It was a sweet setup, with a ninety thousand payoff

Richard Stark’s Parker, by Darwyn Cooke

I don’t review many comics or graphic novels here. That’s not because I don’t read them; it’s just a question of focus. Graphic novels aren’t novels with art, and it’s a mistake to review them as if they are. It’s also why when I do talk about them I prefer just to talk about comics. It’s obvious when you talk about a comic that the art matters just as much as the writing. The phrase Graphic novel though, that implies to me it’s an illustrated novel and that’s not really what a comic is.

Except of course when that’s exactly what it is. Darwyn Cooke’s Richard Stark’s Parker is a dazzling adaptation of the original Richard Stark (a pseudoynm for Donald E Westlake) novel The Hunter. It’s beautifully drawn with a well-chosen bluish-gray colour palette and every page drips with early ’60′s cool. Although Westlake personally approved the project he sadly didn’t live to see the finally finished work. That’s a great shame, but Cooke did him proud.

That image should really be in landscape of course, but then it wouldn’t fit properly into the space I have. So it goes. Buy the comic.

The plot is simple enough. Parker has been wronged; robbed and left for dead. Now he’s back and he wants to get even. He doesn’t care who he hurts along the way. Parker’s only weapons are his charisma, his wits, his sheer physical presence and the strength of his hands. He won’t need more.

Here’s the third page (not counting title sequences and so on), with Parker striding into town. Anyone familiar with how the novel opens will immediately be able to see how without using a single word Cooke captures Westlake/Stark’s prose.

Parker soon tracks down his ex-wife, and it’s then that we see quite how much of a bastard he is. Parker isn’t a hero, he’s not even really an anti-hero, but he is a a protagonist. Parker drives the story at breakneck pace and it’s never less than exciting, but equally Parker is never anything better than brutal scum.

It’s important to say (for a Guardian reader like me anyway) that I don’t think this is glorifying violence against women. We’re not supposed to like Parker. Rather this shows how Parker solves problems – with his fists. Parker doesn’t care whether the person on the other end is man or woman, powerful or weak, he just cares about what he wants and about getting even with anyone he thinks has wronged him. Unfortunately for his ex, however good her reasons may have been at the time she definitely wronged him.

The two pages above though do help illustrate one potential problem with this comic. The female characters tend to be quite similarly drawn and simply aren’t as developed as the males. Mostly the women are pretty blondes with snub noses; the visual range for the men is much wider. I’ve not seen enough of Cooke’s other work to know whether this is just an idiosyncrasy of his particular style or whether it reflects a lack of female character differentiation in the underlying novel. It certainly feels authentically early ’60s, but not perhaps in a good way – this is a story in which men drive the action, and in which women are essentially passive.

Adapting a novel presents some challenges, not least how to deal with situations where it’s hard to avoid including solid chunks of text. The backstory to what happened to Parker, to why he wants revenge so badly, takes a little while to tell and telling it all through images could detract from the main thrust of the tale. Cooke comes up with an elegant solution, and I’ve excerpted a page below which I think neatly demonstrates it.

Firstly I think that’s a beautifully evocative piece of art in terms of illustrating the planning stage of a heist. It’s also though an elegant way to insert a fairly large chunk of text without having to use multiple pages in which there’d be relatively little actually happening. Cooke adapts his art to the needs of the narrative, but still maintains a consistent style. The result is a comic which is a consistent winner at the level of the individual page, but which is even better as a cohesive work.

One last example. If you’re a fan of classic noir cinema this should hopefully stir your heart a little. If you’re not, well, Guy Savage can recommend some films for you that will almost certainly change your mind.

I opened by talking about how I don’t review comics here much. I made an exception for this one because I thought this such a success. This is a comic which pulses with ’60s hardboiled cool. It’s one to read with some hard bop playing in the background and a whisky on the table (well, really a bourbon but I’m an Islay fan, so whisky it is). If you don’t like comics I’m not saying this will convert you, but if you do or if you’re a Richard Stark fan and are interested in seeing a fresh adaptation of this much adapted novel (at least three movie treatments so far), then it’s a definite win.

Finally, a short technical note. I read this comic on my ipad using an app called Comixology. The app works beautifully and is how I read most of my comics these days, though given how lovely this one turned out to be I did find myself slightly wishing I’d just got a hardcopy.

Cooke has adapted two more Parker novels after this one, and has plans to do a fourth. I fully expect to be reading all of them.

He was the kind of puppy that would lick any hand that he was afraid to bite.

The Way Some People Die by Ross MacDonald

The Way Some People Die is where MacDonald stops imitating Chandler and Hammet and becomes his own writer. It’s the best of the Lew Archer series so far (it’s number three) and it’s as twisted a piece of classic hardboiled as you could wish to read.

The cover above is the one I have, from Black Lizard which is a Vintage Crime imprint. It’s a great cover, and physically a nice book, but I couldn’t resist sharing this older cover with you which I also love.

Lew Archer is hired by a concerned mother to find her wayward daughter., Galatea. The daughter is “crazy for men”, and now she’s disappeared with one leaving a good job as a nurse behind and with the only news being a postcard from San Francisco. It’s not much of a case, girls leave home all the time, but Archer agrees to make some easy inquiries. Before he leaves the mother’s house he takes a look at a photo of Galatea:

Pretty was hardly the word. With her fierce curled lips, black eyes and clean angry bones she must have stood out in her graduating class like a chicken hawk in a flock of pullets.

As you’d expect, it’s not as simple as a young woman who’s grown up and left home. Archer isn’t the only person looking for Galatea and the man she ran away with may be as much a danger to her as the people she’s hiding from. All this and somewhere out there is a package that people are prepared to kill to find (yup, there’s a MacGuffin).

