Hoodwink

TWO

We spent another fifteen minutes kicking it around. It was screwy, all right. Why would anybody accuse six different writers of plagiarizing the same manuscript and then try to extort money from each one? And why wait thirty years after the alleged plagiarism took place to make the accusations and the demands? It could be some sort of mass extortion ploy, — but the only way one of those can work is if each of the potential victims thinks, first, that the extortionist really does have something incriminating against him, and second, that he’s the only one being victimized. All six of the Pulpeteers could hardly be plagiarists. And the extortionist had to know- at least he did if he was sane-that one of the six would be sure to mention it to another, and pretty soon everybody would know everybody else had been approached. Nobody was going to pay off under those circumstances.

So what was the point of it all?

According to Dancer, none of the others had any more of an idea than he did. All of the envelopes, as far as he’d been able to determine, had been mailed in San Francisco, which meant that any one of several million people, including the convention organizers and a few dozen friends, relatives, and casual acquaintances of the six writers, might be guilty. The “Hoodwink” novelette had been unfamiliar to everyone, although they all remembered Evil by Gaslight; the movie still ran pretty often on TV. The author’s style had also been unfamiliar-probably that of a beginner, they all agreed, rather than an established professional.

Most of the Pulpeteers were inclined to shrug the whole thing off as the work of a crank, but at the same time they were curious and maybe just a little uneasy. Unusual or abnormal behavior, particularly by a party or parties unknown, always tends to make people nervous. So when Dancer had mentioned my name to them, the consensus was that it might not be a bad idea to have somebody around who was both a detective by profession and a knowledgeable pulp collector by avocation.

“Whoever’s behind this might not even be at the convention, you know,” I said. “Chances are it’s all some sort of hoax and you’ll never hear from ‘Hoodwink’ again.”

Dancer said, “But suppose one of us does hear from him?”

“Well, that’s a bridge to cross if we come to it.”

“Then you’ll snoop for us?”

“Sure, I’ll do what I can. You’ve got me curious too, now. Just don’t expect too much of me wandering around the convention. If I can do anything at all, it’ll probably be through channels.”

“What channels?”

“I know a guy down in Hollywood,” I said, “who knows some people in the movie industry. He might be able to dig up something on the background of Evil by Gaslight-something on Rose Tyler Crawford-that’ll tie in with this extortion business.”

Dancer liked that approach and said so. Then he looked at his watch, wetting his lips the way a man does when he’s thirsty. “Hey, almost five o’clock,” he said. “I’ve got to be moving.”

I nodded. “Okay if I hang onto the manuscript? I’d like to read it so I know what I’m dealing with.”

“Sure, go ahead.”

I asked him about the party tonight, and he told me it started at eight o’clock in Suite M on the fifteenth floor of the Continental. Another handshake, and off he went to do something about his thirst. When he was gone I went and did something about mine too: poured myself a fresh cup of coffee from the hotplate I keep on the file cabinet.

The hotplate was brand new; the old one, the one I’d bought when I first rented this office twenty years ago, had been badly damaged during that Carding/Nichols case a few months back. The whole office had been badly damaged-torn apart, raped, by a paranoid psychotic who thought my investigative efforts were part of a complex and nonexistent persecution plot. So to go along with the new hotplate, I also had a new desk and chair from a secondhand office-supply company, my old desk and armchair having been scarred and slashed beyond repair. I even had a new poster of my favorite Black Mask cover to replace the one that had been ripped off the wall and shredded out of its frame.

It was the same office I had worked in for two decades and yet it wasn’t.

The new furniture did not look or feel right. The walls and floors still bore the stains of splashed coffee and spilled white glue-the stains Dancer had mentioned earlier. They were a reminder of the rape, and a reminder, too, of Taylor Street and the deteriorating Tenderloin that lay outside. No, it wasn’t the same anymore and hadn’t been for months. Hadn’t been, maybe, for some time before the violation.

And that was why I had finally decided it was time for a change. Time to find a new office in a safer building in a neighborhood that would inspire rather than diminish confidence in potential clients. Time to take a step up in the world, or at least a step sideways into a better environment. Time to put on the front of a higher class private detective, as befitted what some local yellow jour nalist had called “the last of the lone-wolf private eyes.”

