followed the path set down for him as a result of his physical aptitude…. only to find himself in a confusing and lonely mid-life dead end once his athleticism, inevitably, fails him. In some ways, he seems like softer, more vulnerable counterpart to the ravaged, emotionally neutered Vietnam vets who were just starting to stumble into the glare of popular culture at this point in time.

This aspect of Moseby’s character is lent greater clarity in the novel through his interactions with Charles, the gay aesthete character with whom his wife works in her furnishing business. In the film, Charles’ sexuality remains unclear, and the brief scene in which Harry needles him thus becomes rather confusing. In the book though, it’s clear that Harry is riffing on the vast chasm which separates his lifestyle from that of the other man (“when are we going bowling again, Charles?”), and that Charles, who sees these remarks as venomous in their intent, is genuinely offended by Harry’s insistence on putting him down for no good reason.

What really makes this scene interesting though, in a way that a film couldn’t easily communicate, is that Harry’s interior monologue reveals that he actually likes Charles, and doesn’t really resent his effete manners or homosexuality in the slightest. He just can’t resist belittling him, feeling the need to assert his macho ‘caveman’ credentials, for reasons he doesn’t fully understand.

Harry’s strange, rather masochistic, affectation of an anti-intellectual tough guy persona is further explored when he declines an invitation to go to the cinema with his wife that night. In the film, urban sophisticates Ellen and Charles are seeing Éric Rohmer’s ‘My Night at Maud’s’, of which Harry comments, “I saw a Rohmer film once, it was kinda like watching paint dry.” Fair comment perhaps for a rough n’ tumble American guy without much of a taste for arty French films.

In the novel though, Harry makes the same comment about a Claude Chabrol film, before admitting in his interior monologue that he’s never actually seen a Chabrol film is just bluffing it – clearly not realising that Chabrol was actually primarily known for making tightly plotted thrillers, pretty much like the one Moseby is in, in fact. Poor Harry, he can’t even get pretending to hate arty-farty French films right.

Much like Robert Altman’s inspired 1973 reimagining of ‘The Long Goodbye’, Sharp’s distaste for the empty and amoral, punctured ego sandbox sprawl of ‘70s bourgeois life – and the strange aptitude with which Chandler-esque noir can serve as a prism for dealing with it – is clear here. The tasteless marble ornaments which Ellen and Charles sell to their monetarily overburdened clients can be linked to the repulsive lifestyle of third rate Norma Desmond figure Arlene Iverson, to the dolphins which Paula and Tom Iverson keep in pens down in Florida (“people buy them for their pools, they think it’s chic to have a dolphin for a pet”), and – in the film – to the glass case full of antique Central American trinkets which Harry’s detective buddy Nick keeps in his office; strictly as investments, rather than cultural artefacts.

More despairingly satirical however is the key ‘specific-reflecting-the-whole’ line found in both versions of ‘Night Moves’. This occurs when Moseby, having discovered that his wife is cheating on him, responds to her disinterested query regarding the Monday night football game he is watching on TV; “nobody’s winning, one side’s just losing quicker than the other”.

Lent an added dimension of literality in the book by other moments in which Moseby expresses his disgust at what he sees as the sloppy conduct of current football players in comparison to those of his own (aging/retired) generation, the extent to which this throwaway line becomes a damning indictment, not just of a crumbling marriage, but of American culture as a whole during the 1970s, is little short of extraordinary. There is no success in the world Sharp is depicting here – just different kinds of failure, progressing at different speeds.

Far more-so than the rushed and mundane (if pleasantly surreal) thriller scenario which comprises ‘Night Moves’ final act, it is in this earlier character stuff - which expands later in the story to take in both Moseby’s instant kinship with stuntman Joey Ziegler and his oblique, somewhat borderless inter-action with the trio of characters in whose aimless, sun-baked world of unspoken tensions he becomes enmeshed once he hits Florida - that the strength of the book really lies.

One of the main thematic threads running through ‘Night Moves’ arises from Moseby’s passion for chess, and in particular his fixation with a 1922 game in which a player named Bruno Moritz “severely fucked up”. The novel opens with Harry obsessively moving through the moves of the fated game on his travelling chess board as her sits in his car, working a stake-out for a particularly undignified feuding neighbours case. Later, in Florida, he discusses this obsession with Paula, telling her, “[Moritz] must have regretted it every day of his life. Well I know I would…. fact is, I do, and I wasn’t even born.” (“That’s no excuse,” she responds, before abruptly leaving.)(1)

Perhaps it’s just because I don’t play myself, but it was only upon reading the novel that I realised the title of the movie is a (slightly awkward) chess pun, as Moseby dwells on the fact that Moritz allowed his opponent to achieve checkmate, using only “three little (k)night moves”. His failure to see his mistake until it was to late, which Harry feels so inexplicably troubled by, provides Sharp with his central metaphor - a perfect analogue to the private eye who is not only unable to see the solution to his case, but unable to even comprehend the path he’s left open for his own destruction, gliding ever closer, as he sits around fretting over other people’s problems.

Those three little knight moves, which Moseby can move through every day in the cold, logical space of his portable board, he is unable to replicate in the soft, sick, ever-shifting world of unpredictable human life which he inhabits.

Although I stated earlier in this piece that Chandler is “never explicitly referenced” in ‘Night Moves’, I later found myself slapping my forehead upon realising just how fiendishly inspired the manner in which Sharp evokes Chandler’s legacy here actually is.

I mean, didn’t Philip Marlowe also play chess during (extremely rare) quiet moments alone in his apartment? And, did Chandler ever explicitly connect this with his oft-quoted declaration that his most famous character should act as a “white knight”? I’m not sure, but either way, Sharp certainly did.

Moseby may achieve top marks as Chandler’s “man who is not mean,” but his failure to become the “white knight” who can pull those three little moves against Moritz’s black, without abandoning his soul in the process – that’s the tragedy at the heart of ‘Night Moves’, one which Chandler, and the majority of private eye writers who followed in his gumshoed footsteps, could never quite bring themselves to acknowledge. (2)

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(1)To relive the 1922 Kurt Emmrich vs Bruno Moritz game which so obsessed Harry Moseby for yourself, try here.

(2)Readers wishing to sink further into this particular black hole may wish to note that one of Alan Sharp’s earliest screenwriting credits was a 1965 BBC TV play entitled ‘A Knight in Tarnished Armour’.

Two-Fisted Tales: Kill Me On The Ginza by Earl Norman (Erle Books, 1969 / first published 1961)

Hunting for English language volumes in the dozens of second hand book shops that fill the Jimbocho area (colloquially known as “old book town”) in Tokyo’s Kanda district can be an interesting experience.