What follows is a byzantine web of greed, double-cross and murder with Archer painstakingly working his way through to unravel just what it is that Galatea has got herself mixed up in. Finding Galatea isn’t Archer’s problem, it’s keeping her alive once he’s found her. All that and Galatea herself is no maiden waiting to be rescued, she’s as hardboiled as the rest of them.

On the level of a detective story The Way Some People Die works extremely well. Archer’s methods make sense (mostly he talks to people, follows up connections, occasionally circles around to talk to someone again once he has new info, it’s dogged detective work). The plot though complicated isn’t needlessly so, by the end you can see why things played out as they did.

All the elements of a great hardboiled novel are present and correct. To actually be a great hardboiled novel though you need more than stock ingredients and snappy dialogue. You need to do something that others aren’t doing, or at least aren’t doing as well. You need to reach beyond the genre.

What raises this novel beyond just being solid genre work is MacDonald’s eye for psychological depth, mood, and description. The Way Some People Die is suffused with a pervasive sense of weariness and sadness.At one point Archer observes of Galatea’s mother:

She lived in a world where people did this or that because they were good or evil. In my world people acted because they had to.

Later, Archer finds himself in a motel room with a pretty girl turned junkie who makes a living conning out-of-towners into thinking they’re going to get lucky:

It was an ugly little room, walled and ceiled with cheap green plaster that reminded me of public locker rooms, furnished with one bed, one chair, one peeling veneer dresser and a rug the moths had been at. It was a hutch for quick rabbit-matings, a cell where lonely men could beat themselves to sleep with a dark brown bottle. The girl looked too good for the room, though I knew she wasn’t.

That’s great description, and it’s not the only example I could have used (there’s a brilliant blow-by-blow account of a fixed fight at one point). Good as it is though it isn’t where MacDonald becomes his own writer. It’s his characterisation that does that.

Take the character of Dowser. Dowser is a racketeer, a mobster, a rich man who lives  in a gated house surrounded by bought women and hired men. So far so standard, but as Archer comes to know Dowser he sees a pathetic and empty man terrified of his own extinction.

Dowser is short, so short that even when he wears sandals by the pool he wears ones with two-inch heels. He can’t bear to be left alone, when his men leave the room he insists Archer stays until one of them returns. He can’t live without the validation of an audience, someone to talk to, to talk at. His real communication is in money, he can’t trust anyone he isn’t paying because he doesn’t know what they want.

It’s an extraordinary portrait. Dowser is humanised, but never ceases to be terrifying. He’s a monster, a hateful creation, and  MacDonald brings out how pitiful Dowser is without the reader ever forgetting quite how dangerous Dowser is too and so without ever actually making him pitiable.

Dowser isn’t the only great character here. MacDonald is forensic, but also compassionate and in contrast to Dowser is Keith Dalloway. Dalloway is a failed actor, a man too good looking for his own good and a drunk. MacDonald takes what with most writers would be a minor supporting character and gives him humanity. What in a film would be almost a walk-on part becomes something much more here, a study of missed chances and a reminder of human frailty.

The reason great crime,  more than any other genre, overlaps with literary fiction is that great crime doesn’t just ask what, it asks why too. MacDonald could have just made Dowser another mob boss from central casting, and if he had this would still have been a very solid novel. He could have made Dalling another good-looking act0r-wannabee, and the plot wouldn’t have suffered any.

MacDonald though asks why. He makes Dowser, Dalloway, Galatea, into real people who become more than just a mob boss, a patsy and a damsel in distress/femme fatale. The result is a book that’s no longer merely influenced by Hammet and Chandler but, that stands alongside them.

When I got off the train I saw two blind men helping each other up the stairs

Dead Man Upright, by Derek Raymond

Dead Man Upright is the fifth, and final, of Derek Raymond’s Factory novels. It’s being reprinted later this year, after a lengthy period out of publication. It became sufficiently obscure that I’ve seen a great many discussions of his Factory novels which make no mention of it at all, which refer to I was Dora Suarez as the last of that sequence.

Suarez is often claimed to be Raymond’s best book. I disagree with that. It’s undoubtedly extremely powerful and an important work of British noir, but He Died with His Eyes Open is for me ultimately the more interesting work. Suarez though makes sense as a finishing point for the Factory novels. It’s so bleak, so mired in filth and horror, that it’s hard to see what could follow it. Anything after it risks anticlimax.

Dead Man Upright isn’t a bad book. It’s worth reading if you’re a Raymond fan, as by now I suppose I am, but it’s not a necessary book. Lots of books of course aren’t at all necessary. There’s no requirement that books should be. Being entertaining is often enough. Raymond though generally tried to do more than merely divert his readers and here the truth is he’s written a reasonably solid crime novel with some moments of genuine interest but one that doesn’t really say anything the previous four novels hadn’t already said.

Dead Man Upright opens about a year after the close of Suarez. The nameless protagonist is drinking with an ex-colleague, Firth, who was fired for drunkenness. Firth believes his upstairs neighbour, a man named Jidney, is a killer. Jidney is middle aged, appears to have little money and isn’t handsome but even so he’s gone out with a string of women. Each of them is with him for a few months, and then suddenly never seen again. The nameless detective is sceptical, but only a little investigation reveals that there’s something very wrong with Jidney indeed. Jidney may be far better off than he seems, the women often disappear after changing their wills in his favour, but most of all he has the dead eyes of a killer.

He was dissatisfied with his face today; it gazed at him, sallow and without expression. He pinched it and narrowed his eyes, but they – even though women insisted that they were ‘mysterious, an artist’s eyes, Ronnie’ – looked back through him flatly., at a flat world; he meant no more to his own eyes than anyone else did. Subaqueous, the eyes of a detached watcher in the depths of a lake, they were not interested in him but in the past; they were still reliving and cautiously catching up with the chaotic situation of a few hours previously.

