Hush-Hush
James Ellroy was only a kid in the 1950s when he started to read the infamous tabloid scandal rags of the age: Confidential, Lowdown, Rave, and Whisper to name just a few. These publications were immensely popular as they played on the public’s fascination with Hollywood celebrities and sought to expose sleazy details about famous people’s private lives. The magazines followed a quasi-McCarthyite editorial policy and often sounded more right-wing than Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels in their tone. Confidential was the most successful and longest running of the scandal rags. It ran stories on Liberace’s sexuality and Robert Mitchum’s marijuana bust. The magazine had a lurid fascination with miscegenation and would often run front page exclusives if a film star had been spotted with an African-American member of the opposite sex. Confidential often justified running these stories by claiming they were in the national interest.
Confidential magazine cover, July 1954
Ellroy loved reading the scandal rags as they mocked idealised conceptions of American society by exposing movie stars’ dirty little secrets. The 50s scandal rags were a huge influence in Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet novels and on American Tabloid. In these novels, Ellroy’s narrative is interspersed with articles from a fictional magazine by the title of Hush-Hush. Hush-Hush is based on Confidential, but there was also a tabloid publication called Hush-Hush in the 50s. These inserted documents serve to update the reader of narrative events which have taken place outside of the leading characters purview. In the novel White Jazz, they alleviate the burden of reading Dave ‘the Enforcer’ Klein’s fractured, staccato first person narration. However, the articles are also difficult to read, as Ellroy cleverly parodies the sensationalist tone of Confidential by filling Hush-Hush articles with comically excessive use of alliteration and onomatopoeia. Ellroy uses Hush-Hush as a form of contemporary Greek choric narrative, commenting on the action with a knowledge and style that goes beyond the limits of the main characters. There are moments when the magazine becomes more directly part of the story, such as in American Tabloid when the magazine, backed by anti-Castro Cuban exiles, hastily publishes a special edition reporting the success of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba– only to be humiliated when the invasion is an outright failure. This leads to the demise of Hush-Hush in the novel. In reality, the heyday of the scandal rag ended due to ongoing legal problems and declining circulation. Yet, their seedy and outrageous portrayals of 50s society have been immortalised in Ellroy’s fiction.
Agatha Christie Week: September 13th-20th
The Bookseller has a run-down of events taking place in honour of Agatha Christie this September (she was born on September 15, 1890):
Agatha Christie fans Kate Mosse, Val McDermid and Jasper Fforde are to appear at the Southbank Centre in London on 16th September to discuss the work of the mystery author, as part of this year’s Christie Week.
Besides events at libraries and at festivals around Britain, BBC Radio 4 will be broadcasting a series of afternoon readings. [Link]
Meanwhile, here’s Monty Python’s Christie tribute:
Jack Webb and The Badge
Jack Webb will forever be remembered as the creator, producer and star of the phenomenally successful television series Dragnet. Dragnet began as a radio show in 1949 and made its television debut two years later. Webb starred as the hero, Sergeant Joe Friday of the Los Angeles Police Department. Webb wanted the show to be as realistic as possible and every episode was shot in a semi-documentary style. It also featured many genuine police terms, such as MO (method of operation), PV (parole violator) and 488PC (petty theft). Webb had tremendous respect for people who worked in law enforcement, and the show was actually designed as propaganda for the LAPD. The LAPD had earned itself a horrendous reputation for corruption after numerous scandals in 30s and 40s. Webb worked closely with LAPD Chief William H. Parker to clean up its image in the public mind.
When viewing Dragnet today, it does not seem to be a particularly Realist work. Webb gives a suitably rigid performance as the morally rigid Sgt Friday. Perhaps a better example of Realism and the LAPD is The Badge (1958), the book Webb wrote as a companion piece to Dragnet. Censorship laws of the time were more relaxed in publishing than they were for television. Webb used The Badge to portray the LAPD’s investigation into some of the City of Angel’s most infamous crimes, crimes too violent and disturbing for 1950s television. The book contains a famous ten page synopsis into the Elizabeth Short (a.k.a. the Black Dahlia) murder investigation. There are also pieces on the Brenda Allen scandal, the murder of the Two Tonys, the Club Mecca arson case and many more dark moments in LA history. But what is more important now than both Dragnet and The Badge is how the latter inspired the greatest crime fiction writer alive today. In 1959, a young boy named Lee Earle Ellroy was given a copy of The Badge from his father, Armand Ellroy, as a gift for his eleventh birthday. Since his mother’s murder the previous year, Lee had become a voracious reader of kid’s crime books, but it was the gripping and terrifying crime stories in The Badge that would inspire him for life. Lee Earle Ellroy changed his name to James Ellroy upon publication of his first novel Brown’s Requiem in 1981. That novel includes a fictionalised account of the Club Mecca arson case (renamed as Club Utopia). Ellroy’s masterpiece The Black Dahlia was published in 1987, twenty-eight years after he first learned of the case in The Badge. The Brenda Allen and Mickey Cohen scandals that rocked the LAPD appear in The Big Nowhere (1988). The gangland slaying of the Two Tonys, Tony Brancato and Tony Trombino, appears in White Jazz (1992). L.A. Confidential is less inspired by material gleaned from The Badge, than it is in paying tribute to the book itself, as the character Detective Sergeant Jack Vincennes works as a technical consultant on the fictional television programme, Badge of Honour, which is based on Dragnet.