At one end of the scale, the area boasts several beautiful, Art Deco shops whose interiors seem to have been carefully preserved since the 1920s. Therein, impeccably-dressed staff wearing disposable white gloves will guide the curious gaijin visitor toward floors housing carefully selected (and ear-wateringly expensive) hardback volumes dealing with specific areas of Asian history, sociology and culture, divided into English, French or German, and seemingly intended to cater to visiting foreign dignitaries who feel the shelves at the embassy are looking a little bare these days.

Needless to say, it was the other end of the scale that was of more immediate interest to your humble correspondent. Down on the street, the English language offerings within the cramped, almost impossibly dusty confines of the smaller, independent shops fall largely into two categories, both priced in such a manner that buying them for fuel or toilet paper would not seem entirely uneconomical, should living conditions in the city take a turn for the worse.

On the one hand, there are masses of largely obsolete, 70s/80s era monographs and text books, many covering such time-specific areas as economics, sociology, engineering and (for some reason) British and Canadian politics. These I take to be either detritus left behind by generations of foreign students and visiting academics passing through Tokyo’s universities, or perhaps reflective of the scholarly interests of the relatively small number of Japanese with both the ability to read English books and the inclination to import them. (Possibly some of the pop economics books could even have originated with bubble-economy era fortune hunters in the ‘80s and ‘90s, or, given the preponderance of hardbacks and the irrelevance of the subject matter, it even occurred to me that some of these books might have entered the country as ballast on ships, or something like that? Who knows.)

And then, on the other hand, we have pulp. Masses and masses of pulp fiction, primarily American, ranging all the way from the ‘50s to the ‘90s.

Although you’ll be lucky to find anything genuinely collectable or valuable in this vein in Kanda (that stuff has presumably already been harvested by dealers by this point), if you duck down the right alleyways you’ll stuff find racks of Carter Browns and Shell Scotts falling apart in the summer sun, together with more Nick Carter: Killmaster’s and other “men’s adventure” series entries than I have ever before seen in one place and a fair smattering of ‘80s/’90s UFO and True Crime titles.

In one inauspicious corner bookshop apparently operated by a pair of elderly ladies meanwhile, I found an entire bookcase filled with nothing but hardcore porn paperbacks. Hundreds of ‘em. (Sadly none of these dated from the smut/sleaze era in which such books had wild n’ zany cover artwork and were quite possibly written by Ed Wood – we’re talking more the blank covers and/or random nudie photos era of the ‘70s. I picked up a couple of the weirder/funnier looking ones, but didn’t fancy having to explain to friends and family my reasoning for cramming ‘Nobody Does It Like Daddy’ or ‘Ski Lodge Orgy’ or whatever in my suitcase, so they’re all still there for the taking, dear readers, if that’s your particular bag. I’d imagine you could probably make enough back on Ebay to cover your plane ticket.)

Of course, the reason all of these books all ended up in Japan is pretty obvious. It lives behind barbed wire in places like Yokosuka and Okinawa, wears khakis and ray-bans, and until recently could be seen cruising the streets in jeeps, probably whilst yelling “yee-ha” and looking for the nearest girls school, if the unflattering caricatures presented in Japanese popular culture are to be believed.

Clearly, the market for pulp fiction (and, no doubt, pornography) amongst U.S. servicemen in Asia in the mid-20th century was vast. So much so that, in the late 1950s, one Norman Thomson, an “old Japan hand [and] well-connected member of the post-World War II American occupation” [source], decided to take advantage of the situation, and began writing a series of low-brow detective novels specifically catering to soldiers stationed in Japan.

Beginning with ‘Kill Me in Tokyo’, six “Earl Norman thrill books” were published by Berkeley in the US between 1958 and 1962, all featuring the ‘Kill Me..’ prefix in the title and recounting the exploits of Norman/Thomson’s series character Burns Bannion, a Tokyo-based Private Eye whose lecherous, bantering first person narration seems modelled fairly closely on that of Richard S. Prather’s Shell Scott.

An easy identification figure for the books’ intended audience, Bannion is a dishonourably discharged U.S. marine who used G.I. bill funds to enrol at a Japanese university, but soon dropped out to set up shop as a PI, making no bones about the fact that his reasons for staying on in Japan are limited to perfecting his mastery of karate and, as he charmingly puts it in ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’, “..anthropological studies, restricted to the female 15 to 40 category”. (Insert your prefered cringe/shudder emoticon here.)

I don’t know how well these books did for Berkeley (suffice to say, they’re fairly scarce on the market these days, going for between $15 and $40 apiece), but whatever the case, Thomson seems to have decided at some point in the sixties that he could cash in more effectively by publishing them himself and selling them direct to oversees servicemen stationed in Asia, a decision perhaps influenced by the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam, which greatly increased the number of US personnel passing through Japan.

As such, cheaply printed new editions of all the books previously published by Berkeley appeared in the late ‘60s, courtesy of the ‘Erle Publishing Corp’ of Minato-Ko, Tokyo. It is at this point that the books, perhaps benefitting from being on the other side of the Pacific from anyone liable to take legal action, adopted the blatant rip-off of the Carter Brown series logo seen on the edition above, whilst the fact that cover prices are given in cents despite the books being printed and published in Tokyo signals pretty clearly that they were never intended for sale outside of American bases and their immediate environs.

Whilst the Berkeley editions of the ‘Kill Me..’ books had pretty lively, comic book style cover art (watch this space for more on that), the Erle reprints feature garish, rather primitive renderings such as the one seen above. God only knows who produced this artwork but, given the expectations created in paperback fans by the ‘Carter Brown’ styled logo, the contrast between this and the immaculate stylings of Robert McGinnis is almost comical.

The Erle editions are printed on the kind of thin, silky paper stock commonly used by Japanese publishers, whilst the prints for many of the pages are lined up in extremely wonky fashion, giving the books a unique, mutant vibe that serves to differentiate them from more professionally produced American or European paperbacks. (The multiple exclamation marks on the back cover copy are a classy touch too.) Financially speaking, they must have done pretty well, as several new Bannion adventures (inviting killings in Yokosuka and Roppongi) were published by Erle alongside the Berkeley reprints.

As regards the actual content of the books meanwhile, aside from the Japanese setting, the only significant differences between Burns Bannion and Shell Scott seem to be that, instead of knuckle sandwiches, Bannion dishes out karate chops to his antagonists, and, no doubt in deference to the demands of his intended audience, Bannion gets his leg over with a far higher number of ‘exotic’ dames than Scott, whose amorous escapades often ended in slapstick disappointment, ever managed to.

