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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Going The Distance with the Czar of Noir

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Going The Distance with the Czar of Noir

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

Eddie Muller is known as the Czar of Noir. He founded the Film Noir Foundation and he hosts Noir Alley, on Turner Classic Movies. He’s written a couple respected non-fiction books about Noir and cinema.

In 2002, Austin hosted the big mystery convention, Bouchercon. I was living there and stopped in for a day. I met Eddie, who hadn’t yet started appearing on TCM opposite Robert Osborne. He was there with his just published first novel, The Distance.

Eddie’s father was a popular, long-time sportswriter for the San Francisco Examiner for over 40 years. He was known as ‘Mr Boxer.’ Eddie would also go to work in the newspaper business himself.

That background is all relevant, because for the book, Eddie drew heavily on his dad’s career, and his own life around the newspaper industry. The Distance features Mister Boxing, Billy Nichols, a local sports reporter who is a legitimate celebrity, working for William Randolph Heart’s The Examiner. Set around the post-WW II San Francisco boxing scene, the workings of the newspaper and the reporter’s life add great depth to the book.

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Weird Times 4: Demography and Race

Weird Times 4: Demography and Race

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The flag of the United States of America, with 48 stars at top and with 50 at bottom.

This post is the fourth in a series reflecting on the world of 1923, and the 1920s generally, as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things will you see?

You might, for example, see a flagpole with an American flag on it. It is a flag with a regular grid of stars in the corner, six rows of eight stars apiece, representing the 48 states of the Union. The United States in 1923 is a different place from what it will become a hundred years later, with a population that is distributed differently, different territories, a different self-image and different ideas about the nature of its peoples.

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Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 6: The Man with the Getaway Face

Richard Stark’s Parker, Part 6: The Man with the Getaway Face

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The second Parker novel: The Man With the Getaway Face (Pocket Books, 1963)

What is it?

Parker has gone to a lot of trouble and expense to get a new face. Now he has to fight to keep his identity hidden, while also planning and executing an armored car heist.

A treacherous waitress and a punch-drunk former boxer complicate those matters tremendously.

This is Volume 2 of Richard Stark’s “Parker” series of crime novels. It is also the second part of the unofficial Outfit Trilogy, the first three books in the series, in which Parker goes up against an organized crime syndicate.

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Into the Weird: Weird Tales, April 1923 (Volume 1, Number 2) Part 2

Into the Weird: Weird Tales, April 1923 (Volume 1, Number 2) Part 2

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Weird Tales, April 1923

The table of contents of the second issue of Weird Tales advertises “Sixteen thrilling short stories / Two complete novelettes / Two two-part stories / Interesting, odd, and weird happenings.” More specifically, one of the two-part stories, the cover story, begins this month while the other concludes. As for the “interesting, odd, and weird happenings,” I wrote about them here, so now let’s get to the fiction. (Note that discussion of one of these stories necessitates quoting an ethnic slur, directed against the French, of all people.)

The first of the tales on offer in this issue is one of the novelettes, “The Scar,” by Carl Ramus (whose surname’s misspelled in the table of contents as ‘Rasmus’). It’s the only known published story by Ramus, though his sister Sybla was a writer whose work would later appear in Weird Tales. Carl Ramus had a day job as a doctor, and as it happens “The Scar” is a tale of a dashing young doctor pulled into a kidnapping plot. It’s not a terrible story, but it’s a surprising choice to lead off the issue as there’s little supernatural about it — the heroine claims to be able to bring on a fever by willing it and the hero believes he has a knack for hypnotism — and nothing I can see as ‘weird’ in any other sense. If the magazine’s still in the process of defining itself, then editor Edwin Baird has a different sense of where he intends it to go than we might expect from our later perspective.

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A (Black Gat in the Hand: Ballard’s Bill Lennox in Hollywood (my intro)

A (Black Gat in the Hand: Ballard’s Bill Lennox in Hollywood (my intro)

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Pulp Fest took place in Pittsburgh first week of the month. It’s a really cool event, and the Hilton Doubletree is a nice site. Steeger Books rolls out its Summer line at this event. Last week I shared the latest intro I wrote for Hammett’s Continental Op series; which is up to four volumes. This week, it’s my other new Steeger release. I’m a big fan of W.T. Ballard’s Hollywood studios troubleshooter, Bill Lennox. He’s a neat take on the hardboiled PI. 

Lennox was featured in short stories and novels, and I wrote the intro for Volume 2.

Willis T. Ballard’s middle name is ‘Todhunter.’ While that is certainly a rare one, it is also the middle name of his cousin, Rex Stout, who created the hugely popular Nero Wolfe. Apparently Todhunter is a good name if you want to become a successful writer.

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Weird Times 3: Fashion

Weird Times 3: Fashion

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Fashions of the week in March of 1923.

This post is the third in a series reflecting on the world of 1923, and the 1920s generally, as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things will you see?

Walk down a city street and you’ll observe other people around you, meaning you’ll see the fashions of the time. Any given era has its characteristic clothes and hairstyles, and the nineteen-twenties are no exception. Interesting to me personally are the reasons behind the adoption of specific fashions, and what they have to say about the way the world is changing. I’m writing these background posts as though one aspect of the 1920s can be divided from the others, but the truth is that then as now everything’s mashed together. Fashion’s affected by technology and politics, by ideas about formality and ideas about sexuality; and it can create images that will, for later years, define its moment.