He tried to correct their lacklustre gaze, but it was a waste of time. Their inky dispassion, his smile, his stereotyped views – mastered and learned by heart in jail – on art, death and relationships, formed part of a fixed set of gestures and passed for wisdom; any attempt to tamper with them contradicted his mask, which immediately loosened, threatening to slip aside like a scrap of plastic dangling from the ear of a drunk. The only reassurance he could extract was the knowledge that the mask had never betrayed him yet; it had deceived all his victims, beckoning them archly into a trompe-l’oeil parlour of sanity, when in reality he was staggering to keep his balance in the roaring slipstream of events, clutching his mantle of self-mastery round him in the frozen delirium of hatred, living to the limit only at the apex of the death he brought the other, and dead to the world thereafter, as well as before.

For the reader there’s no mystery here. The quote above is from early on and is from Jidney’s perspective. Raymond here is exploring the killer’s psychology much more closely than in his previous novels, where he focussed much more on the victims. In common with Raymond’s other killers though Jidney is a banal mockery of a human being who pretends to be like us so that we don’t see the true horror he represents. Jidney is a shell of a man containing a howling void, as intent on lying to himself as he is to his victims.

Raymond’s on familiar ground here, which is both good and bad. As ever some of the writing is extremely good. I loved this line for example:

Where he wanted memory, like a serf, to bring him his version of the past like a brand new coat, it would arrive instead holding something sodden and bloody which bore no relation whatever to the elegant garment he wanted to shrug on.

At other times though it’s hard to escape the feeling of having seen it all before. It is different to take the killer’s perspective, but it’s not as if he ignored their inner worlds entirely in his previous books. As ever the detective beats out the truth, haranguing suspects and generally making such a nuisance of himself that opposition is simply worn down by his persistence, but I’ve had four previous novels with him doing much the same thing. Worst of all was an occasional feel for me of Raymond-by-numbers, as the following quote illustrates:

It wasn’t a room that anyone with positive aims in life would put up with for long. The greasy red carpet was worn through to the threads and I looked down at it thinking that at least the blood wouldn’t show when someone cut his throat over it. The wallpaper was the shade of green that only said hello to people looking for a place to kill thsemleves; in fact it was the ideal surroundings for your end to introduce itself to you in the mirror set into the junk city wardrobe; I expected my doppelganger to walk through it any moment with the message that this was it.

That’s very Raymond, that’s the trouble, it’s a bit too Raymond.

Other flaws emerge. At one point there’s a fairly extended analysis of the killer’s handwriting and what it says about his inner life. The problem is that I find graphology as persuasive as phrenology, and the whole section just seemed a nonsense, and out of keeping with the detective’s generally much more matter-of-fact approach of just worrying away at loose threads until the lies unravelled and left the truth exposed. Later still the detective is given a deadline of 72 hours in which to close the case. That’s not coming dangerously close to cliché. That’s driving straight into it at full speed.

Around the two third mark, perhaps a little later, the book takes a sudden change of tack. In a call back to a technique used heavily in the first novel we’re treated to the killer’s own words (as we were to the victim’s in He Died), as the detective reads lengthy letters from Jidney justifying and explaining himself.

The issue with this is that Raymond has already established that Jidney is a narcissist and, like all Raymond’s killers, fundamentally a bore. He lacks the spark of life, and merely mimics it. His letters read convincingly, but in writing letters that convince as coming from a narcissistic bore Raymond doesn’t escape the obvious problem that the letters themselves are a bit boring.

Looking above I’ve been fairly damning. In a way that’s an overly harsh verdict on my part. If I hadn’t read He Died and Suarez then I’d have rated this much higher. Jidney is a genuinely chilling creation. Raymond creates real sympathy for his victims, making them flawed but human and wholly undeserving of the pain and terror that Jidney inflicts. Most cleverly of all Raymond doesn’t necessarily make them likeable. We don’t have to be good people in order to deserve compassion. We just have to be people. The detective is damned by all who know him as rude, aggressive, unreasonable, but the reality is that he is driven by a terrible love for all of us in our flawed futility. It’s not anger that makes him so bloody minded, it’s love, despair and an undending desire to save us even though we exist in a world that permits no redemption.

That’s powerful stuff, and as I say without the earlier books I’d rate this one higher. In the end though Raymond did write the earlier Factory novels, and this simply isn’t as good. It has its moments, but it has its failings too and while it didn’t deserve to be written out of his history as it was for a while, there’s a reason it’s taken a while to bring it back into print.

This partiular Raymond has been well served for reviews. There’s an excellent one here that I largely agree with, a more positive and again well written one here (I disagree with the conclusion about the meaning of the book’s final words, but it’s a point one can reasonably disagree upon) and a strongly positive (and very well argued) one by author Jeff Vandermeer here. I recommend reading all of them, as they each bring out different points. Perhaps that’s the best praise one can offer this novel. Four reviewers found different things to say. Even when not at the top of his game, Raymond still gives the reader something to think about. He still disturbs.

“Death always doubles off”

The Crazy Kill, by Chester Himes

Over Christmas I read an article which quoted PD James. She talked about how the pleasure of crime fiction was the knowledge that by the end of the book order would be restored. Bad things happen, but good wins out. The world is, ultimately, just.

That’s true of some crime fiction, but not of any crime fiction I enjoy reading. It’s not true of Chester Himes. In the 1950s Harlem of Himes’ novels the bad guys generally do get punished, but so do several other people along the way and there’s no restoration of order because there was never any order to begin with.

