One of the downsides of people communicating with each other through Twitter, texting and email is that it has all but destroyed the art of letter writing. I have just finished reading A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald, 1967-74, and I had almost forgotten how beautifully crafted and sometimes openly and crudely emotional a letter can be. We are losing this form of writing and it is a shame. Dan Rowan was an American comedian who had a long running night-club act playing straight man to his zany comedy partner Dick Martin. Rowan and Martin performed their act touring nightclubs for around twenty years before they met their greatest success on the hit television show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. Rowan was also a huge fan of the work of the crime novelist John D. MacDonald, and through the advice of mutual friend Virginia Caldwell (wife of the famed author Erskine Caldwell), Rowan and MacDonald began a letter correspondence despite the fact that they had never met. Rowan and MacDonald became close friends and the letters cover from 1967 until their friendship suddenly ended in 1974. The correspondence almost exactly covers the years Laugh-In was on the air, and as a consequence, Laugh-In forms the bulk of their conversation.
Laugh-In revolutionised American television comedy in ways not dissimilar to how That Was The Week That Was and Monty Python’s Flying Circus changed British comedy. Laugh-In’s title is derived from the ‘Love-ins’ and ‘Be-ins’ that were culturally important in the 1960s. The immediate style of show was vaudeville, like most musical/variety shows of the time, but it had a improvisational, anarchic and quickfire style that was new. Rowan and Martin were the hosts of the show. Rowan’s exasperated straight man persona is always being undermined by the zany imbelicity of Martin. Neither host pretends to have much control over events on the show as a form of anarchic and comedic mayhem breaks loose, as one sketch follows another with little or no narrative thread. Another novelty was to have big name stars making cameos but then downplay their appearance on show, such as putting John Wayne in a big bunny outfit and then follow it with a completely unrelated sketch.
Rowan and MacDonald’s letters form one of the most fascinating exchanges that has ever been published into the workings of a television show. Although MacDonald was only six years older than Rowan he is definitely the father- figure of the two and frequently gives Rowan advice and ideas for sketches, some of which make their way onto the show. Rowan had never experienced success as big as this before, and he frequently conveys anxiety and nervousness at keeping up the high ratings and quality of a show that very few people thought could last. Laugh-In defied the critics and ran for six series and one hundred and fourty episodes.
Other matters that Rowan and MacDonald discuss in their letters is MacDonald’s phenomenally successful Travis McGee series of novels, Rowan’s failing marriage to Australian model Andrea Van Ballegooygn, the sybaritic lifestyle of Dick Martin, and the Watergate cover-up. Rowan and Martin had a perceived public closeness with Richard Nixon. Nixon had made a well-received guest appearance on Laugh-In during the 1968 Presidential election. The result of the ’68 election was so close that some commentators claimed Nixon’s appearance on Laugh-In just tipped things in his favour. In one letter Rowan describes attending a reception at Nixon’s California home:
Last night Rowan and Martin and their wives, along with Paul Keyes and his wife, were invited to attend President and Mrs. Nixon’s reception at their home in San Clemente, La Casa Pacifica, or as it’s termed among the Republican press, the Western White House. We picked up a pair of choppers in the NBC parking lot, flew to Camp Pendleton, and were driven by Marine sergeants down to the house. He has a beautiful spread there and the party was attended by something like 400 guests. Mostly Republicans, of course, but a substantial number of the Hollywood liberal contingent. Nothing meaningful happened politically, but it was very interesting and I’m happy we went. I was given a pair of cuff links with the Presidential Seal on them, and since I was unable to get 2 pair, I will give you one link and keep one link, since I know how anxious you are to have a Nixon souvenir.
This was Rowan’s little joke. MacDonald was not a Nixon admirer and was constantly ribbing Rowan for being seen as a Nixon man. MacDonald said of Watergate: “It fascinates because it is a morality play and man has never tired of those. Also, it is a detective story.”