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A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hammett & The Continental Op – Volume 4 (My intro)

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Hammett & The Continental Op – Volume 4 (My intro)

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“You’re the second guy I’ve met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.” – Phillip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep

(Gat — Prohibition Era term for a gun. Shortened version of Gatling Gun)

Pulp Fest takes place in Pittsburgh first week of the month. It’s a really cool event, and the Hilton Doubletree is a nice site. Steeger Books rolls out its summer line at this event. And for the fourth year in a row, there was a new Continental Op collection, with a brand new intro by yours truly. Getting to write about Dashiell Hammett remains a definite thrill. This volume contains the first great hardboiled novel, Red Harvest. 

Unable to make a living writing for Phil Cody, Dashiell Hammett quit Black Mask – and the Pulps, entirely – after “The Creeping Siamese,” which appeared in the March 1926 issue. It was also the last story in Volume Three of this series.

Hammett had written some top-tier stories, such as “The Girl with the Silver Eyes,” and “The House in Turk Street.” But he was not yet THE Dashiell Hammett when he took a full-time job as advertising manager for Albert S. Samuels Co. Jewelers, in March of 1926. Hammett worked, drank, got a second apartment as a writing studio, and romanced the office secretary; all while his second child was being born. The stress was too much for his war-damaged lungs and he collapsed, coughing up blood. Unable to work full-time, he did free-lance advertising writing. He simply did not want to write fiction again. Enter Joseph ‘Cap’ Shaw.

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Into the Weird: Weird Tales, April 1923 (Volume 1, Number 2) Part 1

Into the Weird: Weird Tales, April 1923 (Volume 1, Number 2) Part 1

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Weird Tales, April 1923, front and back covers

The second issue of Weird Tales, on sale from March of 1923 through to April, looked much like the first: a pulp magazine roughly 6 and a half inches by 9 and a half, with 192 pages. The April issue was .75 of an inch shorter and half an inch narrower. The black-white-and-red cover was more striking than the previous issue’s, with the main image contained in a thick red frame, and the date and price more easily visible under the title. There was a new and smoother-looking logo. Unlike the first issue, this cover didn’t share a format with that month’s issue of Weird Tales’ older sister publication Detective Tales. Although to phrase it that way may be misleading; John Locke, in The Thing’s Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales, argues that what is referred to as the April/May 1923 issue of Detective Tales was actually an issue that came out in May which the publisher retroactively dated as a bimonthly issue, and if that’s so then there was no Detective Tales issue in April for the second issue of Weird Tales to parallel.

Either way, the cover’s about all you might hope for from a magazine called Weird Tales. Mysterious gigantic eyes stare out of darkness, while from just below them pink rays shoot out to strike a man who screams and throws out his hands. It’s not terribly sophisticated — background details are nonexistent or lost in the ink wash, and you can’t help but wonder if the mysterious creature in shadows is firing rays from its nostrils. But it is an image that tells you things supernatural and horrific lurk within these pages.

This post will take a look at the physical and editorial package of the second issue of Weird Tales, with an eye to tracking the magazine’s evolution. It’ll run long, because I’ve included numerous extracts from pulp magazine editorials — mostly for the sake of making an argument about how Weird Tales was positioning itself in its marketplace, but partly, I have to admit, for historical interest and potential amusement value.

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Into the Weird: Weird Times 2 — Cars, Roads, and Travel

Into the Weird: Weird Times 2 — Cars, Roads, and Travel

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A 1923 Ford Model T

This post is the second in a series reflecting on the world of 1923 as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in February of 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things will you see?

Probably the first thing you’ll notice as you set out into the street is the street itself, and its contents. The motor car has begun to change urban life. Since Ford introduced the Model T fifteen years ago the price has steadily dropped; there were almost 11 million registered passenger automobiles in the United States by the end of 1922, and will be just shy of 13.5 million by the end of 1923. Cars are registered, incidentally, and license plates have been required since 1918, but most states do not issue driver’s licenses; half the states will require licenses by 1930, and as late as 1935 only 39 states will mandate licenses and not many of those will require passing a test. In 1923 Model Ts are still the most common make of car, though competing models are about to cut into its sales. Famously, you can get a Model T in any colour, so long as it’s black; Ford used to offer a range of colours, but in 1914 streamlined production by cutting back to a particular type of black paint that was cheap and fast-drying. Model Ts do not at this time have shock absorbers, windshield wipers, rear view mirrors, bumpers, or an instrument panel for a speedometer (not a standard feature) or gas gauge.

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Forgotten Authors: Henry J. Kostkos

Forgotten Authors: Henry J. Kostkos

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Amazing Stories, August-September 1933, cover by Leo Morey

This week starts a brief period where these explorations are going to be shorter, for many of these authors have little biographical information available.

In the 1972 anthology Clarion II, Damon Knight included an essay entitled “Goodbye, Henry J. Kostkos, Goodbye,” using the author, along with J. Harvey Haggard, as an example of an author he once read and was invested in, but whose name no longer meant anything to modern readers. At the time, both Kostkos and Haggard were alive (Haggard would be alive for another 29 years).

Henry J. Kostkos was born on June 11, 1900.

Kostkos and his wife, Mary, had two children, Miriam and Maureen. Kostkos worked for Western Electric as an electrical engineer as well as for Bell Labs in Chicago and Ohio. He worked on display mechanisms developed by Bell Labs for their associated telephone companies. At various times, he ran his own contracting business in New York and in Chicago.

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