Here’s the opening of The Crazy Kill:

It was four o’clock, Wednesday morning, July 14th, in Harlem, U.S.A. Seventh Avenue was as dark and lonely as haunted graves.
A colored man was stealing a bag of money.

The bag is full of change. It’s on the seat of a double-parked car, just near a cop on patrol and a grocery store manager who’s opening up and will be back in a moment to pick up the bag and take it inside. Problem is, a bag doesn’t have to be left alone long in Harlem to go missing.

Nearby at a wake Reverent Short is leaning out of a first-story window watching proceedings. He leans too far out, falls and ends up in a large basket of bread sitting outside the bakery below.

The Reverend’s fine, but when he returns to the wake he does so with what he claims to be a vision. He saw a dead man, and when the partygoers go outside they find right in that same bread basket the body of Valentine Haines, stabbed through the heart with the knife still jutting out.

Before long everyone’s wondering who killed Val. Was it Johnny, local gangster and Val’s business partner? Was it Dulcy, Johnny’s girl and Val’s sister? What about Chink Charlie? He’s got the hots for Dulcy and he owns a knife just like the one sticking out of the corpse. Everyone says Val had no real enemies, but there seem to be a lot of people who might be in the frame for his death.

The Reverend’s throwing out accusations and stirring up trouble; Dulcy doesn’t seem to mind Chink Charlie paying her a little attention; and Johnny’s a jealous man with a violent temper. If things carry on as they are Val’s body won’t be the only one with a knife sticking out of it. Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed are soon on the scene and applying pressure.

The questioning was conducted in a soundproof room without windows on the first floor. This room was known to the Harlem underworld as the “Pigeon Nest.” It was said that no matter how tough an egg was, if they kept him in there long enough he would hatch out a pigeon.

I won’t say more about the plot. It’s only there because without it nothing would happen. As ever with Himes the real substance is in the characters, and in the sense of Harlem life. Johnny is a successful gambler and gets a lot of respect, even from the police. He wears sharp suits and drives a fancy car. The Reverend says, and believes, that he’s sworn off all alcohol, but he drinks a nerve tonic of his own devising which is a mix of hard drugs and harder liquor.

This is a Harlem filled with gambling joints, whorehouses, the Holy Roller Church where the Reverend preaches and where the congregation roll around on the floor when the spirit moves them. It’s Summer, it’s hot as hell, and tempers are running high. The only place there’s any relief is in the bars and gambling joints where people like Johnny spend their time:

Inside it was cool, and so dark he had to take off his sun glasses on entering. The unforgettable scent of whisky, whores and perfume filled his nostrils, making him feel relaxed.

In a sense this is Damon Runyon territory. It’s a different decade, a different part of New York and everyone’s black, but otherwise he’d recognise a lot of this. Just look at the names some of the characters have: Chink Charlie, Baby Sis, Reverend Short, Valentine Haines, Deep South, Mamie Pullen, Dulcy, Johnny, Pigmeat, Poor Boy, Doll Baby, Alamena, and of course Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed themselves.

The difference though is that Chester Himes doesn’t write comic novels. His characters have none of the loveable nature of Runyon’s rogues. Take away Runyon’s humour, and his affection, and the milieu isn’t so different. Damon Runyon after all portrays a world in which people scheme, cheat, take crazy risks and kill. Runyon does it with a laugh. Himes’ books have plenty of laughs, but hollow ones, and you can smell his characters’ sweat.

There’s always a question with novels forming part of a series as to where one should start. With the Harlem cycle the answer has to be at the beginning with A Rage in Harlem. The answer definitely shouldn’t be The Crazy Kill. It’s solid, but probably the weakest of the three I’ve read so far.

Jones and Ed barely feature, which isn’t vastly problematic as Himes’ interest is always more in his criminals than his detectives, but their presence sets up expectations about the kind of novel this is which aren’t quite realised. The plot, clearly intentionally, makes very little sense which is fine as Himes is all about the atmosphere but does make what happens all a little random (which again is clearly intentional, but even so is a little unsatisfying).

Although The Crazy Kill features a crime, and detectives who solve that crime, it’s not really a detective novel. At the end I found myself wondering if it would have been better with a little more detecting, or with none at all. It’s messing with Mr. In-Between that causes the problems there are here.

In writing this I found two reviews online by other bloggers, here and here. That first link has two extremely well chosen quotes and so I’d strongly suggest at least following that to get a little more of a taste of Himes’ prose. Otherwise, if you’ve read the first two Himes and enjoyed them then you should absolutely read this, but if you’re not already a fan this won’t be the one to convert you.

The cover up above is from the Vintage Crime edition, which I don’t particularly recommend as it has absurdly large margin spaces. There’s a Penguin Modern Classics edition now available, and if I were buying this now that’s what I would get. For the curious there’s also apparently a biography of Himes written by James Sallis, which makes it rather fitting that this review follows my review of Drive.

On a very final note, I found two alternative covers for this online, which I thought I’d share because they’re just great examples of vintage cover art. Particularly the first.

I drive. That’s all I do.

Drive, by James Sallis

Readers often come to writers with expectations. Sometimes those are based on that writer’s previous work (and those expectations can be a straitjacket for a writer), sometimes they’re based on reviews or blog comments, sometimes they’re based on pure assumption (I have expectations about Danielle Steele, but truth be told I’ve very little to base them on).

When it came to reading James Sallis I expected competent crime writing. I expected solid thrillers with efficient prose and a well crafted plot; the sort of book I might read on a long journey or when tired. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of book, and plenty right with it. On the strength of Drive though James Sallis is a much more interesting animal.