To a significant extent in fact, the Norman books I’ve skim-read are as much tame, comically-inclined smut as they are detective stories, with Bannion spending the bulk of his time frequenting hostess bars, night clubs, strip joints, bath houses, massage parlours and pretty much anywhere else where he might conceivably get the opportunity to leer at some women, whilst meanwhile taking full advantage of the feminine attention that a square-jawed, Caucasian stud might reasonable expect to attract in such establishments (in the hetero male fantasy world of a pulp detective novel, at least).

Showing at least a little more imagination in its relentless pursuit of lechery, ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’ finds Bannion at one point pursuing a flighty young lady to the ‘Oppai Jinja’ or ‘Temple of the Breast’, a sacred site allegedly located in the Ogikubo district, wherein expectant mothers are apparently encouraged to stimulate their production of breast milk by making enlarged casts of their breasts from clay and hanging them from the walls.

Hilarity, needless to say, ensues, but fear not – Bannion’s girl is not pregnant (because that would be a bit of a buzz-kill for the G.I. crowd), she’s merely trying to heal the anatomical peculiarities that have helped her make a living through the preceding years. (According to our narrator, “..many G.I.s on leave from Korea have taken photos with their service hats hanging from her knotty protuberances”.) Laugh? Why I nearly… etc.

Elsewhere, the book is thankfully rich in all kinds of other random weirdness, the like of which you’d be unlikely to encounter in even the zaniest of purely American detective novels. The central plotline, if you have the patience to locate it amongst all the leering an shagging, concerns Bannion’s hunt for the killer of a fellow American whose severed head has been found in a duffle bag, a quest that leads him to reluctantly team up with an elderly gentleman who claims to be a master of “ninjutsu”. A lengthy digression outlining the history and practice of this art follows, which must have been eye-opening stuff for Norman’s readers, many years before the ninja first became a regular presence in international pop culture in the late 1970s.

Thereafter, the ninjutsu gentleman hires Bannion to aid him in his investigation of something called the ‘Oshira’ cult – an outlawed group who seemingly practice an unspeakably ancient fetish/fertility rite dating from the very earliest days of Japanese civilisation, in which a sacred wooden pole is wrapped in silk.

Whilst I confess I’m unsure whether the ‘Oppai Jinja’ is a genuine eccentricity of Japanese culture or just something Norman made up for laughs, the whole Oshira business is actually rooted in authentic folklore, and is pretty fascinating, even though Norman, naturally enough, ramps up the sensationalism by assigning the practice of human sacrifice and all-purpose sexual deviance to the cult - which , by the way, turns out to be masterminded by a villain going by the unlikely name of House Charnel, and is operating rather incongruously from a secret meeting place in the urban sprawl of West Ginza.

Other odd, page-filling tangents along the way include discussion of Shinto ‘toilet gods’ and some novel methods for taking finger prints directly from a live human body, but, despite this evidence that the author is at least somewhat engaged with the culture of his adopted home, anyone approaching the Bannion books in the hope that Norman might have taken the opportunity to present his fellow Americans with a sympathetic alternative portrait of life in Japan will be cruelly disappointed.

Indeed, as far as East-meets-West type stuff goes, Bannion’s interactions with the world around him are about as crass as it gets. As the capsule biography of the author I quoted above concisely notes, the books are “..filled with stereotypes and caricatures, and the Japanese women are treated with an outlandish chauvinism, as if the country were one giant geisha house”.

The opening of ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’ very much sets the tone in this regard, as the “oriental doll” Bannion finds himself fooling around with is referred to as “slant-eyed” or variations thereof no less than three times in the space of a single page. It’s… ghastly, to be perfectly honest.

If, as has often been remarked, Japanese pop culture of the 1960s had a tendency to fan the flames of public anger (of both left and right wing varieties) by portraying the American military as a barbaric occupying force engaged almost solely in acts of rape and cultural desecration, it’s safe to say that the fictional antics of Burns Bannion can’t have done much to help matters.

One can easily imagine the kind of controversy that might have resulted had the local media got wind of the content of these books, but perhaps Norman/Thomson was simply confident that the good old language barrier (and perhaps the disinclination of the Japanese establishment to rock the U.S. boat) would save him from adverse publicity.

Speaking of which, worse is yet to come – in terms of the book’s readability more than anything else - as our hero begins to engage in some verbal (as opposed to merely physical) interaction with the populace of the city in which he has apparently lived for many years without getting murdered. (Given the way Bannion behaves, the books’ titles seem more like taunts to random passers-by than anything more dramatic.)

Although Norman sometimes has a decency to record sentences in romanised Japanese, which Bannion then conscientiously translates for his readers (which is both nice, and potentially educational), more often than not the protagonist’s Japanese friends and enemies address him in the kind of pidgin English that would make Charlie Chan blush, whilst he in turn mocks their pronunciation, throwing phrases like “hando baggo” and “iceo boxo” into his bantering narration whilst simultaneously expressing frustration at their failure to grasp the precise meaning of the dense passages of wise-crackin’, tough guy slang he rattles off, irrespective of his listeners’ level of comprehension.

If you can overlook the relentless misogyny and racial insensitivity of Bannion’s banter however (and that’s a pretty big IF, I’ll grant you), ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’ actually holds up as an enjoyably off-beat timewaster. Although Norman lacks the chops of a Prather or Spillane, his prose is certainly never less than lively, and the sheer novelty of the socio-cultural circumstances under which these books were produced makes them – to me, at least – far more interesting reading than the rather smug and interchangeable Shell Scott books.

Both as detritus of an age long gone and as bracing evidence of a variety of inter-cultural exchange that those men in white gloves in the nice bookshops could scarcely imagine, they are actually quite fascinating, and I’ll be sharing a few more scans of other volumes in the series with you over the coming days/weeks.

As a final note, I’ll also draw your attention to the fact that someone has used a biro to etch what seems to be a woman’s phone number onto the back cover of my copy of ‘Kill Me On The Ginza’; perhaps evidence of a previous owner aspiring toward the lifestyle celebrated by the book’s hero, for better or (more likely) for worse.

Pan’s People: Experience With Evil by John Ross Macdonald (1958)

Over the past year or so, I’ve really been getting into the work of Ross Macdonald (he soon dropped the ‘John’, for whatever reason).

Coming on as if Raymond Chandler had knocked the ‘frustrated-literary-novelist’ bit on the head and settled into a routine of knocking out two hard-boiled thrillers per year, the Macdonald books I’ve read thus far have all been absolutely first rate, mixing up the requisite laconic humour and restless plotting with consistently sublime prose and an acute sensitivity for the tragic quirks of human nature, all baked in an atmosphere of creeping malaise and cynicism that is pure mid-century California noir.