My new offices were on Drumm Street not far from the waterfront. The building had been renovated a couple of years ago, and I would have two large, cheery rooms instead of this dreary one-and-an-alcove. The location, in an area more or less surrounded by the financial district, the waterfront docks and warehouses, Embarcadero Center, and the Ferry Building, was attractive and easy to get to. And the best part was, the rent amounted to only forty dollars a month more than I was paying here after the latest increase.

I was all set to move in any time after next Monday, which was the last day of the month. A two-year lease had been signed, and I had given notice to the landlord here; all I had to do was pack up everything that belonged to me and then make arrangements with one of the smaller moving companies to transfer boxes and furniture.

And yet I kept putting off the packing job. I had brought the boxes in three days ago, and I’d had plenty of free time since then, most of which I had spent, as usual, reading pulp stories by Russ Dancer and his peers. Maybe I was just lazy. But more likely it was psychological: giving up a place where you’ve spent a substantial part of your life, a place full of memories more pleasant than unpleasant, is something that does not come easy to somebody with my temperament.

I would have to do it before next Tuesday, but now I had an excuse not to do it at all this week. For the next three days, I would be rubbing elbows with pulp writers at the Hotel Continental. I would not really be working, because I wasn’t getting paid, but that was all right. Next week I could pack boxes and finally get out of here and into my new offices; next week I could worry about building an image as a better-class private eye and also start making lots of money-enough, maybe, to get myself some fancy electronic surveillance equipment, not to mention a sexy secretary.

Right, Mr. Marlowe?

You bet, Mr. Spade.

I carried the coffee back to my desk and sat down with it and the copy of “Hoodwink.” The style in which the manuscript was written was not my cup of tea: florid descriptive passages, some of them a little stilted; arch dialogue and not much in the way of action. But for all that, there was power in the words-a kind of brooding and atmospheric sense of evil that hooked you and kept you hooked from the opening paragraph-

The hansom cab drifted spectrally out of the fog-enwrapped London night, its horse’s hooves clattering upon the cobblestones, the crack of its driver’s whip not unlike the snapping of a condemned man’s neck on the gallows at Newgate Prison. When it drew to a halt before the entrance to No. 7 Kingswood Crescent, the silence which settled around it seemed to possess a sudden sinister breathlessness. The tall man who alighted drew his cloak about him, stood peering up at the great house through its garlands of clinging mist. In that moment of silent motionlessness, man and hansom had the aspect of two-dimensional shadows newly sketched on night’s dark canvas, with ink still wet and glistening.

to the final paragraph-

The identity of that caped figure sent her reeling away toward the open window and the darkness beyond. The stationary objects in the room seemed to swirl past her, shading into distorted and colorless images much like those in a surrealist composition. The darkness reached out for her, yet she was no longer afraid of it. Fearful darkness? No! Merciful darkness. Darkness, her last lover. And when it embraced her in that first instant of weightless descent toward the black waters far below, she cried out not in terror but in ecstasy at the fulfillment of the dark promise which now, at long last, would be hers.

The plot was solid and cleverly worked out: a psychological study of two women and a man, one of whom was a murderer, living in the London of 1895, and of a mysterious fourth person-a caped figure-who wasn’t identified until the last page. That final revelation was surprising in print, but cinematically it had been stunning-the main reason why Evil by Gaslight had been such a box-office success in its time.

I hadn’t seen the movie for a while, and then in an edited version for TV, but its plot and that of “Hoodwink” struck me, as they had Dancer and the other Pulpeteers, as being identical. So did some of the more memorable passages of dialogue. Which started me wondering if maybe the novelette had been written after the film instead of before it-if “Hoodwink” was the plagiarism, copied as a prose work for the purpose of extortion. But even if that were the case, the mechanics of the scheme still escaped me. How could you collect extortion money by accusing six different writers of a thirty-year-old act of plagiarism none of them could have committed?

I studied the extortion letter again, but it didn’t tell me anything more than it had the first time. So much for research. I put the letter and manuscript back into the envelope, pulled the phone and my address file over in front of me, and called Ben Chadwick down in Hollywood.