Here’s the opening paragraph from Drive:

Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there’d be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment. And the moment includes this blood lapping toward him, the pressure of dawn’s late light at windows and door, traffic sounds from the interstate nearby, the sound of someone weeping in the next room.

Firstly, that’s better than competent writing. Just seeing it again now it strikes me how clear it is. I’ve not yet seen the film version of Drive, but this unfolds in my head as I read it. I can see the blood and the light, hear the weeping and the sound of traffic. I even have an image of Motel 6. This is the kind of prose that often gets described as lean, taut, and much as I’d like to come up with something more original I find myself reaching for the same words. It is efficient prose, but it’s not merely efficient. It has style.

It’s immediately apparent that this paragraph is just a slice in time. Driver is sitting, not in movement. Blood is still lapping towards him though, and whoever is crying is still doing so, so it’s not a static scene. This is the immediate aftermath of violence. A brief moment of reflection, caught between the action just past and the time for regret later. The story’s already started, the reader is thrown in, in media res.

From there Sallis tells a fairly straightforward tale of a heist gone bad, a doublecross and a spiral of resulting revenge and murder. Classic Hollywood stuff, and this is very much a Hollywood narrative. The tricks here are cinematic.

Characters are iconic (none more so than Driver, a man with no name, but there’s also hired muscle out of Houston called Dave Strong, a blonde named Blanche and so on). The story is told in scenes, each of which is framed so neatly you can almost hear Sallis yelling cut. The narrative jumps backward and forward in time, not so much as to be confusing but so that I was pulled in and forward, so that I wanted to see how it would all fit together.

Driver is just that. He’s a Hollywood stunt driver and part time getaway driver. Sallis tells enough of his past to get a feel for his character, but never his name. Here as the classic Fitzgerald quote goes, action is character. We know Driver through what he does, how he does it. What he says is almost unimportant, and besides he doesn’t say much.

Up till the time Driver got his growth about twelve, he was small for his age, an attribute of which his father made full use. The boy could fit easily through small openings, bathroom windows, pet doors and so on, making him a considerable helpmate at his father’s trade, which happened to be burglary. When he did get his growth he got it all at once, shooting up from just below four feet to six-two almost overnight, it seemed. He’d been something of a stranger to and in his body ever since. When he walked, his arms flailed about and he shambled. If he tried to run, often as not he’d trip and fall over. One thing he could do, though, was drive. And he drove like a son of a bitch.

Drive is just as focused as Driver himself. It sets out to tell a classic story (the difference between a classic story and a clichéd story is mostly execution) and it does so like a son of a bitch. I thought it one of the best and most invigorating crime novels I’ve read in a while, even though in terms of plot and character there’s nothing original here at all.

I’ll end with one final quote. It’s here because I think it’s a thing of beauty, and because it captures the novel. It’s Hollywood in a sentence.

Throwing the duffel bag over the seat, he backed out of the garage, pulled up by the stop sign at the end of the street, and made a hard left to California.

Haven’t we all at times wanted to throw a duffel bag over the seat, pull up to the end of the street and make a hard left to California? I know I have, and I don’t even know how to drive.

Guy Savage reviewed Drive here: here and is pretty much responsible for bringing Sallis to my attention. My copy came as a review freebie from the publisher.

Everything was natural now

The Train, by Georges Simenon and translated by Robert Baldick

Before I started blogging Simenon to me meant Maigret, and since I wasn’t interested in Maigret I wasn’t interested in Simenon. As anyone actually familiar with Simenon will know though Maigret was just one part of his hugely prolific output. He also wrote noir fiction, psychological thrillers, and novels like The Train.

The Train is a story of small lives caught in grand events. Marcel Feron is a self-employed radio repairman living with his wife and their young child in an ordinary French town near the Belgian border. Their life is ordered and quiet. Marcel isn’t quite a happy man, but he’s not an unhappy one either.

The year is 1940. For some time now Marcel has been listening on his radios to reports of German troop buildups and rumours of invasion. The rumours are true. The Germans roll into Belgium and it’s clear that it will not be long before they are in France. Soon everyone in the area is deciding whether to flee or stay.

I don’t know what the two women said to each other. From the noises I could hear, I gathered that they weren’t the only ones outside, that women were calling to one another from doorstep to doorstep. When Jeanne came back, she looked pale and even more drawn than usual. “They’re going!” she told me. “Where?” “South, anywhere. At the end of the street I saw more cars going past with mattresses on the roof, Belgians mostly.”

As an aside, does anyone know why people used to take their mattresses? Were they particularly expensive back then?

Marcel and his wife, like many others, have done nothing to prepare for this day despite the many signs that it was coming. Oddly Simenon puts in a rather unconvincing psychological explanation for this on Marcel’s part – an idea that he saw himself as destined for this kind of disruption due to events in his childhood.

Given that nobody in the novel has made any real preparations for the arrival of war, and given the story’s about an ordinary man caught up in an extraordinary time, the explanation seemed unnecessary and in any event wasn’t particularly persuasive. It’s not a huge flaw, and it doesn’t come up much after the opening few pages, but it did seem that Simenon felt a need to justify something that simply didn’t require it.

The decision is taken to flee with a few core possessions packed into suitcases. Lacking a car they head to the train station where they join a growing mass of terrified townsfolk. Fortunately they are able to board one of the few trains available.

It was the gendarmes who finally got tired of holding back the crowd. They suddenly broke the cordon and everybody rushed toward the five or six freight cars at the rear of the train. At the last minute I had given Jeanne, together with the food, the suitcase containing Sophie’s things and some of hers. I was left with the heavier of the two suitcases, and with my other hand I was dragging along as best I could the black trunk, which was bumping against my legs at every step. I didn’t feel the pain. I wasn’t thinking of anything, either. I hoisted myself up, pushed by the people behind me, and, trying to stay as near as possible to the sliding door, I managed to put my trunk against the side of the car and sit down on it, panting for breath, with the suitcase on my lap. Everything was natural.