The letters end as abruptly as their friendship ended. The reason for this is complicated. Rowan was feeling bitter and miserable as Laugh-In was coming to an end, and he knew his career was on the decline (he worked very seldomly after Laugh-In). Also, he was going through a very expensive divorce to Van Ballegooygn and he appealed to MacDonald for sympathy. Unexpectedly, MacDonald almost completely takes Van Ballegooygn’s side, and the two exchange harsh words. What makes the letters so moving and thrilling to read is that it is possible to see both men’s points- of- view with sympathy. Rowan’s behaviour does sink into immaturity, as he is going through the emotional pain of divorce, but one is left with the feeling that perhaps MacDonald was just a little too harsh in his attempts at tough advice. The two men finally reconciled, ironically in a similar way to how they had met, at the suggestion of a mutual friend. Perhaps as a symbol of this reconciliation, they agreed to publish their letters in a book. The book came out in 1986. Both men wrote a separate introduction to the book. Rowan writes in his introduction:
I don’t know about you, but in a busy, varied and much-traveled life I have not made so many solid and worthwhile friendships that I can afford to lose one. I am happy that we are friends again, John D. and I. It’s not like before. But neither are we. I miss the time we lost. I hold dear the time we had. I look forward to what’s to come. Thank you John.
Alas, neither man had much time left to live. MacDonald died of complications of heart surgery during Christmas 1986. Rowan died of lymphona in 1987. It is a touching epilogue when reading this book to know that the two men reconciled before they died.
Below is an audio recording of a telephone conversation in which Nixon thanks Rowan and Martin for performing a comedy sketch at his sixtieth birthday party. Nixon’s reference to Haldemann and the tapes is unintentionally hilarious!:
Read my follow-up post, Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald’s Idea for a Television Show.
Fred Otash – Private Eye to the Stars
I have just finished reading Investigation Hollywood! (1976), the memoirs of Fred Otash, Hollywood’s most famous Private Detective. Throughout the 1950s and 60s– when Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, Lew Archer and a hundred other literary P.I.’s were popular with the American public– Otash was the chief investigator for the tabloid scandal rag Confidential. During that time, he made a considerable amount of money on assignments that included arranging abortions for the mistresses of movie stars.
Otash appears as a character in several of James Ellroy’s novels. Ellroy knew Otash well, and Otash told Ellroy the contents of his files on J.F.K., which had been confiscated by the F.B.I. Otash had been hired by the Mob to wiretap Kennedy in a rendezvous with his mistress. Otash only refers to the incident elliptically in his memoir, but he seems to have done a good job for the Mob, as he told Ellroy that Kennedy was a ‘two minute man’ and was ‘hung like a cashew’ . Kennedy, according to Otash, used his bad back as an excuse for his lack of virility in the bedroom. In Ellroy’s novel American Tabloid (1995), Kennedy is referred to as ‘Badback Jack’.
Ellroy thought Otash to be good company but not trustworthy. Ellroy had been considering making Otash one of the leading characters in American Tabloid. He was going to pay Otash money with the stipulation that Otash would not publicly contradict how Ellroy portrayed him in the novel. But Ellroy never trusted Otash to keep his word, thus he created Pete Bondurant (one of his greatest characters) for the role that he originally conceived for Otash in American Tabloid.
Reading Investigation Hollywood! it is tempting to concur with Ellroy’s opinion that Otash is entertaining, but you’re never really sure whether or not he’s telling you the whole story. Still, Investigation Hollywood! is a fascinating glimpse into the seedy side of Hollywood in the 50s and 60s. The book features an introduction by Mickey Spillane and reads like one of the sleaziest editions of Confidential. It is also the only book, that I know of, in which the author boasts about how he would have committed the Watergate burglary properly!:
If I were going to engage in that kind of illegal activity, the first thing I would do is have a key made for those locks. My man could look at a lock and give you a series of sixteen master keys.
I would have had a key for each of the offices and I would have used sound equipment so sophisticated that the thing could have been hidden in the inkwell, a picture frame, or under a chair – someplace where you can wire the equipment beeper for months and where it would transmit to a receiver two or three miles away.
And the idea of using their xerox. Another blunder. Nothing is ever xeroxed anymore. You use your own equipment. Camera equipment is superior to anything else. You set the camera and then just keep sliding the papers under it, photographing to your heart’s content. You walk out with nothing more than a roll of minifilm that may have a thousand documents recorded on it.
