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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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Forgotten Authors: Carl Selwyn

Forgotten Authors: Carl Selwyn

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Carl Selwyn

Carl Selwyn Pugh, Jr. was born on December 12, 1918 on Roanoke Island, North Carolina to Carl Selwyn Pugh and Amelia (née Myatt). He was the first of two sons.

He attended the University of North Carolina where he edited the college humor magazine. After college, he moved to New York where he attempted to sell jokes to humor magazines, achieved a small amount of success, but not enough to sustain himself.

During World War II, he served as a lieutenant in the Signal Corps and after the war he worked as a scenario writer at the Signal Corps Photographic Center in Astoria, writing military training films.

His science fiction, published using the name Carl Selwyn, appeared during and immediately after World War II, with his first story, “The Strange Death of Richard Sefton,” being published in the January 1940 issue of Amazing Stories. his next story, “Revolt on the Earth-Star” was his debut in Planet Stories, where most of his fiction appeared.

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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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Forgotten Authors: Dave Dryfoos

Forgotten Authors: Dave Dryfoos

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Fantastic Adventures, October 1950, cover by Robert Gibson Jones

Dave Dryfoos was born on March 29, 1915 in San Francisco, California to Jesse and Beatrice (née Goodman) Dryfoos. He attended Lowell High School and attained the rank of Eagle Scott before attending the University of California at Berkeley.  He earned a law degree from the University of California’s Hastings School of Law before being admitted to the bar in 1936.

In 1942, Dryfoos married Dorothea Gallatin and shortly afterwards was drafted into the Army, serving in Australia, New Guinea, and the Philippines during World War II before being mustered out in 1946 as a staff sergeant. He returned to Benicia California after the war.

Dryfoos published his first short story in the October 1950 issue of Fantastic Adventures: “Lest Ye Be Judged…” Over the next six years, he published twenty-one additional short stories, including “Some Like It Cold,” “The Old-Fashioned Spaceman,” and “Younger by the Minute.” His work appeared in Galaxy, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as several other magazines. He stopped published in 1955 with “Seller of the Sky,” which appeared in the February issue of If.

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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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Forgotten Authors: Edwin K. Sloat

Forgotten Authors: Edwin K. Sloat

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Edwin K. Sloat

Edwin K. Sloat was born on March 1, 1895 in Denmark, Iowa.

The attended State Normal College in Edmond, Oklahoma (now University of Central Oklahoma), graduating in 1916. Following his graduation, he worked as a newspaperman, an employee of the post office, and as a band leader during World War I, in which he was a Musician 1st Class Petty Officer.

After the war, he married Corinne Evelyn Lake in 1922 and they had two sons, Jerry and Donald.

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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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