The women and children are put on one carriage and the men on another. Everything is confusion though. Carriages are taken off and attached to different trains. Carriages are added on. Come the morning Marcel’s carriage and his wife’s are on different trains and he is on his own. The French countryside is awash with Belgian refugees many of whom are also being transported by train. Their transports and the French are meant to be kept separate, but soon Marcel’s train has both French and Belgian carriages. Nobody knows where they are, or where their train is headed. As another passenger says:

“If only I knew where I could find my wife and kids! Back there, they treat you like soldiers or prisoners of war: do this, do that, don’t get out on the platform. They give you an orange juice and sandwiches, the women up in front, the men at the back, shoved together like cattle. They cut the train in two without telling you, they machine-gun you, they separate you—in fact, you aren’t human beings anymore.. . .”

Although Marcel’s carriage (a cattle car) is supposed to be men only it does have a few women on it too. One of them starts a sexual relationship with one of the men, the two of them lying so close to Marcel at night on the packed train that he can feel the moment of penetration. Another woman (possibly foreign) forms a bond with Marcel after he gives her some water and he becomes her protector – seen by the others quite clearly as her man (and she as his woman). On a train adrift somewhere in France the normal rules no longer apply.

The Train then is a novel about a man swept out of his life and everything he is familiar with. As the book opens Marcel is a conservative sort living a comfortable if passionless existence. The war tears everything away and leaves him stripped and directionless, but with his context changed he changes too.

The obvious comparison is Jean-Patrick Manchette’s Three to Kill. In both novels an ordinary man is separated from what he knows by events utterly outside his control. In both the result is a change in the man – the man being a product of his situation.

Three to Kill is ultimately a better novel than The Train and is certainly the more disturbing. The Train though is probably more realistic, and is interesting for its exploration of a small life caught up in world-spanning events. Marcel is a refugee; a man become an administrative problem. For him though exile from home is a form of liberation. People die in The Train. Germans strafe civilians and France of course falls. For Marcel though it is a strange form of holiday. The suggestion is that he’s not alone in that.

In the end I didn’t love The Train. I think that’s reflected in the fact this review features more description than reaction. I did enjoy it though and I don’t at all regret reading it. It’s well written and the translation flows smoothly (save at one point when a French character is identified as Jeff, was that really the character’s name in the original text?). Marcel’s connection with the woman he meets on the train is nicely realised and Simenon skilfully captures the psychology of a man caught in the paradox of being at his most alive at the very time his life is on hold.

The Train is published by Melville House as part of their Neversink Library series – “books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored”. I got my copy free for review through netgalley. The Melville House page for The Train has quotes hailing it as a masterpiece and as having “no false note”. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it certainly deserved bringing back into the light and I’m glad Melville did so.

I’ll end with one final quote. It has nothing to do with the review, though it is from The Train. I just liked it too much not to include it.

… somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much.

Quite.

Classic Himes

Penguin is bringing out the first five of Chester Himes’ Harlem Noir novels in its modern classics range. I’m delighted by this. The Himes’ novels are underrated and not particularly well known now, but they really are classics and they do deserve much more attention than they receive.

I’ve written about the first two novels here. Here’s the new Penguin covers:

Happy as I am about this I am a little surprised to see five making classic status at once. Penguin treated Ambler similarly of course but each of his were stand alone novels. Still, it’s welcome recognition for a neglected writer and that’s always a good thing.

On a more personal aside, I’m still presently reading Proust’s second volume. Unfortunately work pressures meant that I haven’t made the progress I’d hoped so it’s still not finished. Thankfully it is very good. I did however read a small Penguin collection of Jean Rhys short stories which I shall write up soon.

Rules and commandments

There’s been a bunch of guidelines and rules for writers published over the years. As long as people want to write (but don’t quite now how or what about) I guess there always will be. I thought I’d share my two favourites.

The first is here simply because it’s long amused me. Father Ronald Knox was a priest and crime writer who wrote a number of detective stories during the 1920s and ’30s. He also famously wrote a (admittedly slightly tongue in cheek) list of commandments that he thought all detective fiction writers should follow.

Here they are:

The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.

No Chinaman must figure in the story.

No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

The detective must not himself commit the crime.

The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.

The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

You will note, of course, that every one of these commandments has been violated at one time or another in a classic mystery novel.

I particularly like the no Chinaman rule, which seems so oddly bizarre. Sax Rohmer and Robert van Gulik would not have approved.

Knox’s period saw a fair few other writers come up with similar lists and they capture why this genre has never much appealed to me. Ok, he didn’t really mean people to follow them, but there is a degree of truth to them all the same. The point in good detective fiction is a hard but fair puzzle, capable of solution by the reader, which is told via an entertaining story and protagonist. That’s not stuff that much interests me.

Here a much more interesting list. Elmore Leonard’s famous rules of writing:

Elmore Leonard’s Ten Rules of Writing
Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle

from the New York Times, Writers on Writing Series.

By ELMORE LEONARD

These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.

They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s “Sweet Thursday,” but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.

The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .

. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories “Close Range.”

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character—the one whose view best brings the scene to life—I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in “Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. “Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, “Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled “Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter “Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: “Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”

“Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

This is a more serious list than Knox’s, but it has in common that each rule can and sometimes should be broken. For all that though, they’re not bad rules. Leonard’s examples are well chosen. His explanations make a lot of sense. Following these rules would help a novice writer avoid writing a truly bad book.