I still can’t believe the Republican party could have hired such a bunch of idiots. First off, the people in party headquarters are not going to do much talking about anything strategic because they probably don’t know that much anyway. If you really want to know what’s going on you put a tap on George McGovern’s phone at home. That’s where all the important conversations are taking place.
You have to hit two or three phones – like the campaign manager and the finance manager who is hustling all the funds to see what deals he’s making for the candidate.
Those are the people you want. That’s the way you find out what’s happening!
The University of Texas has a video available online of Otash being interviewed by Mike Wallace in 1957. It is clear from this interview that Otash consider himself, quite simply, as man doing his job. You can watch the interview here.
Robert B. Parker 1932-2010
Robert B. Parker, author of 37 novels featuring the Boston-based private eye Spenser, has died, aged 77. Parker is credited with reviving interest (and sales) in the hard-boiled private eye novel, which by the 1960s had begun to seem anachronistic and played out. Parker, as J. Kingston Pierce puts it in the interview included in this tribute, had “the misfortune to be overeducated”. He wrote a PhD dissertation on Hammett and Chandler and was a professor at Northeastern University in Boston. When I began my own PhD on Chandler in the early 1990s Parker’s was one of only a few then written on the subject. For good or ill, as an indirect result of Parker’s influence on the popularity of crime fiction in general, by the end of the decade the number of academic papers was growing fast.
Parker began writing the Spenser novels in the early 1970s because he wanted more stories about Philip Marlowe. He later completed Chandler’s unfinished eighth Marlowe novel Poodle Springs and could channel Chandler like no other; a difficult task given the ease with which Chandler can be parodied. But his writing is also distinctively Parker and in novels such as 1980’s Looking for Rachel Wallace, as smart as any.
A great deal has already been written about Parker and his legacy. In particular Sarah Weinman is doing a great job rounding up the tributes and obituaries as is J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet.
Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane
As the author of the Eliot Ness and the Nathan Heller series of novels, Max Allan Collins has a deserved reputation as being one of the most creative and prolific of contemporary American artists. There is a strange irony to this as Collins has spent a large part of his career defending the work of one of the most commercially successful and critically reviled writers of the twentieth century, Mickey Spillane. Collins co-authored the first (and to my knowledge only) scholarly monograph on Spillane, One Lonely Knight: Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1984). He directed the award-winning documentary Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane (1998). He gave Spillane acting roles in the films Mommy (1995) and Mommy’s Day (1997). Collins was good friends with Spillane, and when Spillane was close to dying he handed over to Collins unfinished manuscripts, which Collins completed and prepared for publication, Dead Street (2007), and the final Mike Hammer novel, The Goliath Bone (2008).
Collins has definitely helped improve Spillane’s reputation. Yet even now, defending Mickey Spillane can be a dangerous business. In Collins’ introduction to The Mike Hammer Omnibus: Volume One (2006), he stated:
For over four decades now, I have found myself in the unlikely position of being perhaps the chief defender of one of the most popular writers of all time. Because of my boldly expressed high opinion of Mickey Spillane, I have been involved in screaming matches; I have nearly been in several fistfights; and I have been dissed and dismissed because of the taint of Spillane on my own work. As beloved as Spillane is – and no other mystery writer has touched readers in so deeply personal a manner – so in some quarters is he so roundly despised.
Poe and Highsmith in the New Yorker
January 19th is the birthday of both Edgar Allan Poe and Patricia Highsmith. In the New Yorker Ian Crouch makes the case that they are similar as writers too:
Like Poe’s work, Highsmith’s has been hamstrung among critics by its limited set of obsessions—murder, impersonation, mystery, and suspense. Much of Highsmith’s work either fits into, or was influenced by, popular genres. Offering remarkable insight, Joan Schenkar reveals how Highsmith’s early work as a comic-book writer—when she crafted stories for such characters as “Jap Buster Johnson”—was reflected in her novels. Though she gamely maintained that the likes of Henry James and Dostoyevsky also wrote “suspense” novels, Highsmith’s reputation was such that Norman Mailer once told Schenkar: “Remind me, Joan…what was Highsmith? A high-class detective novelist?” (Had he confused her with Agatha Christie?) Poe has suffered similarly. Schenkar points out that E. L. Doctorow once called Poe a “genius hack,” and “our greatest bad writer.”
