Crime novels, p.1
Crime Novels, page 1
Library of America, a nonprofit organization,
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CRIME NOVELS
FIVE CLASSIC THRILLERS 1961–1964
VOLUME 1
The Murderers • Fredric Brown
The Name of the Game Is Death • Dan J. Marlowe
Dead Calm • Charles Williams
The Expendable Man • Dorothy B. Hughes
The Score • Richard Stark
Geoffrey O’Brien, editor
LIBRARY OF AMERICA E-BOOK CLASSICS
CRIME NOVELS: FIVE CLASSIC THRILLERS 1961–1964
Volume compilation and backmatter copyright © 2023 by
Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.
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Published in the United States by Library of America.
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The Murderers copyright © 1961 by Fredric Brown. Reprinted by permission from the Fredric Brown Estate. The Name of the Game is Death copyright © 1962 by Fawcett Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Dan J. Marlowe. Dead Calm copyright © 1963 by Charles Williams, renewed 1991 by Alison Williams. Reprinted by permission of Alison Williams. The Expendable Man copyright © 1963 by Dorothy B. Hughes. Reprinted by arrangement with The G Agency, LLC, acting in conjunction with Diana Finch Agency. The Score copyright © 1964 by Richard Stark. Reprinted by permission from the Westlake Estate.
Distributed to the trade in the United States by Penguin Random House Inc. and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.
ISBN 978–1–59853–737–6
eISBN 978–1–59853–741–3
Contents
Introduction by Geoffrey O’Brien
THE MURDERERS
by Fredric Brown
THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH
by Dan J. Marlowe
DEAD CALM
by Charles Williams
THE EXPENDABLE MAN
by Dorothy B. Hughes
THE SCORE
by Richard Stark
Biographical Notes
Note on the Texts
Notes
Introduction
by Geoffrey O’Brien
American crime fiction has always tended to reflect the culture’s rougher edges and more unstable elements. In the twentieth century, genteel puzzle mysteries in the Agatha Christie mode had their devotees and imitators, but the native product was more typically characterized by an acute awareness of social fissures and mental borderlines. The pressures and dangers of the Prohibition era, the Depression, World War II and its anxious aftermath are never far away. Likewise, the crime novels of the 1960s are suffused with the outward ills and troubled undercurrents of their time—urban chaos, racist hatreds, proliferating drug use, the suspicions and jangled nerves of suburban enclaves, the nihilistic rejection of established moral codes, the dissolution of personality itself—as perceived by very different writers from multiple angles.
As a genre, crime fiction has always also had a symbiotic relation with emerging media and with evolutionary changes in publishing formats. The pulp magazines of the 1920s and ’30s fostered the rise of the hard-boiled style exemplified by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. In the 1940s—a decade during which crime stories of all sorts maintained a dominant position in the world of entertainment—the same tropes, and often the same writers, could be found in novels, popular magazines, movies, and radio. It was typical for a successful mystery novel to be serialized in a magazine, adapted for radio and the movies, and eventually reissued as an inexpensive paperback. At this moment of peak popularity, the genre embraced a wide range of approaches, from the tough guy school to the psychological realism of women writers such as Helen Eustis and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. In the 1950s, the success of paperback reissues ushered in the era of paperback originals, driving the remaining pulps toward extinction, just as the conventions of the half-hour radio play migrated to television. Increasingly in evidence was a grittier, more male-oriented vein exemplified by the novels of Mickey Spillane, movies offering violent ripped-from-the-headlines exposés of gangsterism, or televised celebrations of law enforcement such as M Squad or Highway Patrol.
By the 1960s, crime fiction, although still a reliably popular genre, no longer occupied such a commanding cultural position. Even Ross Macdonald, the preeminent literary heir of Hammett and Chandler, did not become a best-selling author until late in the decade. (Macdonald’s work, central to any consideration of crime fiction in the 1960s, is available in three Library of America volumes.) Conventions that had flourished for decades seemed to have reached a point of diminishing returns. The era of the private eye and the romantic noir melodrama along the lines of Double Indemnity or Laura tended to inspire parody or evoke nostalgia. Other genres emerged as strong competitors to traditional crime fiction: science fiction and fantasy as developed by Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, and others (including the belatedly popularized J.R.R. Tolkien), and extended by The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits; the fusion of crime story with horror as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, from a novel by Robert Bloch; the political thriller making drama out of global crisis, exemplified by best-selling novels like Seven Days in May and Fail-Safe; the harsh realism and psychological probing of true crime breaking through to a wider public with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood; and above all the phalanx of secret agents led by James Bond and given more substantial credibility by the clandestine bureaucrats of John le Carré.
