A Century of Noir: F Brown, G Brewer, M Spillane and B Pronzini

Welcome to our third Mickey Spillane-centric or Mickey Spillane-adjacent blog post in a row.  In 2002, New American Library published A Century of Noir: Thirty-two Classic Crime Stories, a volume edited by Spillane and Max Allan Collins, and today we'll read four of those thirty-two, tales by Fredric Brown, Gil Brewer, Spillane himself, and Bill Pronzini.  A Century of Noir actually includes a story by a fifth person who interests us here at MPorcius Fiction Log, Leigh Brackett, but we've already read her contribution, "I Feel Bad Killing You," which I blogged about (along with some other Brackett crime fiction) back in 2020.

"Don't Look Behind You" by Fredric Brown (1947)

This seems to be a well-liked tale, first appearing in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and then being reprinted in numerous magazines over the years.  Those who chose to reprint it had reason to do so, because it is quite good.

"Don't Look Behind You" tells the story of a talented printer who gets mixed up in a bad crowd when a well-dressed criminal recruits him to join a counterfeiting operation.  The horrendous adventures the printer has among the criminals and in the clutches of the police drive him insane and turn him into a serial killer!  The text is actually penned by the printer, so Brown is able to very convincingly show us how insane his main character is, rather than just show us.  Another strength of the story is that it is centered on a human relationship, that between the career criminal and the naïve printer; this relationship is movingly pathetic, as the criminal, of course, is just using the printer, but the printer admires the crook and, in his mind, the printer builds up the delusion that they have a wonderful friendship--this fantasy of having a bosom comrade gives the printer, when the going gets tough, the strength to carry on, to triumph over adversity, but his triumph does not redeem or ennoble him--on the contrary, it serves only to give him the opportunity to work monstrous evil on innocent people.  

Thumbs up for this well-written and emotionally powerful tragedy.  

Verdict and Suspense are two magazines which reprinted 
"Don't Look Behind You" in the 1960s

"The Gesture" by Gil Brewer (1956)

We recently read Brewer's Backwoods Teaser; I thought all the psychological and dramatic stuff in the novel was good, but was irritated by the cop-out ending.  Fortunately, this very short little tale has a much better, much more believable ending.

A successful business owner has a beautiful wife, and he is so jealous that he has moved them out to an island so no men will be able to ogle her.  But as the story begins his wife has convinced him to let a photographer stay over a few days to take pictures of the photogenic island for a magazine.  The husband gets insanely jealous, thinking the journalist is trying to steal his wife, and plots to kill the photographer.

Something happens that makes the business guy reappraise what he has done, and he realizes he has ruined his wife's life, that he has kept her a prisoner on this island.  We readers also get an astonishing surprise--the couple have been on the island for like 50 years!  The idea that the young photographer is going to steal away an eighty-something man's seventy-something wife is absurd!  Suddenly cognizant of how silly, and how unjust, he has been, the guy takes the gun he was going to murder the photog with and commits suicide!

Thumbs up for this economical, totally convincing and quite surprising melodrama.    

"Tomorrow I Die" by Mickey Spillane (1960)  

The three Mickey Spillane stories we read for the blog post prior to the last all included lots of clue hunting, lots of the main character going here and there and talking to many minor characters, collecting all the clues with which to solve the mystery.  "Tomorrow I Die" has none of that, it is a sort of battle of wits for high stakes practically from the start to the finish.

Our narrator is riding the train through the dusty desert near the border; when the train stops briefly in a little town he gets out to get a drink.  In the bar he meets the local sheriff and the sheriff's hot daughter, who is engaged to the town's mayor.  She seems to recognize the narrator, and he explains that he used to be in movies--the young woman is starstruck as she identifies the narrator as an actor she used to have a crush on.

Bank robbers who have an elaborate scheme to loot the local bank take over the bar and hold everybody hostage.  They think that the narrator is the mayor because he wears an old-fashioned hat of the same style habitually worn by the mayor.  Using the sheriff's police car and another vehicle, the gang of crooks and the hostages travel to the bank, where the hoods get all the money, and then proceed into the desert.  The sheriff drives his own police car, and complicated circumstances arise that allow him to trick the driver of the second car into going off the road and down into a deep ravine.  That second car carried the sheriff's daughter--luckily she was thrown clear and not hurt.  That car also carried the money, which is now down at the bottom of the ravine.

By now it is night and it is too dangerous to go down into the ravine to get the dough.  The survivors end up at some isolated cabin; in the morning the crooks send the narrator and the girl back to the ravine to retrieve the cash--they have the sheriff and some other minor characters as hostages, and will slay them if our heroes don't come back with the cash in time.

The narrator and the girl run into the police and the mayor, her fiancé.  The mayor sees an opportunity in this caper to achieve fame that he can use to make his way into the governor's mansion--when the girl realizes how greedy and craven her fiancé really is, she loses all interest in him and falls in love with the narrator.  The narrator tricks the cops and the mayor into separating, directing the fuzz in the wrong direction so they won't find the crooks and hostages in the cabin, and ties up the mayor so he won't cause any trouble.

The narrator and his new girlfriend retrieve the cash, and then divide it up and secrete it in multiple hidden caches not too far from the cabin, but out of sight.  The narrator writes down where the money is and when they get back to the cabin he gives the directions to the boss of the gang.  The two most senior members of the gang leave with the page of directions to dig up the money, leaving behind their henchman to murder all the hostages.  The two crooks stumble upon the police, who outnumber and outgun them and kill them.  

