It's no secret that I love mysteries.
This is largely due to the influence of my late and much lamented Aunt Betty, whose interests included (in no particular order), shopping, jewelry, getting out of doing the dishes, attempting to badger her brother into refinancing a redecorating the house, lunching at the Vendome and/or Stouffer's, playing Solitaire and/or 500 Hundred while her sister cooked dinner, flirting with the parrot at the pet department at Kaufmann's, badgering her sister into creating Jell-O molds purportedly enjoyed by Lady Bird Johnson, and otherwise driving the rest of the family nuts as she gamboled through life.
Oh, she also loved reading mysteries. Did I mention that?
Regardless of everything else (and God knows there was plenty of "else"), Betty was a devoted mystery fan. It is due to her influence that I started reading Sherlock Holmes, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen, and Rex Stout as a teenager, and if recently my favorites have included the likes of Josh Lanyon, Sara Paretsky, Larry Niven, and Martha Grimes as well as the classics, that can also be laid at Betty's door. There's nothing quite like a well written, well plotted mystery, and I have no doubt that I'm going to reread at least one or two old favorites this winter as the days grow long and the nights grow cold.
Tonight, as part of December Rewind, I bring you four diaries that in some ways touch on mystery/private eye novels. One celebrates the sub-genre that brought the world the stereotype of Humphrey Bogart in a trench coat, the second touches on a writer who took this stereotype to ridiculous extremes, the third lauds perhaps the single oddest writer ever to grace the pages of the pulps who was not named "Howard Phillips Lovecraft," and the fourth discusses a pulpy hero with a fetish for lemon verbena perfume AND a cross-dressing murderer with a green wig:
Hard-Boiled Nudes and Double Talking Honeys - cheap paperbacks get their due in this diary, which started with my prudish Aunt Betty's inexplicable ownership of a couple of very, very, very questionable paperbacks and went on to discuss two sexy but tasteless examples of the private eye genre. The first, Richard S. Prather's Shell Scott series, features a happy go lucky ex-Marine who wears teal blue suits (in the 1950s!), romances women who are "nude as a noodle," and otherwise combined dated humor with the sort of sexism that probably entertained the hell out Don Draper when he wasn't cooking his liver and cheating on his wife. The second, G.G. Fickling's Honey West series, is about a PI who somehow combined outrageous innuendo, professional virginity, crime solving, and a boyfriend who probably was on the verge of Death by Delayed Orgasm. Even better, it was made into a TV series that co-starred an ocelot, presumably because Honey was a sex kitten, or something....
"I Busted My Cerebellum Making Them Up" - in which I discuss the remarkable career, and life, of Harry Stephen Keeler, a pulp writer/escapee from a mental institution who managed to accomplish the following in a life that can be best described as "unique":
- Wrote a short story about compound interest and Socialism that's still reprinted as an early (and absolutely terrible) example of science fiction;
- Decried racism while writing whole paragraphs, pages, and even books that traded in the worst sort of racial/ethnic stereotyping, all told in the sort of attempted dialect that is all but unreadable thanks to liberal use of apostrophes and phonetic spelling.
- Featured educated, NON-stereotyped Chinese-American characters during the heyday of Charlie Chan.
- Created the "webwork plot," a technique for outlining a novel that is surprisingly post-modern, and surprisingly prescient of the works of giants such as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon.
Trust me, it doesn't get any weirder than Harry Stephen Keeler. Yes, really.
Golden Amazons and Sneezing Roscoes - the pulps dominated working class popular literature from the 1920's through the early 1950's, along the way producing the likes of HP Lovecraft, Dashiell Hammett, Isaac Asimov, and Leigh Brackett. Alas, not every pulp writer was in (or even close to) the same league as these giants, and this diary introduces the reader to two largely forgotten pulp writers and their creations:
- Proto-feminist character Violet Raye, the Golden Amazon, born on Venus (or was it to a mad scientist?), created by a male writer (just like Wonder Woman!), who begins as a ball busting man-hater and ends up as a benevolent protector of Earth; and
- "Hollywood Private Eye" Dan Turner, creation of Robert Bellem, who sleeps, shoots, and otherwise works his way through a movie colony that's about as similar to reality as the Emerald City is to Lagos, Nigeria. Even better, Bellem, whose prose style was so distinctive that SJ Perelman gleefully teed off on him in a piece called "Somewhere a Roscoe...," had a penchant for calling breasts "globes" or "orbs," had people "ankling" instead of walking, and - yes! - called handguns "roscoes," at least one of which "sneezed ka-chee!" just before shooting someone.
The Murderer Wore What
? - Think that the only books Sax Rohmer wrote were about Fu Manchu? Think again! The adventures of Moris Klaw, the Dream Detective, were some of the wackiest, silliest, most purely enjoyable Golden Age pulp lunacy around. See Klaw sleep on an etheric pillow to solve crime! Hear his pet parrot scream that the Devil's come! Smell his lemon verbena!
The second half of the diary touches not on the silly, but on the sad, sad deterioration of brilliant mid-century author/editor/anthologist Ellery Queen. Bad psychology, a ludicrous plot, and a character who all but personifies the "evil/crazy/dead" stereotype of LGBT figures in so much 20th century fiction - this one has it all, and not in a good way.
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So...these are some of the mysteries/pulps that I've written about in the last couple of years. Have you more suggestions for the silly and the satire-worthy? Would you share them if you dared? Do you own an ocelot? Use lemon verbena cologne? Have a gun in need of Dayquil? It's the Saturday before the Solstice, so don't be shy....
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