Facing this stiff competition, writers working in a more traditional vein—some of them, like Fredric Brown, Charles Williams, and Dorothy B. Hughes, long-established veterans; others, like Dan J. Marlowe and Richard Stark, relative newcomers—felt the pressure to go beyond the predictable limits of the standard whodunit or police procedural. By widening the breadth of their subject matter, addressing themes that might once have seemed risky, perhaps availing themselves of the audacity allowed by a new permissiveness in publishing, or experimenting with formal approaches befitting a flashier and speeded-up era, the best crime writers reinvented the genre in strikingly distinctive ways.
A writer with his roots in the pulps, equally successful in the crime and science fiction genres, the prolific Fredric Brown was known for his dark humor and twisty mind games, whether the theme is Martian invasion or the inner workings of a criminal mind. In The Murderers (1961), one of his last novels, the consciousness laid bare is that of Willy Griff, a hipsterish out-of-work actor, hanging with Beat drifters on the fringes of Hollywood and scrounging for small-time television work. Willy is a pretender so hollow he can barely be said to be there, callous, calculating, and self-admiring, devoid of even a glimmer of belief in anything or affection for anyone. His extended monologue, as he recounts an absurd murder scheme destined to fall apart into nightmare, oscillates between casual cruelty and terrifying triviality. One senses Fredric Brown bidding farewell to a world he found increasingly alien.
Sometime professional gambler, sometime pornographer, sometime amnesiac, and longtime friend and literary associate of a professional bank robber, Dan J. Marlowe was also a stalwart Rotarian, Republican, and NRA member with a degree in accounting. He began writing crime fiction at the age of forty-three after the sudden death of his young wife, and after a few routine novels wrote the book that has kept his reputation alive. The Name of the Game Is Death (1962) does not simply chart the trajectory of a violent criminal as he hurtles toward an annihilating climax; it channels his inner life with an emotional authenticity that makes the book feel like a memoir dictated by an alter ego. Marlowe’s narrator (his real name is never revealed) frankly acknowledges the truth of a prison psychiatrist’s diagnosis: “Your values are not civilized values.” But as he recounts his tale of early sorrows and final revenge, he proposes an alternative and unnerving morality tailored to a brutal society. Marlowe went on to write a string of other hard-boiled yarns, but the hallucinatory intensity of The Name of the Game Is Death remains singular.
The first paperback originals of Charles Williams defined him as a writer focused on the Gulf Coast states from Texas to Florida, thoroughly acquainted with the region’s bayous and back roads and with a gift for linking turbulent human dramas to natural settings. Even as he worked variations on standard noirish tropes in books like A Touch of Death (1954), The Big Bite (1956), and All the Way (1958), there was always a sense of scenes unfolding in a thoroughly real environment. Williams had been a radio operator on merchant ships before World War II, and his 1963 best seller Dead Calm is pervaded by his intimate knowledge of seagoing matters. Indeed, the psychological battles of Dead Calm—as a newlywed couple alone on a small yacht in the mid-Pacific find themselves at the mercy of the troubled survivor they have rescued from a sinking ship—are surpassed by a more fundamental evocation of the sheer terror of the ocean itself. Williams’s skill at technical exposition is raised to a high pitch as rotting planks become symbolic counterpar
Dorothy B. Hughes began her literary career as a poet—she was published in the Yale Younger Poets series in 1931—and her crime novels were at the outset marked by heightened language and symbolic effects. The fourteen novels she published from 1940 to 1952—among them The Fallen Sparrow (1942), Ride the Pink Horse (1946), and In a Lonely Place (1947)—established her as one of the most important crime writers of her era. After a long hiatus she wrote one last novel, The Expendable Man (1963), which shares the political themes and strong feeling for local atmosphere of much of her earlier work. Beautifully told and sharply observant, The Expendable Man shuns melodrama as it methodically lays out the process by which a young medical intern is set up to become the fall guy for a stranger’s death. The insidious poison of endemic racism underlies everything that happens in the novel, even as its protagonist tries to reassure himself: “This wasn’t the Deep South. It was Arizona.”
Long-running fictional series built around a single hero—Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee—became increasingly abundant as the decade wore on. They tended to be covert agents or freelance adventurers serving the government or the cause of justice in one way or another. Inhabiting a zone apart was Parker, the laconic, cold-eyed professional thief who made his first appearance in The Hunter (1962) by Donald E. Westlake writing under the name Richard Stark. As Westlake commented: “Stark and Westlake use language very differently. . . . Westlake is allusive, indirect, referential, a bit rococo. Stark strips his sentences down to the necessary information.” The Parker novels are constructed with a formalist rigor equivalent to a criminal planning a complex heist. Each book is a variation on a theme, with four movements—conception, preparation, execution, and aftermath—and the effect is indeed musical. Despite their immersion in material details, they have a nearly abstract quality that suggests a wide range of possible readings without ever imposing a particular message. They are among the books most consistently admired by other crime writers. The Score (1964) was the fifth in the series, which would eventually encompass twenty-three titles; it is notable for the particular audacity of the attempted crime, and the emergence of the actor-thief Grofield as a lighthearted foil to the implacable Parker.