In his introduction to the 2005 republication of The Badge, Ellroy paid tribute to Webb and the impact his book had on his literary career:
Books attract the inner brain and leave their virus there. Books rarely shape a writer’s curiosity whole. Books rarely give him sustained subject matter and a time and place to re-create anew. I’m anomalous that way. I got lucky at the get-go. It was one-stop imaginative shopping. I found all my stuff in one book.
Today Ellroy is as staunch a supporter of the LAPD as Webb ever was. Ellroy has defended the LAPD’s actions during the Rodney King and Rampart scandals. In recognition of this, the LAPD presented Ellroy with a replica police badge inscribed with Sgt Friday’s number 714. Also, Ellroy has been awarded the LAPD’s highest honour, the Jack Webb award.
Here’s a clip of Webb as Sgt Friday in a famous scene from Dragnet.
Louis Menand on Pynchon’s ‘Inherent Vice’
Thomas Pynchon’s new novel Inherent Vice, appears on August 4th 2009 and it is a detective novel of sorts. Pynchon has dabbled in detective fiction before–The Crying of Lot-49 is nothing if not a mystery story–but Inherent Vice is more explicitly genre-driven. According to Louis Menand’s review in this week’s New Yorker, it is ‘a spoofy take on hardboiled crime fiction’, with a pothead for a detective, named Larry “Doc” Sportello. Spoofing the hard-boiled novel is easy to do and by now probably a little pointless, but maybe Pynchon can do something new with it.
Like the concept he outlines for Pynchon’s book Menand himself seems a little tired. His research into what makes private eye stories tick seems to extend only as far as Chandler’s famous essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1944) and certainly no further than the old chestnut about Howard Hawks and what happened to the chauffeur. It’s lazy stuff. The review is based on the conceit that all private eyes are more or less alike and as a result makes some serious mistakes. Maybe they are the same mistakes Pynchon makes, maybe not, but they are stupid and lazy nonetheless. Here are a few.
Menand uses Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer as evidence that the most important element in private eye fiction is the detective. The general point is arguable I guess. But anyone who knows anything about Archer knows that the books are not really about him, at least not in the same way as Chandler’s books are about Marlowe. And this lack of understanding also leads Menand to say, of Pynchon’s detective, ‘Philip Marlowe or Mike Hammer would have eaten this guy for breakfast’. Oh dear. There is of course a yawning gulf between these two characters. Chandler disliked Spillane’s books and even has Marlowe throw one of them in the trash in his last completed novel, Playback (1959). It would probably be in character for Mike Hammer to get a little frustrated and physical with Doc Sportello, but Marlowe would just shake his head and go back to his chess game.
Menand tells us that the twist in Pynchon’s novel is that it is set in the 1970s. Some twist. It is certainly true that the heyday of the Hammett-Chandler-Macdonald school of crime writing was the mid-twentieth century, but there is no shortage of 1970s private eye crime fiction in books, on film, and on TV. Of Menand’s own examples Macdonald continued to write Archer novels well into the 1970s. Spillane published Mike Hammer novels regularly throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the very last appearing, after a long hiatus and the author’s death, in 2008.
Menand declares that ‘mystery writers have tended to be screenwriters as well (or wished that they were), and so have lived near Hollywood’ and implies that by convention they have mostly, like Pynchon, set their stories there. Yet many of Menand’s key examples don’t fit into his limited version of the history of American crime fiction: for instance, Spillane’s Mike Hammer stories are set in New York, another city with excellent ‘noir’ credentials, while The Maltese Falcon is set in San Francisco. It’s not that Menand is actually wrong here–LA is of course prominent in the hard-boiled canon–but he seems to be looking at crime fiction through a hole in the fence.
Who knows how Pynchon’s book turned out–I haven’t read it yet–but I find reviews like this rather depressing. Despite the many thousands of good, serious, well-written, but above all entertaining crime and detective novels published every year, when it comes to the literary establishment the crime novel is still subject to the same lazy neglect, the same churning of clichés and lack of real enthusiasm as it ever was.