If you’re into crime fiction and yet to discover Macdonald, doing so is an experience I can highly recommend.

‘Experience With Evil’ originally appeared in 1953 under the delightful title ‘Meet Me At The Morgue’, and though it doesn’t feature Macdonald’s signature character Lew Archer, I’m nonetheless confident that Pan’s blurb-ists weren't lying when they deemed it “a kidnap mystery for the connoisseur”.

The cover – by our old pal Sam “Peff” Peffer – is of an equally fine calibre (no firearms pun intended), and in fact, finding this book a few months back represented a rare quadruple win for my paperback collection: a great writer, great art, great condition, and a great price (£2). Satisfying!

FRANCO FILES: Los Blues de la Calle Pop (1983)

During my visit to Spain last year, prior to my pilgrimage to Calpe for the inaugural instalment in the (hopefully soon to be continued) Great Jess Franco Locations Tour, I was obliged to spend several days just down the coast in Benidorm – a town whose negative reputation couldn’t even begin to prepare me for the reality of its sheer, staggering awfulness.

A baking strip of wall-to-wall concrete and claustrophobic, decaying high rise hotels sucking the life out of a once idyllic beach front, Benidorm is populated largely by roving gangs of bloated, sun-burned British tourists, many of whom seem determined to live down to their nation’s very worst stereotypes by behaving in as thuggish and xenophobic a manner as they can get away with without attracting the attention of the town’s ever-present (and presumably long suffering) police patrols.

Along the front, bars seem to blast out Queen and Bryan Adams for about sixteen hours a day whilst serving microwaved pizzas and endless steins of watered down lager, whilst further back from the beach, the streets, distressingly, begin to resemble the dying centre of some economically deprived English town - full of familiar decaying chain stores, rubbish-strewn pavements and a vague sense of menace.

Deeper into what passes for Benidorm’s “pleasure quarter” meanwhile, in between Brit-owned faux-pubs proudly advertising the fact that no Spanish is spoken within, one can find beer-sodden strip joints, sex clubs and, I’m sure, vice-related enterprises of a less legal nature, all of an order so grimy and desperate that even Jess Franco himself might have thought twice before paying them a visit.

In view of these horrors, I have subsequently been delighted to discover ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’ (“The Blues of Pop Street”), an extremely strange little movie that Franco filmed in Benidorm in the midst of his early ‘80s Golden Films purple patch. (1) Herein, our hero rechristens the town “Shit City”, reimagining it in his own inimitable fashion as a kind of neo-noir dystopian wonderland of organised crime, rampaging punks and sweaty sexual violence.

Fitting roughly into the lineage of whimsical, ramshackle thrillers Franco had been occasionally banging out ever since La Muerte Silba un Blues in ’62, the inexplicably named ‘.. Calle Pop’ (wouldn’t “Shit City” have been a better title?) begins with a scene in which down at heel private eye Felipe Marlboro (Antonio Mayans) is hired by a sad-eyed young lady named “Mary Lucky” (played, with typical Franco weirdness, by a one-shot actress credited only as “Mary Sad”). She pleads poverty, but reluctantly agrees to pay Marlboro back with a bit of casual sex if he will travel to Shit City to locate her missing boyfriend, who goes by the name of “Macho Jim”.

Mary hands Mayans a picture of “Macho Jim”, and, in a rather bizarre visual gag, we see an insert shot of a Frank Frazetta-style barbarian illustration, prompting the observation that ol’ Jim certainly seems to live up to his name. Other shots of Frazetta artwork will proceed to pop up once or twice through the rest of the film, though whether they are intended as Godardian avant garde interjections or just weird attempts at humour, who knows.

Similarly, quite why the protagonist of this movie is named “Felipe Marlboro”, despite being essentially the same character as Franco’s frequently recurring private eye Al Periera, whom Mayans played on many occasions, is likely to remain a mystery for the ages.

In a further eccentric touch, stills of the Manhattan skyline are used to illustrate the opening credits sequence, over which the credits are scrawled in the form of blood-red children’s sprawl, accompanied by crude, stick-man illustrations, whilst a dusty old bossa-nova/fuzz-rock track blares in the background.

Arriving in ‘Shit City’, Marlboro of course has to stay at one of Benidorm’s very few actual cool-looking hotels (shot from high angle, its geometric outline briefly captures a touch of the sinister, futuristic vibe Franco brought to the ‘Grande-Motte’ complex in Lorna The Exorcist).

Whilst making himself at home, Felipe discovers that his neighbour in the hotel is some kind of loud-mouthed dominatrix type person who seems to have stepped straight out of Derek Jarman’s ‘Jubilee’, complete with hair like a poodle attacked with spray paint, studded leather jacket and a dog collar.

Though Marlboro declines her offer of casual sex, they still hang about together a bit, and as such, he subsequently finds himself in the hot seat when she is unceremoniously murdered by a gang of sadistic underworld heavies, catapulting our hero into a theoretically complex (but actually just boring and inconsequential) sub-‘Big Sleep’ style mystery with the elusive “Macho Jim” at its epicentre… or something.

(The movie’s primary antagonist, by the way, is an unhinged flamenco dancer who assaults his victims via aggressive dance moves, accompanied by snatches of canned music on the soundtrack and cries of “please, not the flamenco!”. Perhaps it’s a Spanish thing, I dunno, but speaking as a foreigner I must say I found this line of humour somewhat less than hysterical. Flamenco-guy’s main sidekick however is a moustached ‘70s long hair / aviator shades type dude, which I thought made for an amusing contrast.)

As I have stated in prior reviews, I feel that, to some extent, Jess Franco never really got the 1980s. Whilst he remained as prolific as ever through the first half of the decade, I just don’t think he was ever managed to exploit the aesthetic of the era as successfully as he had during the ‘60s and ‘70s - thus aligning himself with a long list of ‘60s veterans in all creative fields who hit the skids in a big way once 1980 rolled around.

But, this failure certainly wasn’t down to any lack of effort on Franco’s part, and, as my brief synopsis above implies, what we find ourselves looking at here is – brace yourselves – a Jess Franco movie full of punks.

Yes, the streets of Shit City are veritably overflowing with cockerel-haired, safety pin adorned, leather-clad miscreants, of whom the ill-fated dominatrix girl and “Macho Jim” (when he eventually makes an appearance) and but two, and indeed, Franco’s take on the punk sub-culture is just as off-beat as you might imagine.