1. Outside – A Noir Album
Town Full of Losers wrote a post on David Bowie to mark his 63rd birthday on January 8th. Reading this post made me revisit my favourite Bowie album No.1 Outside (1995). No.1 Outside is a concept album like no other album ever made. Bowie reunited with writer, musician and record producer Brian Eno, with whom he had collaborated on the famous ‘Berlin Trilogy’, and began writing a series of songs in which he noticed, almost by chance, that a narrative was emerging.
The narrative is deliberately obscure and not easy to follow. It is loosely set in a future in which a new government bureau has been created to investigate the phenomenon of art crime. Murder and mutilation have become part of an underground art craze. The leading character, Nathan Adler is determined to ascertain what is acceptable as art, and what is simply criminal. The songs are interspersed with the monologues of several characters, which are designed to clarify the narrative. In my opinion, the monologues are pretentious and the weakest part of the album. The best songs simply allude to the narrative, as a good album should not be overplotted. The numeral is in the title as Bowie planned to make a whole series of concept albums based on a similar narrative theme, to be titled 2. Contamination and 3.Afrikaan. Sadly, no follow-up album was ever produced.
Despite these minor flaws 1. Outside is a remarkable musical achievement, one of the only albums to my knowledge to successfully adapt a crime narrative. It is fitting then that the cult film director David Lynch chose one of the best songs from the album, ‘I’m Deranged’ as the opening and closing song for his surreal neo-noir thriller, Lost Highway (1997):
Shamus Town: The Los Angeles of Raymond Chandler
Loren latker’s excellent Shamus Town website is an increasingly important repository of all things Raymond Chandler. The site now includes hundreds of photographs of LA in Chandler’s time and in the present as well as many scanned documents relating to Chandler himself. For anyone researching Chandler, having access to his birth certificate and school records via the Raymond Chandler Timeline is invaluable. Latker also has podcast tours of Chandler’s LA. The site has recently been updated and there are lots of good things on the way. Loren writes:
The new timeline is up! It now starts in 1858 with the birth of Morris, or Maurice, B Chandler. I’ve added many popup images for Ray’s birth certificate, his school records, a Laramie new item about an M Chandler attending a party in 1886, obits about his uncle Fitt’s brother and his aunt Francis Grace. I also found the document from 1927 where Ray started the process to regain his U.S. Citizenship. From that we learn that after WWI he returned to Canada, made is way to Victoria BC, boarded the Governor bound
for San Francisco and arrived in March of 1919. He and [Florence, his mother] were living at the West 12th Street address then.In the True Crime section I added two images. I already had an image of rich Ned dead on the floor of Greystone taken from Leslie White’s wonderful “Me, Detective.” However, I won an auction (don’t ask how much!) for two 1929 8×10 crime scene photos. One is the same rich Ned dead that White had in his
book, but the other is of poor Hugh Plunket dead on the floor as well. 8x10s scanned at 1200 DPI make wonderfully large digital images! The photo of Plunket probably hasn’t been seen since 1929! I made them into very large popup images – they look great!Coming up I want to record the narration of the two rides I have the video done for and add them as Podcasts. I want to finish the section I started about Dorothy Fisher nee Gruber, Chandler’s secretary and add the good parts of her audio interview we did, along with the transcript, and pictures of letters Ray sent her.
Link to Shamus Town. More on Chandler’s early life here.
Detroit in the Fiction of Elmore Leonard
This Christmas I read several of Elmore Leonard’s classic crime novels. Leonard really is one of the greatest American crime writers. His novels are hard-hitting, unpretentious, original and blackly comic tales. Leonard’s novels usually feature a cast of characters from differing backgrounds and professions (both criminal and legitimate) that he brings together in what read as seamlessly interwoven narratives.