Naturally many of the greatest writers merrily ignore Leonard’s prescriptions. That’s fine. Those writers know what they’re doing. Leonard’s rules are pretty solid requisites for good writing. That doesn’t mean they’re requisites for great writing. Leonard’s a good enough writer to know there’s no formula for that.

They say it’s a very big stone. They tell me it’s almost two hundred carats.

The Blue Sweetheart, by David Goodis

I wrote the other day about Black Pudding by David Goodis. Unlike it’s culinary namesake it was bland stuff.

Black Pudding was one of two Goodis’ stories that I’d picked up for my Kindle. The other was The Blue Sweetheart. Stranded again recently without my copy of Pynchon’s V handy (my read of the moment) I decided to give it a try.

Like Black Pudding, The Blue Sweetheart is formulaic pulp crime. Both feature a wronged man, a beautiful woman who has abandoned the hero in order to run off with the bad guy, a quest for revenge and a final confrontation. There are no surprises here. The difference though is that where Black Pudding was kind of flat The Blue Sweetheart is just plain fun.

I couldn’t bear posting up the badly computer generated image that’s been used as a cover for The Blue Sweetheart on kindle, so here’s an image of the author instead:

Here’s the opening, and to paraphrase Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell if this doesn’t speak to you then you may as well quit this review now:

Thick sticky heat came gushing from the Indian Ocean, closed in on Ceylon, and it seemed to Clayton that he was the sole target. He sat at the bar of a joint called Kroner’s on the Colombo waterfront, and tried vainly to cool himself with gin and ice. It was Saturday night and the place was mobbed, and most of them needed baths. Clayton told himself if he didn’t get out soon, he’d suffocate. But he knew he couldn’t walk out. If he walked out, he’d be killed.

That’s more like it. That’s pulp. We have an exotic location, a man in trouble, a gin joint and the threat of imminent violence. The only thing that’s missing is a beautiful woman. She’ll be along shortly.

I’m not going to talk at length about this story. Clayton has discovered a huge and perfect blue sapphire. It’s not his first find. A while back he discovered some other gems, less valuable than the sapphire but still decent. He had hoped to use them to provide the means to settle down with his girl. A man called Hagen took the gems and took the girl and left Clayton with nothing but the memory of their laughter. Now Clayton has this new find, an unprecedented treasure, and everyone’s suddenly keen to get it off him. Even the girl’s back in the picture…

Goodis still isn’t that amazing a literary craftsman. At one point he uses that hoary old technique of having the hero look at himself in the mirror and size himself up. Does anyone ever really do that outside fiction?

Clayton lit a cigarette and stood staring at himself in the wall mirror. His hair was a black storm on his head and he had a two-day growth on his face and all he wore was a pair of shorts. But then, still focusing on the mirror, he wasn’t seeing his unkempt appearance. He was seeing something beyond the mirror. Again his brain made the tortuous journey along the paths of bitter memory.

When I talked about Black Pudding Lee Monks in the comments said that stories like these should be like neat vodka. He’s right, and here’s the thing: neat vodka is sometimes a little on the rough side. What it lacks in subtlety though it makes up for in impact.

Goodis relies here on stock techniques. There’s that self-examination in the mirror; there’s a beautiful blonde; a seedily corrupt Englishman with an air of menace; a solid friend that money can’t buy; a greedy gem merchant who’ll stop at nothing to possess the stone. None of it is original. It rattles along though. The pacing’s good and there’s a constant air of tension and danger. Yes, it’s formula, but it’s good formula. It entertains, and that’s it’s only goal.

One last quote. Here Clayton takes a gun with him and decides to spy on Hagen even though he knows Hagen has men combing the streets looking for him. He runs into a couple of Hagen’s thugs:

The thugs hadn’t seen the gun, they were concentrating on their own target. As they lunged, Clayton sidestepped and brought the gun-butt crashing against the skull of the man nearest him. The man went down like a toppled statue. The other man let out a curse and forgot Hagen’s orders not to use the knife for killing, and slashed the blade toward Clayton’s throat. Clayton stepped back, wielding the gun so that the butt hit the man’s wrist. There was the cracking sound of splintered bone. The man opened his mouth to yell, and Clayton rushed in and used the gun like a hammer on the man’s mouth. The man went to his knees, spitting blood and teeth and choking on more blood. Clayton gave him a rap on the temple that knocked him flat and put him to sleep.

It’s ugly, it’s violent, it’s arguably all a bit ludicrous. It’s pulp. Pulp is the doughnut of the literary world. You eat it not because it’s good for you and certainly not for the quality of the ingredients or the craftsmanship. You eat it because it’s an indulgence. I wouldn’t recommend to anyone that they have doughnuts all the time, but sometimes it’s nice to kick back with something sweet, sticky and probably not at all good for you.

One final note. Black Pudding and The Blue Sweetheart are both published by Wonder ebooks as part of their “Noir Master Series”. Let’s be blunt here, even for pulp they’re not masterpieces and they’re not noir either. This though was a fun story and if Wonder ebooks’ descriptions are a little hyperbolic given the actual quality of these stories, well, that’s pulp too.

Revenge is black pudding

Black Pudding, by David Goodis

I’m a Hard Case Crime fan. Not a very good fan since I’ve only read one book published by them so far and only own two, but a fan all the same. It’s the covers. They’re just gorgeous.

One of the Hard Case Crime titles I’ve been looking at is by David Goodis. He’s a writer that’s been recommended to me by at least two different people. When I saw that two of his stories were going extremely cheap on Kindle it seemed a great chance to try him out. Admittedly neither were titles that had been recommended to me, but they were immediately accessible.