Scene of the Crime
For a visual history of Los Angeles’ most famous and infamous crimes, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything better than Scene of the Crime: Photographs from the L.A.P.D. Archive. The book (which has an excellent introduction by James Ellroy) is a collection of over one hundred L.A.P.D crime scene photographs taken from the 1920s to the1970s: the graphic and haunting photographs from cases such as the Black Dahlia, the murder of the Two Tonys, the Onion Field killing and ransom notes from the Symbionese Liberation Army are included. Perhaps more moving than the images from these famous cases are the pictures of crimes that happen everyday. There’s one of a beaten woman. Her face looks slightly away from the camera as though unsuccessfully trying to hide her wounds. A man is hanging from an unseen ceiling beam. Why did he commit suicide? The image will haunt you more for not knowing.
If you can’t get your hands on the book right away, take a look at some photographs of historic crime scenes that I took on a recent research trip to L.A.
On January 15th, 1947 the tortured, severed body of a Miss Elizabeth Short was found at Leimert Park, 39th and Norton, in L.A. Miss Short was dubbed the ‘Black Dahlia’ by the press, most likely due to her black hair and the black clothing she often wore. The ‘Black Dahlia’ case is still officially unsolved, and it is the most publicized case in L.A.P.D history. At the time, the area where her body was dumped consisted mostly of vacant lots, now, like the demographics of L.A., it has changed irrevocably and become part of the city’s wealthy suburbs— a fact alluded to in John Gregory Dunne’s excellent novel based on the Dahlia case, True Confessions. In Dunne’s novel, the prologue is first person narration by Detective Tom Spellacy. Spellacy’s words are both racist and strangely elegiac about the changing face of L.A.
Anyway. 39th and Norton two weeks ago. It’s a Jap neighbourhood now, Jap and middle-class colored. No empty lots, no bungalows, no Hudson Terraplane. The Neighbourhood Association has put up streetlamps that look like gaslights and there are topiary trees and over on Crenshaw there’s a Honda dealer and a Kawasaki dealer and Subaru and Datsun and Toyota dealers. The colored all have Jap gardeners and the Japs have colored cleaning ladies, and right where Frank Crotty said, “You don’t often see a pair of titties as nice as that,” there’s this Jap-style house and just about on the spot where we found Lois Fazenda’s bottom half, this Jap family has put up one of those cast-iron nigger jockeys.
Son of a bitch if they haven’t.
June 22nd 1958, El Monte, California, the body of Geneva Hilliker was discovered by some kids playing baseball. The body was lying face down in an ivy patch on a road beside the playing field of Arroyo High School. She had been strangled with a thin white cord and her own nylon stocking. The case is still unsolved. Her son James Ellroy was merely ten years old at the time. Unlike 39th and Norton, the crime scene has barely changed with the passing of time, although much of the ivy is now gone. In 1994, Ellroy (now the legendary Demon Dog of Crime Fiction and the author of The Black Dahlia) would reopen the case with Bill Stoner a retired homicide detective from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. The subsequent reinvestigation is the basis of Ellroy’s book My Dark Places.
Arroyo High School gained another footnote in crime history when in 1969 a recently graduated student, Steven Earl Parent, became one of the victims of the Charles Manson Family. My thanks to the indispensable local resident Ronda Logan for her help in El-Monte.
Read my follow-up post, Ellroy in LA.
Lawrence Block on Writing Mysteries
In an essay at mysterynet.com Lawrence Block has the following to say about writing:
If you’ve got something to say, hire a hall. If you want to send a message, call Western Union. But if you’ve gotten nothing more than the urge to write and a talent to amuse, just sit down and write your book. Even if you don’t change any lives, you might get somebody through a bad night or two. [Link]
The Russia House
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War presented Spy fiction writers with something of a dilemma. The intricacies of espionage could no longer be rendered concisely in a narrative of East and West, Communism and Capitalism. Spy novelists found their books dated and old-fashioned. One writer who was ahead of the curve in reinventing the genre was John Le Carre. The Russia House is LeCarre’s moving elegy to the traditional spy novel. Published in 1989 (although set in 1987 a clever device by LeCarre which ensured the story would not be overtaken by events) the plotting still carries the hallmarks of the mystery genre. Niki Landau is a rep for a British publisher on a visit to the Soviet Union when he is contacted by a beautiful mysterious Russian woman named Katya. She claims to be carrying a manuscript written by a friend Yakov that needs to be urgently delivered to Landau’s boss, the jazz-loving, heavy drinker Barley Blair. However, the manuscript is not the kind of material Barley is used to handling, it contains Soviet State secrets and Barley soon becomes a pawn in the hands of British and American Intelligence determined to exploit Katya and Yakov as part of their espionage game. But when Barley finds himself falling in love with Katya will his love of country hold firm?