Chadwick, like me, was a private investigator. Unlike me, he specialized in work for the major film companies-investigating property-room and backlot thefts, insurance claims against the studios, missing actors or actors’ relatives, things like that. I had met him a few years ago on a routine case, and he had looked me up once when he was in San Francisco; we were friendly enough for me to ask a favor and him to do it if he was free.

He was in, free, and willing. When I explained the situation, he said that offhand he couldn’t remember any sort of scandal connected with Evil by Gaslight or even anything memorable from behind-the-scenes. Sounded like a nut thing to him, he said, but he’d see what he could come up with by the first of next week.

After we’d rung off, I picked up the convention brochure Dancer had given me. They had quite a program mapped out for the three-day con. There were two panel discussions on Friday, two on Saturday, and one on Sunday morning; there were cocktail parties on Friday evening and Saturday evening, a banquet Saturday night, and a Sunday luncheon; and there was a pulp art show, a screening of the old Shadow film serial with Victor Jory and another of The Maltese Falcon, and a special auction of more than fifty rare and valuable pulps.

The first of Friday’s panels was called “Weird Tales and the Shudder Pulps” and would be chaired by Ivan Wade, whose specialty during the late thirties and throughout the forties had been some of the grisliest horror fiction ever set down on paper. He was also something of an authority on occult themes and stage magic, the brochure said. Bert Praxas would head the second panel that day, about “The Super Heroes,” a topic on which he was well qualified. He had written some 130 full-length novels between 1939 and 1951 about a crimefighter called The Spectre, one of the era’s rivals to The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Operator #5.

Saturday’s panels were “The Western and Adventure Pulps,” chaired by Jim Bohannon, one of the most prolific writers in each of those categories; and “The Pulp Editor Versus the Pulp Writer,” headed by Frank Colodny. The final, Sunday morning, panel was the one that most interested me: “The Hard-boiled Private Eyes,” with co-chairpersons Russ Dancer, Waldo Ramsey, and Cybil Wade, Ivan’s wife. Dancer’s qualifications were obvious, as were Ramsey’s-I recognized his name as a semiregular contributor to Midnight Detective, one of Colodny’s Action House pulps, and others such as Black Mask and New Detective, he had also become a successful suspense novelist in recent years. But I didn’t know what Cybil Wade was doing there until I read her list of credits and discovered, with some amazement, that she was Samuel Leatherman.

If I had been asked to name the best writer of pulp private-eye fiction after Hammett and Chandler, I would have said Samuel Leatherman without having to think twice. The Leatherman stories, all of which featured a tough, uncompromising detective named Max Ruffe, had run in Black Mask, Dime Detective, and occasionally Midnight Detective throughout the forties. They were lyrical studies in violence, poetic in the same way Hammett and Chandler were poetic, with more characterization and insight than any five average pulp stories. But they were male stories from beginning to end; the style was masculine, the appeal was masculine, even the insights were masculine. The fact that they had been written by a woman was more than a little remarkable. And it made me want to meet Cybil Wade even more than any of the others-to find out what sort of woman she was and also to find out why she had never taken Max Ruffe into book-length novels, why she had let him die along with Dancer’s Rex Hannigan and so many others.

I could feel myself getting excited about the next three days, the prospect of talking with half a dozen old pulp writers-a feeling that may or may not have been childish for somebody my age, but what the hell. As Dancer had said, I was into pulps and had been for more than thirty years. I had more than six thousand of them, nearly all mystery and detective issues, in my Pacific Heights flat, and I read them with a great deal of pleasure. Psychologically, in fact, they were the reason why I had become, first, a cop and later, a private detective. Emulation: you grow up worshipping a certain kind of hero and if you can, you want to become the same sort of hero yourself. Life-imitating-art in its purest form. So here I was, living out some, if not all, of my youthful fantasies. Erika Coates, a woman I had almost married nine years ago, had been the first to point out to me that I was trying to be a pulp private eye-in an age when the hero was no longer fashionable, in a city that already had Sam Spade. She thought it was unhealthy and counterproductive, and maybe she was right.

But trying to be a pulp private eye made me happy, — reading pulps and talking to old pulp writers made me happy. And wasn’t being happy what life was all about?

Damn right it is, Mr. Marlowe.

Let’s go meet some pulp writers, Mr. Spade.