Only on question has been bothering me about Leonard’s work — is his depiction of Detroit rather tame? Leonard was born in New Orleans, but his family settled in Detroit when he was a child. The author’s bio in his books usually states Leonard lives in the wider Detroit area, which probably means he lives in the more salubrious Grosse Point or Bloomfield Village, which some would argue are not really part of Detroit. Detroit has been in terminal decline over the past forty years. There are many reasons for this, including the collapse of the American car industry, the race riots of the 1960s, and the ‘White Flight’ — the Caucasian population fled from the city to the suburbs to escape the rising crime rate. Perhaps as so many of Detroit’s social problems are rooted in the politically incendiary subject of race, Leonard avoids the subject so as not to bog his books down in controversy. The population of the city is 81.6% black, according to the last census. Most of the black population live in the inner city, often in sub-standard housing. This leads to added tension as many of the whites, who live in the suburbs and townships surrounding the city, blame the black population for the high crime rate.
Leonard does not entirely avoids these issues: Killshot (1989) makes some interesting comparisons between crime-ridden Detroit and rural Michigan, an area dominated by hunters and Evangelical Christians. 52 Pick-Up (1974) features a scene in which a coach full of tourists on a historical tour of Detroit is held-up, and all the passengers have their belongings stolen. Fairly shocking, but to my knowledge Detroit is now considered too dangerous to run historical tours. My wife is from Detroit, and I’ve come to know the city quite well over the past few years. I like it, and I hope one day it will reclaim its former reputation as being one of America’s greatest cities. Before then, it will have to move on from the damage inflicted by the corrupt Mayoralty of Kwame Kilpatrick, and the shocking story reported in the Times that the city can no longer afford to bury its own dead.
The last time I was in Detroit was this past summer, and the big news story was of a shootout at a city bus-stop. You can watch footage of the incident below.
The Writer or the Critic: Who Is the Best Judge?
A recent article in The Guardian, Is James Ellroy the best judge of his own novels?, examines Ellroy’s strange disowning of his novel The Cold Six Thousand (2001). Critics and readers found the harsh, clipped and dialectic prose style (which is sometimes called Ellrovian prose) of The Cold Six Thousand far too jarring and difficult to read. Many reviewers were scathing of the novel, and Ellroy has come to agree with their analysis. Perhaps Ellroy is being too harsh on himself. I believe The Cold Six Thousand is flawed, and the prose style is a distraction, but the plotting and structure is thrilling. If you can get to grips with Ellroy’s writing style, you are left with a remarkable fictionalised account of five years of American history from 1963 to 1968, including the Civil Rights movement, the escalation of the war in Vietnam and concluding with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
Ellroy did his utmost to promote the novel at the time it was released, so perhaps his change of opinion regarding its merit is in itself a publicity stunt. By disowning his previous work he creates excitement for his forthcoming novels (which he will always promote as being bigger and better). After all, Ellroy has expressed some harsh judgements on some of his other work. With some critics there is already an inbuilt hostility to crime and mystery fiction, so it is not a surprise that crime writers have to steel themselves to harsh criticism or sometimes talk down their own work or grow to dislike it. Mickey Spillane insisted he was a writer not an author. Arthur Conan Doyle grew weary of his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, as did Ian Fleming of James Bond. I’m also not sure writers should always be trusted when they give opinions as to which is their best book. Norman Mailer insisted his bloated fictional history of the CIA, Harlot’s Ghost (1991) was his best novel, but there are few critics who would agree with him. On the other hand, Ellroy’s dismissive attitude to some of his previous novels may have created a situation in which readers and critics no longer trust his views on his own work.
Orson Welles – Radio Days Sketch
It’s Christmas, so I don’t want to post anything too dark. I thought you might enjoy this wonderful Orson Welles monologue and sketch taken from the very first Dean Martin Show in 1967. Welles talks about his time as a radio actor, writer and director. The greatest period in Welles’ radio career was in the late 1930’s and early 40’s, (Old Time Radio Show Catalog has an excellent summation of this Golden period). Welles briefly describes the many roles he played, including The Shadow: ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.’ Alas, he does not mention the infamous 1938 War of the Worlds production that terrified America. Welles’ monologue is followed by a very funny sketch about a Private Eye show, which features Welles as a radio actor and Dean Martin as an overworked sound effects man.
The Venetian Vase 