LeCarre skilfully avoids the clichés of the Spy genre. This is a novel less concerned with double agents and secret microfilm than it is of the changes happening in Russia at the time. What makes the book such a pleasurable read is the portrayal of the lives of ordinary Russians living in the age of Glasnost and Perestroika. The scenes in which Barley is debating and drinking with his Russian friends are a delight to read. LeCarre personally observed these Russian traditions whilst doing research in the Soviet Union. He had been lobbying to visit the country for years, and the thawing of relations between East and West during the Gorbachev era gave him the opportunity. This level of research and attention to detail gives the novel its sense of realism.
The novel veers (somewhat untidily) between first and third person. The first person narration is by Harry Palfrey, a mid-level British civil servant who becomes one of Barley’s Intelligence handlers. Yet Palfrey is not central to the novel, like the other characters he is merely an observer to events bigger than himself. Palfrey only appears in certain scenes: his narration is conveyed through memory and what the principal characters have confided to him. This cast of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern figures is allegorical of the reader’s relationship with the major events of their own time. There are no heroes in LeCarre’s world. Spies are cuckolds, adulterers and divorcees. Indeed, Palfrey reappears in LeCarre’s later novel The Night Manager (1993) as a minor character who has completely given himself up to corruption. Those characters who do try to behave honourably often find themselves betrayed, alone and unable to reconnect with the innocent overt world which no longer exists for them. Anyone who has been following the bizarre and sad recent case of the former MI5 whistleblower David Shayler, now a transvestite who thinks he is Jesus, would acknowledge that LeCarre’s portrayal of spying is in no way overblown or unrealistic. Human frailty is presented with sympathy and understanding. Indeed, it is often not the individuals who are at fault: their suffering is due to a malaise in national institutions. The manuscripts Barley and Katya are handling contain the biggest open secret of the age— The Soviet Union’s military and nuclear capacity is years behind American technology. But will the British and American Intelligence Services accept this inconvenient truth or is it in fact a ruse by the Russians to spread disinformation? On a human level, it is Barley and Katya who pay the price for this complexity. The Russia House is a thoughtful and moving novel, and in retrospect it does not read much like a Spy novel at all.
The Mysteries of Melville Davisson Post
Melville Davisson Post came from an important farming family in West Virginia and after a brief career as a lawyer he became one of the most highly paid magazine story writers of the early twentieth century. His characters, including backwoods detective Uncle Abner and crooked lawyer, Randolph Mason, brought him wealth and fame. He died in 1930 and since then several stories and inconsistencies about him have come to be thought of as true. The first of these concerns his birth year, which is given wrongly on his death certificate as 1871, a date that subsequently found its way into reference sources as respectable as Webster’s Biographical Dictionary. It was in fact April 19, 1869; 140 years ago this year. He was apparently nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1922 (except he wasn’t), and perhaps was also a candidate for President of the United States in 1924. Except that in that election, the famous ‘Klanbake’ election, Calvin Coolidge won by a landslide from Democrat John Davis. An excellent article on Post at First Things gives a more convincing explanation. In 1892, the year he graduated in Law, Post
was selected as one of the Democratic party’s electors in the national presidential election. (He was subsequently chosen by the Electoral College to serve as its secretary, the youngest person ever to hold the position.) But upon his return home, perhaps feeling that he was rising too fast, the West Virginia party chairman rejected him for a political run, and he settled down to practice law in Wheeling.
Post, who travelled widely in Europe, is an underrated writer whose reputation has perhaps been damaged by the sometimes overblown intensity of his religious and moral attitudes. But he does not need these myths; what Post did achieve is remarkable enough in itself. He was a highly successful writer and a supreme plotter and innovator in detective fiction. Among his admirers was William Faulkner, who studied his stories while writing the six mystery stories in Knight’s Gambit (1949).
More on the mystery of Post’s birth date on my personal blog.
The Venetian Vase
This site began life as a supporting site for two books: 100 American Crime Writers and 100 British Crime Writers. These books are co edited by Chris Routledge and Esme Miskimmin and will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in their Crime Files series. When I was contacted by Steven Powell, who is one of the writers on the book projects, asking if he could contribute to the original site it quickly became clear that we would have to do something different. The blog will be edited and maintained primarily by Steven and me. So here is The Venetian Vase.
The Venetian Vase 