Then comes the twist ending.  The narrator is not really a former actor, but a killer who looks like the actor and sometimes impersonates him.  He has had a small pistol with him the entire time and now that he faces only one foe, he is he able to outdraw and kill him.  The narrator escapes to Mexico, leaving behind the girl who fell in love with him.  

(You'll recall that Spillane's "Kick It or Kill!" and "The Bastard Bannerman" also featured main characters whose true vocations were kept a secret from us until the end of the story.)

This story is not very believable; again and again people act in ways that I found inexplicable or at least unconvincing.  It was a little hard to believe that the bank robbers had no idea what the mayor looked like.  And that the crook who frisked the narrator wouldn't discover his pistol.  (The text says he did a "professional job" of patting the narrator down, but didn't pat down his arms, so the .32 in his sleeve went undiscovered.)  And that the narrator and other hostages could keep doing things to piss off the crooks without the crooks killing any of them.  This is in contrast to the Brown and Brewer stories we are talking about today, in which everybody acts in a way that feels absolutely authentic.  Another contrast is that Spillane's story has no emotional resonance; I felt for the characters in Brown and Brewer's stories, and when those writers unleashed their plot twists I was genuinely surprised.  Spillane's male and female leads in "Tomorrow I Die" are flat and I observed what happened to them and the twist ending with only a distant curiosity.  Spillane's minor characters, like the hoods with their various psychological quirks and the insightful old man who owns the cabin (one of the odd elements of the story is the idea that real killers can recognize each other by looking into each other's eyes), are sort of fun, but like cartoon characters, not real people.

"Tomorrow I Die" isn't irritating or boring, but it isn't immersive or impressive, much less thrilling or moving.  I'll call it acceptable.

It looks like this one first appeared in Cavalier under its deadname "I'll Die Tomorrow."  In the 1980s it would serve as the title story of an anthology of uncollected Spillane tales with a cover by Jim Steranko.

"One Night at Dolores Park" by Bill Pronzini (1995)

I'm primarily interested in Pronzini as a collaborator with our hero Barry N. Malzberg, though we have read a few stories he wrote all by himself, like the crime tale "Night Freight" and three SF short shorts I thought were bad bad.  This one first saw light of day in a copy Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine which had Pronzini's moniker in the most prominent position on its cover.

     

The intro to "One Night at Dolores Park" here in A Century of Noir argues that Pronzini is a literary genius who ignores the dictates of today's "bottom-line oriented" publishers and writes about "serious concerns" and will be respected after he is dead for chronicling "our time."  Good grief; is this going to be a detective story about welfare reform or sanctions on Iraq or war in Bosnia or Rwanda?  I lived through the '90s, I don't need to be lectured about them via the medium of a detective story.  I almost decided to skip this one, especially after I saw it was part of a long series ("The Nameless Detective"), but it is only eight or nine pages so I bit the bullet and took the plunge.

The story starts like a newspaper account of a San Francisco neighborhood gentrified by "well-off Yuppies" and then stricken by a plague of drug dealers and junkies who make the place too dangerous for decent people to walk through at night.  The narrator is staking out this neighborhood one night, sitting in his car by a park in which lurk the aforementioned drug dealers and drug addicts; he is on a job, trying to serve a subpoena to some alleged stock fraudster who is hiding out in his yuppie friend's house nearby.  

The narrator sees a woman walking--a guy in a ski mask with a pistol is stalking her!  The narrator rushes to help her, the mugger grabs at her purse and then shoots her, then shoots at our hero before  disappearing into the park.

The woman was just hit in the upper arm, so the narrator takes her to her place to call the cops and the paramedics.  She is a successful artist, her house full of her paintings comparable to those of Hans Hofmann or Burgoyne Diller--geometric abstractions, squares and triangles in primary colors.  Her husband is a failed sculptor whose many sculptures just look like blobs.  The woman describes her relationship with her husband--he is envious and jealous and they argue all the time. 

When the husband shows up the narrator immediately figures out hubby was the "mugger" based on his gait and other clues.  Our hero holds him until the cops arrive.

The theme of "One Night at Dolores Park" is that the world is in a constant state of war; Pronzini explicitly calls the relationship of the married couple "their private war," the struggle of the yuppies vs the druggies is called "Armageddon" by a cop, and Pronzini ends the tale with narrator's musings about how the world is locked in a struggle between good and evil and he is confident that good will triumph.

Acceptable.  Seeing as our lettered class and so much of our popular culture has such a positive--or at least permissive--view of drugs nowadays, and is so skeptical--even hostile--to law enforcement, especially when it comes to marijuana, it is interesting to see in this relatively recent story what amounts to an attack on drugs and an endorsement of the police.     

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I want to like Mickey Spillane because he seems like a fun guy (Steranko used Spillane himself as the model for the guy on the cover of Tomorrow I Die--come on, that is awesome!) and he hates the commies, but of these four stories his is obviously the least sophisticated and least technically accomplished.  The Brown is my favorite, with the Brewer second.  The Pronzini and the Spillane are about equally "fun" or "entertaining," but Pronzini's is more ambitious and polished, as well as more realistic and believable; it is also more engaged with the real world and real life, it offers opinions and theories about relationships and society--Spillane's story is outlandish, and I'm not sensing that in it he is trying to say much about life or society or whatever.  Spillane's name is on the cover of A Century of Noir as editor, and you'd think he'd choose one of his best things to include in it--did he think "Tomorrow I Die" was one of his best short stories?    

Of course, it is possible Spillane's writing is so subtle it is sailing right over my head.  We'll read more hard-boiled detective stuff for our next blog post, something by Spillane as well as stories by writers associated with the SF world, so soon I'll have another chance to see if Spillane is my cup of tea.