Well, I say ‘off-beat’, but it’s really more just lazy, to be honest. The beliefs and tastes of the ‘punks’ are never addressed by the film, and basically it is easy to imagine that, when Franco found himself working on a story that featured a lot of ‘youth’ characters, he just asked “hey, uh, how are the kids dressing these days? It’s all this ‘punk’ thing, isn’t it?”, prompting whoever was responsible for the film’s make up and costumes gave him a big HELL YES and then go absolutely bananas with the idea.

Whoever was responsible, ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’s low rent urban warriors are certainly a sight to behold, verging on ‘Rollerblade’/‘Intrepidos Punks’ level ridiculousness at times. Much face paint is in evidence alongside the requisite overdose of hair-spray, whilst the female punks sport plastic-y looking chains and fragments of mismatched lingerie, whilst appearing to have taken a few lessons from the Betty Rubble school of DIY dress design.

My favourite male punk meanwhile is a guy who wears a black golf visor with “PUNK” written on it with correction fluid, combined with a homemade swastika patch, black leather driving gloves and a Phil Oakey-style face-covering forelock. I don’t know how much they paid him to walk around Benidorm dressed like this, but it wasn’t enough. (2)

Meanwhile however, there is not even the slightest hint of ‘new wave’ music to be found within ‘..Calle Pop’ – quite the contrary, in fact. Indeed, I’m sorry to report that most of the music used here is at best inappropriate, at worst singularly dreadful, consisting of a bunch of lumpen, cheesy big band jazz cues of the kind more traditionally used to enforce a ‘jaunty’ atmosphere in unspeakably Germanic sex comedies. (Hell, for all I know Franco might have picked up some tapes of this stuff whilst making an unspeakable German sex comedy.)

Wherever it originated from, this ‘wacky’ guff plays loudly and incessantly through much of the film, pretty much destroying any attempt to create a dystopian/neo-noir kind of ambience, and driving me to distraction in the process. (Seriously - it’s awful.)

We do at least get some brief respite from the trombone however when, in a delightful instance of only-in-a-Jess-Franco-film surrealism, it turns out that Shit City’s punk rockers like to congregate in a ‘piano bar’, where they listen intently as the director himself (playing a kind of loosely Film Noir inspired nightclub pianist/informer type character named “Jack Chesterfield”) lays down some gentle boogie-woogie and mellifluous lounge jazz for their delectation.

This being a Franco film of course, the ubiquitous punks are also dedicated strip club patrons, and it is here, needless to say, that we encounter Lina Romay – appearing in her ‘Candy Coster’ alter-ego – who essays the role of “Butterfly”, the latest in a long line of happy-go-lucky exotic dancers / sex workers portrayed by Romay in Franco’s films from the mid ‘70s through to the mid ‘80s.

Often, Lina’s nightclub scenes are highlights of the films in which they feature, with the couple’s unique voyeur/exhibitionist relationship firing on all cylinders (from my own reviews, Los Noche de los Sexos Abiertos, filmed the same year as this one, proves a pertinent example), but sadly, Franco’s mojo seems to have deserted him here, and the strip club routines are pretty dire.

Capturing Lina as she works her way through a listless, buttock-grinding routine that proves distinctly unflattering to her increasingly plump form, these typically lengthy digressions see her rolling around and gyrating rather clumsily on the grubby stage, basically resembling the kind of unedifying spectacle one might expect to see in an actual Benidorm strip club. Rendered even less enjoyable by the fact that she seems to be moving to a completely different beat from the mind-numbing easy listening cue heard in the finished film, I’m afraid this is definitely not a highlight of Ms Romay’s storied career in erotic cinema.

Actually, it is interesting to note that, for the most part, ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’ is entirely lacking in the kind of sexual content one would expect of an ‘80s Franco film. Though the storyline itself is full of unseemly business (prostitution, strip clubs, sexualised murders), someone involved in the production seems perhaps to have taken a last minute decision to pitch the film at a slightly different audience, and as such, nudity and on-screen sex is kept to a minimum (by Franco standards, at least). Despite being staggeringly sleazy in most other respects, the aforementioned nightclub scenes for instance don’t even see Lina taking her g-string off (which perhaps to some extent explains why both she and Jess seem so bored with the whole affair).

But then, late in the movie, Franco goes and blows the whole deal with a lengthy Mayans/Romay love scene, filmed as was often his want in this era entirely via near-abstract close-ups, including the sight of Mayans spending a great length of time sticking his chops into what I’m *fairly sure* must be an artificial bush (though with Lina, I wouldn’t count on it). Maybe they thought the censors wouldn’t mind if it was a fake one, or something? Who knows.

In light of this confused approach, it is difficult to figure out quite who this film was supposed to be aimed at, or indeed how it secured a release at all, given its DIY level production values and lack of any easily exploitable content. (3) As with most of Franco’s straight ‘thrillers’, casual viewers are liable to find ‘..Calle Pop’ an off-putting, meandering and generally infuriating experience, whilst its intentional comedy elements alternate between the hopelessly clumsy and the simply incomprehensible. The “youth movie” aspects that the film’s domestic VHS release gamely tried to play up meanwhile never really materialise, with the generally sleazy vibe further mitigating against this idea, so, without any real erotic material to fall back on, what does that leave us, beyond a barely releasable load of lackadaisical, in-jokey Franco hoo-hah?

Well, for dyed-in-the-wool Franco freaks such as myself of course, such barely releasable hoo-hah is very much our bread and butter, and in spite of everything, ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’ is actually a surprisingly engaging film on a purely visual level. As I discovered when returning to it to take some screenshots for this review, if you play it through with no sound or subtitles, it actually starts to look like pretty great in places.

Some scenes utilise rich, deliberate colour schemes (red walls and stained glass), picked out with what looks like it might have been quite decent cinematography before the ravages of VHS took hold. At various points in the film, different varieties of red filters are even used – sometimes to create an atmospheric ‘evening’ effect, and sometimes just for the sake of random weirdness (such as making a drab hotel lobby look like a photographic dark room).

In another characteristic Franco touch, ‘accidental’ camera blunders (over-saturated sunlight, lens flare, botched focus etc) are actively encouraged, and indeed exaggerated in the name of added visual interest. In particular, rainbow-coloured light halos, created by strong light sources shone directly into the camera, can be seen exploding all over the place like cost-free psychedelic effects.