Each of these works establishes a very personal connection with a transitional and often chaotic cultural era, while continuing to draw on the strengths of a mature tradition. The novels collected in this volume, along with its companion volume, Crime Novels: Four Classic Thrillers 1964–1969, reveal not so much a period style as a varied and inventive range of approaches. In going beyond earlier templates for crime fiction, these writers continued to redefine its nature and widen its possibilities.
THE MURDERERS
Fredric Brown
Chapter One
* * *
I WOKE to darkness, with the shreds of a ridiculous dream keeping me from knowing what had awakened me or even who I was. Then I remembered; it was the automatic alarm clock in my mind which had awakened me; I’d set it for this time because of an appointment. I even knew who and where I was.
I was Willy Griff, waking from a nap in my basement room, and the room was in Mrs. Whelan’s rooming house—better known as the Zoo because of the strange characters that it housed. And the Zoo was in Hollywood, the mecca of actors like myself. Correction: other actors; there is none exactly like unto me. Better, perhaps, but never like.
I thought, let there be light; and turned one on. The clock on the night stand under the lamp told me that it was eight o’clock. I had to get up now because of my appointment to meet Lennie, my agent, at the Wilshire Derby at nine. It could be important. Lennie had told me he thought he could bring a television producer along, one who was starting to shoot a new crime series on the Warner lot. Lennie had told me it ought to be good for at least a bit part; the series characters were set but the show would need a full complement of fresh faces every program for the hoods who would not survive the show.
I threw my feet over the edge of the bed, stretched and yawned.
I, Willy Griff, twenty-seven, born of farmer parents in the Imperial Valley, sufferer under Pasadena Playhouse, crucified most of the time since in my efforts to get a foothold above occasional bit parts, but not yet dead or buried. Move over, Brando, I’m on my way.
I walked across to the sink and put cold water on my face, wiped it and studied myself in the mirror to decide whether or not to shave again. The verdict: negative. Just a touch of shadow on my face, as now, made me look more mature and more plausible as a potential crime-show hood. The face I studied was neither rugged nor handsome but somewhere in between; sometimes I wished it were more definitely one or the other, but one works with what one has. And I can think of it as a versatile face; I smiled at myself boyishly, lowering my eyes and then raising them again in the manner of Jack Lescoulie charming housewives with a soft-sell commercial, then I tightened the corner muscles of my mouth and scowled through flat hard eyes, a torpedo with finger itching on a trigger. Yes, a versatile face. I let it revert to its usual expression of slight arrogance—or partially concealed great arrogance—and looked at it again, and approved. I ran a comb through the black hair above it, making it sleek again.
Yes, a versatile and satisfactory face. And why shouldn’t I face the world with arrogance, seeing that it’s a lousy world I never made. I could have done a better job.
I lighted a cigarette, put on my robe, and went down the hall to the bathroom, deciding I might as well get that trip over with before I dressed.
The door was locked so I stood leaning against the wall opposite until the toilet flushed and in a minute the door opened and Doll came out. “Hi, Willy,” she said. And, with a glance at the robe, “Getting up late or going to bed early?”
Doll was a slightly gorgeous redhead, the most attractive female inmate of the Zoo. But she belonged to Solly and was hands-off stuff for that reason. Solly was an ex-wrestler who now managed other wrestlers. He was fifty if he was a day but he was a giant of a man who could still tie any ordinary man into pretzel knots.
But Solly wasn’t in hearing and I let my voice go dulcet—sexy instead of arrogant—when I answered her question. “Hi, Doll. Haven’t decided yet. Any suggestions?”
I stood watching while she walked away from me down the hall. I knew that she knew I was watching by the way she rolled her hips a little more than she usually did. Provocative, but she was a commodity that’s never in short supply in Hollywood.
Back in my room I dressed carefully, but quickly; if I didn’t dawdle I’d have time to walk down to Wilshire and save myself a cab fare. The rooming house is on Rondo just off Sunset, not too far a walk. 1515 Rondo is a fleabag and a poor address, but it has the advantage of being central.
I went out, and paused on the top of the two cement steps that led down to the sidewalk; the air felt damp, as though rain might be coming, and I was wondering whether to go back to my room and get a hat and trench coat. A car door slammed, quite close, and I glanced in the direction of the sound. A gray ’57 Fairlane was parked at the curb and a man had just left it. He was coming across the sidewalk toward me and since I hadn’t yet made up my mind about the coat-and-hat bit, I stepped a little aside to let him pass and enter. I’d never seen him before.
He was big, almost as big as Solly, and like Solly he looked like something from TV wrestling, but in clothes. He wasn’t tall, maybe five-ten to my six feet even, but he had shoulders, and a neck like a rhinoceros.
He came up to me, but didn’t pass. He said, “Hi, actor-boy. Let’s go back to your room.” His voice sounded tired, as though he’d been waiting a long time to say that.