So, I bought and downloaded Black Pudding. It’s a short story/novella rather than a full length work. It’s also, unfortunately, not really all that great. I forgot the cardinal rule with pulp writers – follow the recommendations you get. A lot of these guys churned out a lot of material and quality sometimes suffered. They’re remembered for the times they got it right, but that usually doesn’t mean they always got it right.

This is the original cover which I found online:

Ken’s in Philadelphia. He’s an ex-con who just finished serving nine years for a crime he did commit.

There were five of them, Ken and Oscar and Coley and Ken’s wife and the Boss. The name of the Boss was Riker and he was very kind to Ken until the possession of Ken’s wife became a need and then a craving and finally an obsession. It showed in Riker’s eyes whenever he looked at her. She was a platinum blonde dazzler, a former burlesque dancer named Hilda. She’d been married to Ken for seven months when Riker reached the point where he couldn’t stand it any longer and during a job in Bel-air he banged Ken’s skull with the butt end of a revolver. When the police arrived, Ken was unconscious on the floor and later in the hospital they asked him questions but he wouldn’t answer. In the courtroom he sat with his head bandaged and they asked him more questions and he wouldn’t answer. They gave him five-to-twenty and during his first month in San Quentin he learned from his lawyer that Hilda had obtained a Reno divorce and was married to Riker.

Nine years is a long time, but it’s not the full term. That means that Riker has a problem. What if Ken wants revenge? Ken knows Riker can’t take that risk so he hides out, but it’s not long before Oscar and Coley catch up with him.

They spotted him on Race Street between Ninth and Tenth. It was Chinatown in the tenderloin of Philadelphia and he stood gazing into the window of the Wong Ho restaurant and wishing he had the cash to buy himself some egg-foo-yung. The menu in the window priced egg-foo-yung at eighty cents an order and he had exactly thirty-one cents in his pocket. He shrugged and started to turn away from the window and just then he heard them coming. It was their footsteps that told him who they were. There was the squeaky sound of Oscar’s brand-new shoes. And the clumping noise of Coley’s heavy feet. It was nine years since he’d heard their footsteps but he remembered that Oscar had a weakness for new shoes and Coley always walked heavily. He faced them. They were smiling at him, their features somewhat greenish under the green neon glow that drifted through after-midnight blackness. He saw the weasel eyes and buzzard nose of little Oscar. He transferred his gaze to the thick lips and puffed-out cheeks of tall, obese Coley.

I’m far from persuaded by lines like “their features somewhat greenish under the green neon glow”. It seems repetitive. I like my pulp snappy. The scene that follows develops well though as Oscar and Coley decide to take Ken out right there in front of the restaurant. There’s a nice menace to the pair, and the whole scene is very easy to picture.

Ken escapes and lies low in a derelict building where he meets a once beautiful girl who has a terrible facial scar (“It was a terrible scar, really hideous”) and an opium addiction. Ken figures that the scar could be fixed with plastic surgery, and if it were she’d be a real looker. There’s a kindness in her eyes that was never in Hilda’s, but she’s bruised by life and men and wears her scar as armour against either bothering her again. She’s not planning on getting it fixed. She has nothing and nobody to care about that would make it worthwhile.

With all that the stage is set for a reasonably tight little revenge drama. Ken soon finds feelings developing for this girl he’s stumbled into. Both have been badly used and there’s a chance they could find some peace together. First though Ken needs to decide if he’s going to roll over and wait for Riker to take him out or if he’s going to take his revenge – revenge apparently having a sweet taste, like black pudding.

No, I’m not particularly sure of that analogy either. It could easily be a real phrase though. It’s certainly stupid enough to be true.

It’s all pretty clichéd. That’s not in itself a problem. It’s a short story and cliché is one way of cutting to the chase. It provides a platform upon which the fun stuff can be built. For me the weakness here was more that it was also a little obvious. Nothing really surprised me.

The best pulp crime writer I know is Mickey Spillane. Spillane makes heavy use of cliché too. Mike Hammer is as hard as nails, the women he encounters are beautiful and either innocents or deadly femme fatales. Mike swings with both fists and though he may take the occasional kicking by the end he always comes out on top.

What’s good about a Spillane Mike Hammer story isn’t then the destination. Someone’s going to get wronged. Mike’s going to take an interest and decide to avenge them. There’ll be setbacks but someone’s going to end up with a bullet in their stomach and it won’t be Mike. That’s the way it goes in Hammerland (no relation to MC).

It’s the journey that makes it fun. Spillane writes punchy and immediate prose. He throws in twists and turns so that while the eventual destination is never in doubt how you get there is (and who Mike will end up shooting is too).

The problem here is how much doubt can there be in this setup? Ken is clearly going to get his black pudding. Riker and the rest are headed for a fall. The only interest that’s left is how it’s written and how you get there. It’s not that well written on this occasion and the journey is in a fairly straight line.

Black Pudding was originally published in Manhunt magazine in 1953. In that context I suspect it would have worked far better. If I’d bought it on the newstand and read it on the way into work I’d have read it as Goodis probably meant me to. As it was it came under a scrutiny it was never really intended for.

In the end Black Pudding isn’t terrible. If it were a film noir I’d probably give it three stars in a review. It has some nice moments, particularly in the interplay with Oscar and Coley and the final standoff with Riker is well handled. I don’t read that much pulp though so when I do I like to read the really good stuff, and everything I’ve heard says Goodis just did much better stories than this one.

While writing this I came across another review which is much more positive. It’s well written and makes a good case for the story. If you’re into pulp crime at all the whole blog looks pretty interesting so it might be worth a root around there generally. Here’s the link. I also found an e-zine with a guide to Manhunt Magazine and pictures of its wonderful covers. That can be found Here.