At the other end of the technical spectrum meanwhile, a brief scene in Lina’s dressing room casually pulls off a nifty ‘infinite mirror’ effect, and a red-tinted final confrontation between the two leads is constructed with great skill and no small amount of style, paying effective tribute to the jagged framing and editing patterns of classic Film Noir. The film’s editing (credited to David Raposo) is actually very good throughout, meaning that, mystifyingly awful though it may be in many ways, ‘..Calle Pop’ at least never drags. (4)

Franco’s usual ADHD tendencies also see him splicing in static close-ups all kinds of posters and decorations adorning the bars and apartments in which the film is shot, some of which – including the Frazetta illustrations referenced above and a Victorian print of a train accident assigned the English caption “Oh Shit!” - seem to provide oblique commentary on the on-screen action. Between shots of Bogart, Marilyn, Led Zeppelin and Adam & The Ants, the cultural iconography of Benidorm circa 1983 is certainly well-explored here.

Locations are used reasonably well (I was particularly delighted to see an early ambush/fight sequence staged within the monolithic shopping mall that I ventured into to pick up some breakfast supplies during my stay), and the idea of reimagining Benidorm as a kind of floating, pulp fictional dystopia is an absolutely brilliant one, although sadly Franco doesn’t seem to have put a huge amount of effort into realising it on screen.

As usual in these Al Periera-type movies, he seems to have been more concerned with goofing on a few half-remembered scenes from whatever classic Hollywood crime movies were on his mind at the time, and, as usual, one suspects this was a lot more fun for the director than it is for his audience.

For first time in fact, we get a definite sense in ‘..Calle Pop’ of Franco getting old. Up to the mid-70s at least, his films felt at least somewhat in tune with the zeitgeist, comfortable in their own skin you might say, but here he demonstrates little interest in the contemporary characters and settings, instead subjecting his viewers to the squarest music imaginable whilst giving every indication of wishing to return to the glory days of his youth, taking in some black & white studio masterpiece in a darkened Madrid picture house.

One gets the feeling here that by this stage in his career Franco really just wanted to make his own ‘Kiss of Death’ or ‘The Big Combo’ or something… but, when you find yourself in Benidorm in 1983 with a few Pesetas in yr pocket and a cast & crew consisting mainly of local kids, you’ve got to adjust to your circumstances, and ‘..Calle Pop’ is the somewhat confused result – a massively self-indulgent work, complete with an overriding tone of camp self-awareness that would go on to shape the majority of the director’s dreaded post-1990 Shot-On-Video output.

For its sheer strangeness, for the chance to see Franco’s take on Benidorm, and for all the random, piano bar-frequenting punks, I confess I actually quite enjoyed ‘Le Blues de Calle Pop’ on its own terms, but at the same time, it is not a viewing experience I would necessarily recommend to many other human being. As should be abundantly clear by this point, we’re well into a “For Madmen Only” corner of Franco’s filmography here, so if you’re anything less than a tenth level adept of the great man’s canon, I’d advise approaching with caution.

…

(1) Despite being shot during the period in which Franco was primarily working for Golden Films, ‘..Calle Pop’ seems to have been shot without their intervention, with the credits assigning the production solely to Franco’s own Manacoa Films. Combine this with the lack of any credited producer and ‘..Calle Pop’s bottomless eccentricity, lack of easily exploitable genre elements and general obscurity all come into sharper focus.

(2)In tracking down and watching ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’, I have actually found myself fulfilling my long-standing ambition of discovering a film crawling with punks which was NOT included in Zack Carlson & Bryan Connolly’s otherwise encyclopaedic Destroy All Movies: The Complete Guide to Punks on Film. I wish I could take the opportunity to become probably about the 78th person to point out this oversight to the authors, but the book’s promotional website is long-dead by this stage, and it was out of print the last time I checked, so what can ya do?

(3)According to IMDB’s always eerily hyper-specific box office data, ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’ did actually enjoy a brief theatrical run in Spain, selling exactly 5,401 tickets and earning 1,291,425 Spanish Pesetas.

(4) An editorial assistant on a number of mainstream/arthouse films in Spain during the ‘70s (as well as the 1975 Exorcism knock-off “The Devil’s Exorcist” with Jack Taylor), Raposo seems to have moved toward (s)exploitation fare when he took on full ‘editor’ status in the early’80s, although I believe this film is his only credit for Franco.

Shell Shock: Gat Heat by Richard S. Prather (Four-Square/NEL, 1968)

Until recently, I’d never read a novel by Richard S. Prather all the way through, yet I own more of his books than most authors I actually like. Don’t ask me why – I mean, usually even the cover art isn’t much good (although I’ll make an exception for this one).

On reflection, I think it must be Prather’s gift for titles that keeps me parting with (extremely small amounts of) cash to add to my pointless collection of his work. Whilst I’ve still not acquired a copy of his hopefully beatnik-themed masterwork ‘Dig That Crazy Grave’, I could easily rattle off a top ten awesome/absurd monikers from the Prather canon, and it is this aspect of his career that I aim to primarily highlight in this new series of posts.

Though not as mirth-inducing or psychotic as some of his titles, ‘Gat Heat’ is a sublime bit of gutter pulp nomenclature that might well make it into my top five, and it was probably that, plus the rather unique aspect of the hip-hugger clad dame featured on the cover, that led me to pull this one off the shelf when, bolstered by the realisation that Prather is actually rated rather favourably in certain circles of vintage crime fiction fandom, I determined to finally actually sit down and read one of these damn things front to back.

And so, the verdict. Well, in short, Prather strikes me (on the basis of this novel at least) as a talented writer who was fully aware he was cranking out trash, and happy to let his standards slip accordingly.

His writing does often have bit of a raw, weird post-Cheney/Spillane punch to it, leavened with a hefty dose of goofball humour, and, at his best, he is capable of crafting bits of prose that read like extended strings of irresistible exploitation movie poster tag-lines. This is perfectly exemplified by chapter # 2 of ‘Gat Heat’, which begins with the immortal line;

“They were all naked. It was that kind of party. Even the dead guy was naked.”

And if at that point you don’t feel compelled to immediately cease whatever else you’re doing read on, you’re a better man than I.

Sadly though, such zingers become fewer and further between as the disappointingly linear blackmail storyline grinds into gear, and, once the novel’s beguiling setting – a delicious world of pre-Manson Hollywood decadence, ripe with wife-swapping parties, gaudy condos and brightly hued Cadillacs – has been satisfactorily established, it soon becomes a bit of a plod, despite Prather’s admirable efforts re: piling up blood-thirsty violence, extravagantly lecherous descriptions of scantily-clad dames and miscellaneous crazy, high octane shenanigans to beat the band.

(Clearly already geared up for the ‘70s, ‘Gat Heat’ actually reads like a 50/50 transition between an old-fashioned private eye mystery and one of the action-orientated ‘Men’s Adventure’ titles that would soon begin to take their place in the new decade.)

I’m not sure quite why I remained so unmoved by all this, given that I’m usually pretty happy with so-so pulpy private eye yarns, but what really bugged me I think is Shell Scott himself. Generally portrayed rather unappealingly on the covers of these books as a leering, albino buzzcut-sporting psychopath, Scott is a character who combines the blunt thuggery of Spillane’s Mike Hammer with the wise-cracking, womanising patter of yr average smirking Euro-Spy protagonist, and as such he tends to emerge as an almost insufferably smug narrator.

Whilst some of Scott’s habits (retrospectively assessing the quality of each punch he delivers to a crook’s jaw and ruing the circumstances that denied him a better performance, for instance) are quite endearing, others are decidedly less so (I hope he doesn’t go through all these books referring to women as “juicy tomatoes”, because it gets old pretty quick).

The most essential problem here though is that Scott – and by extension, the story he narrates – simply lacks the sense of moral ambiguity found at the heart of all the best P.I. tales.

From Sam Spade to Lemmy Caution to Lew Archer – they all inhabit a treacherous moral universe in which the slippery relationship between crime, the law and their own uneasy position as a reluctant conduit between the two is forever uncertain; corruption is ever-present, and questions of a given action’s justification ever unanswered. That’s the way these stories work, and it is a large part of what allows them to remain so compelling.

Take that away, and you’re left with, well… Shell Scott – a self-righteous bore whose delusions of self-determination fail to mask his more apparent function as a sadistic stooge for the established order. Every cop he meets is salt of the earth, an A-1 guy with a great sense of humour, whilst the ‘hoods’ he tangles with are diminutive, goblin-like hoodlums left over from the 1930s, who can’t pronounce ‘th’ sounds and have names like ‘Bingo’ and ‘Gippo’. Not much scope for ambiguity there.

Whilst Prather is careful not to put such dialogue directly into the mouths of his police characters, Scott speaks for his cop buddies when – ala ‘Dirty Harry’ a few years later – he repeatedly curses out the pen-pushers in the Supreme Court who won’t even let him give these crooks a well-deserved beating upon arrest, and decries the system that demands he must go through the absurd farrago of actually obtaining evidence against his suspects and letting them call their swanky lawyers, rather than just, say, shooting them.

Of course, given that nobody is reading ‘Gat Heat’ for the sake of court room intrigue, Shell Scott does end up shooting most of them, but in an off-hand, self-satisfied manner that can’t kind help but leave a bad taste in the mouth, as he blunders on towards his next comedic encounter with a bikini-clad ‘tomato’.

Of course you might say I’m expecting far too much of a light-hearted, read-in-one-sitting bit of pulp hoo-hah, and this reactionary take on the genre certainly has its precedents (I don’t recall Mike Hammer being haunted by too much moral uncertainty as he bashed villains’ teeth down their throats). But still, I dunno… arch and self-aware as Prather’s style may be, he essentially seems like a smart guy, so would it have killed him to have approached this tale of blackmail, multiple murder and sexual deceit with just a *touch* of the gravitas such topics entail, in between all the yukks..?

Anyway, more to the point, the artwork on the front of this one is pretty cool. It turns out the illustration is actually by Robert McGinnis, re-purposed by New English Library from the 1967 Carter Brown number pictured below. (I thought I detected a McGinnis-y look in the folds of her flares and contours of her belly, but wasn’t 100% sure.)

As of 1968, the ubiquitous exaggerated sales figures thrown around by all of Prather’s publishers had apparently reached the not unimpressive count of forty million, and NEL’s back cover blurb hedges its bets with a couple of paragraphs that could have been applied to literally any Shell Scott story, suggesting that perhaps they were just as reluctant to read these books as your correspondent.

More fun with the “steel-eyed, sliver-haired ‘tec” coming soon to these pages, potentially.

Pan People.

Amid all those artful Penguins, we haven’t had many examples of the more ‘old school’ approach to paperback crime covers on here for a while, so, here’s a cheery trio of UK Pan editions I just picked off the top of the book-heap, all featuring artwork from the ubiquitous Sam “Peff” Peffer - definitely one of the most consistent and classy British pulp cover artists I’m aware of.

‘Dames Don’t Care’ was actually a birthday present a few years back from some friends I’ve sadly lost touch with since (sorry about that guys, if you’re reading). I skim-read it at the time and found it a hell of a lot of fun as I recall – an example of Peter Cheyney pushing the ultra-hard boiled, cod-American thug vernacular style of his Lemmy Caution books to the point of absolute oblivion. Needless to say, none of the raging, desperate white trash characters featured in the book look anything like the more well-appointed couple seen on the front of this edition, leading me to suspect that the illustration was either just a generic, one-size-fits-all crime cover, or else a spare painting left over from some other assignment, slapped on here by a cost-conscious editor on a deadline.

Conversely, the Pan edition of ‘Lady in the Morgue’ must count as a bit of a minor brit-pulp classic, not only for the macabre and unusual cover painting, but for the frenzied back cover blurb (“..cuts grim mortuary capers over a volcano of violence..”), and even the press quotes are good too. Maybe not a paperback that’ll blow your mind on first glance, but in terms of the wonderful and peculiar stuff that keeps me coming back to these books, it’s got the complete package for sure.

Not much to say about about ‘The Endless Colonnade’, except 1. Hitchcocksploitation!, and 2. Ouch, quite a burn on John Buchan from the Evening News.

A nice interview with ‘Peff’ himself, alongside fellow cover artist Pat Owen, can be found here. Plenty of interesting recollections about life in the cover art business, but the thing that really knocked me out was the revelation that, for a lot of these covers, the publisher actually paid for reference photographs to be taken in advance, arranged on the artist’s instructions complete with models and costumes, and THEN paid the artist to paint the cover based on the photos! Truly, the mind boggles.

Oh, and by the way, apologies again for the continuing lapse in regular content on this blog. Just to keep you updated, I’m slowly getting back to some blog writing done after an unavoidable lay off, and, though I still have a pretty daunting workload to get through in other areas of life, I hope to be back in business with some fresh movie reviews by about this time next week, fingers crossed. Thanks again for your patience.

‘Lady in The Morgue’ dates from 1959 (originally published 1937), ‘Dames Don’t Care’ is 1960 (originally published 1937), and ‘The Endless Colonnade’ is 1959 (published for the first time).

Penguin Crime Time / Weird Tales: The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett (Penguin, 1966 / originally published 1929)

In general, I feel that the design policy on Penguin Crime paperbacks became far less aesthetically interesting when they began moving toward photo covers from the mid ‘60s onwards. Anyone who has spent time pulling green spines off shelves in British bookshops over the years will no doubt be familiar with those woeful ‘70s editions that just feature ‘still life’ arrangements of handguns, wedding rings, wrist watches and so on posed on somebody’s bedside table.

(Just personal preference I suppose, but god, I hate those covers so much - just looking at them makes me drift into a state of utter boredom, despairing at the tiresome litany of stock detective story props. Such a total contrast to the thrill and mystery generated by the earlier, more modernist / abstract artwork covers I’ve previously shared on this blog…)

Before that nadir though, some of the earlier forerunners of the photo cover were extremely good. William Haggard’s Slow Burner is one of my all-time favourites, and I’ll also make an exception for this startlingly lurid presentation of Dashiell Hammett’s ‘The Dain Curse’, wherein Penguin quite uncharacteristically seem to be going all out to sell it as a horror story, complete with bloody knife, thinly veiled boobs and the kind of frothing-at-the-mouth back cover copy you’d be more likely to find on a New English Library horror cheapie from a decade later.

For whatever reason, I skipped over ‘The Dain Curse’ when I made my way through Hammett’s novels in my youth, so when I picked up this edition and learned that it allegedly features the father of hard-boiled fiction mixing up “slaughter” and “hoodoo” in “bizarre, cult-riddled shapes”, I had no choice but to drop everything and read it straight away. Mission accomplished for the ’66 Penguin design team then, And I mean, even if the promises of the cover turn out to be complete hooey, Hammett is always worth reading, right?

And, well… what a peculiar book this is. I was unaware of its episodic publication history when I began reading, so I’ll admit that it came as something of a surprise when the story boiled over into a blood-curdling melodramatic conclusion on about page 45, then promptly started again from scratch in the next chapter following a dry, expositional wrap-up. After this, it swiftly became obvious that, though presented as a continuous novel, ‘The Dain Curse’ actually consists of a number of interlinked short stories, following the same group of core characters through a series of black-hearted capers and genre exercises, with the bad-ass first person narration of Hammett’s nameless Continental Op character holding things together whenever the inter-story continuity gets a bit frayed around the edges (because when that guy tells you what’s what, you tend to believe him, if you want your jaw to remain intact).

Thus, it proves no surprise therefore to discover that ‘The Dain Curse’ was originally published in four monthly instalments in Black Mask magazine, from November 1928 to February 1929. The earlier ‘Red Harvest’ was also published this way of course, but whereas that story functioned well as a self-contained novel (insofar as I remember anyway – it’s been a while since I read it), the connecting tissue linking the stories in ‘The Dain Curse’ is much sketchier, leading to a rather rambling, uneven feel, with a pulpier tone than that found in Hammett’s other full length works.

Heading straight for the index in my long unread copy of Diane Johnson’s ‘The Life of Dashiell Hammett’ (Hogarth Press, 1984), I learn that Hammett himself didn’t seem to hold a high opinion of ‘The Dain Curse’, later describing it as his “silly story”, and losing interest in it almost immediately when he began working concurrently on what became ‘The Maltese Falcon’. It also seems that the book only saw print as a stand-alone volume after editor Harry C. Block had repeatedly pleaded with Hammett to further revise his manuscript, politely presenting the author with a list of ‘recommendations’ that included increasing coherence between the different episodes, eliminating minor characters and digressions entirely and significantly reworking the character of the heroine. To be honest, all of these issues remain pretty problematic in the version that was eventually published, so god knows what kind of a mess things must have been in when Hammett initially submitted his manuscript three revisions earlier.

This all goes some way toward explaining why ‘The Dain Curse’ is by far the least celebrated and least widely read of Hammett’s five novels, I suppose, but it also goes without saying that the book’s awkward narrative flow, which renders it quite hap-hazard and unsatisfying as a detective story, still allows for frequent outbursts of exceptional writing and sheer strangeness that led me to enjoy it quite a bit.

Predictably enough, my favourite part of the book was the second quarter, originally published in Black Mask in December 1928 as ‘The Hollow Temple’. To my surprise, this segment, which seems to have inspired the entirety of Penguin’s design for the book, does indeed see Hammett taking a detour into full-blown horror territory, delivering on the promise of the back cover copy in spades (if only for the space of twenty-something pages).

So, simply put, pages 63 to 98 of ‘The Dain Curse’ represent the most awe-inspiring chunk of weird/pulp prose I’ve read in years, incorporating a reclusive religious cult who pump narcotics through the air-con in their guests’ rooms, secret passages and encounters in the darkness with both sap-wielding thugs and terrifying spectres, a bullet-proof Satanic messiah presiding over a sacrificial altar, and yes, a hypnotised, bloody knife-cradling heroine in a diaphanous nightgown.

Despite the more esoteric subject matter, Hammett’s prose is, as ever, full-blooded and razor-sharp (more literally so here than usual), and the fact that he suddenly begins ploughing through all this in the midst of what is ostensibly a detective story makes it all the more remarkable and unexpected. The passage in which the Continental Op finds himself apparently wrestling with an amorphous, shape-shifting ghost, taking chunks out of the fucker ‘til it *bleeds*, is absolutely staggering – as perfect a realisation of somebody’s “hey, imagine if Dashiell Hammett wrote for ‘Weird Tales’” daydream as could be wished for, rendered with a James/Blackwood-esque descriptive power that no amount of “it was all just knock-out drops and a light show” back-pedalling can sufficiently account for.

It is intriguing to realise that Hammett was clearly an admirer of the genre he is wading into here – he even throws in a cheeky name-check for Arthur Machen - and not even ‘The Hollow Temple’s concluding chapter, in which the rational explanation for everything that transpired is rather awkwardly and tediously outlined, can dampen the memory of the blood-splattered, opium-frazzled power of these pages.

Whilst I’ve always been a fan of Hammett’s work, not to mention the brave stands he took on his beliefs in later life, discovering this full strength detour into weirdsville increases my admiration for him even further. So if, like me, you’ve previously skipped ‘The Dain Curse’ on the basis that it sounds like some kind of fuddy-duddy missing jewels stately home whodunit that nobody seems to rate as much as his other books, now might be as good a time as any to correct that omission, especially if you can track it down with one of the numerous great covers it has inspired over the years.

To that end, let’s conclude with a few I grabbed off the internet; apologies for the low res of some of the images – apparently the standing of this novel remains so low that no one has even much bothered with any decent cover scans. (And yes, James Coburn played the Op in a 1978 TV version – good casting.)