Mostly Murder: A Short Story Collection

Introduction

Writing is a profession you start to get the hang of about the time your non-writing contemporaries are talking early retirement. So selecting a group of your own stories is a humbling experience. True, each brings an earlier “you” back to life. True, you read with the eyes you wore when you wrote them, you smell the smells of then, feel the textures, hear the sounds, taste the excitements, remember the enthusiasms.

But reading them now, you also see what you should have done better, what you should smooth out, update, modernize. But you can’t. Mysteries, like Hamlet’s players, are the abstracts and brief chronicles of their time; to edit and alter them after the fact destroys much of their value. Any differences the scholars among you might find between the stories here and their first publication is just a restoration of the original text.

I didn’t set out to be a mystery writer. In those early years I just kept writing anything and everything — mainstream, mystery, adventure, sci-fi, 15–20 short stories in the mail at all times — and just kept getting rejected: over 1,000 printed rejection slips during the four years between graduation from Notre Dame and my first sale. I once papered a bathroom with rejection slips — a fitting ambiance for them, actually.

I wanted to sell, to be a professional. I wanted desperately to justify Stanford University’s rejection of me for their creative-writing Master’s program because the stories I had submitted to them read “as if they had been written to be sold.”

“Killer Man,” the earliest story here, was my second published story; it appeared in the June, 1958, Manhunt — the only magazine that ever paid me with a post-dated check. “Plot It Yourself,” the most recent story here, appeared in the January, 1988, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. I perpetrated the other tales of Mostly Murder during the 30 years in between, often while working other jobs to support my writing habit.

I spent a half-dozen Minnesota summers unloading boxcars of lumber, cement, bricks and coal. I became an instructor at a weight gym in Palo Alto. Hod-carrier during reconstruction of the San Fernando Mission. Roughie on a carnival making the midwest county-fair midway circuit. Dishwasher stranded in Salt Lake City. Manager of a hot-sheet motel near San Francisco’s Cow Palace. Car-parker for Giants home games at the Stick, and evenings at The Shadows restaurant on Telegraph Hill. Briefly, a logger in Alaska. Not so briefly, a teacher at an African boys secondary school in Kenya. For two draftee years, a Pentagon writer of Army generals’ biographies.

And for 12 years, off and on, a private detective working out of San Francisco. First with the L.A. Walker Company, then as a partner in David Kikkert and Associates. The first real date my wife Dori and I had, in fact, was snatching a Cadillac from Mafia hitman Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno. I quit active field work in the late Seventies and sold DKA five years later, after my dear friend and partner, Dave Kikkert, fell over dead in the company parking lot while changing a tire on a repo.

As a detective, I was getting an inexhaustible supply of material. The things that happened to me on the street, the reactions they evoked, the people I worked with and the people I hunted down — all these heavily informed my fiction. And writing agency reports that demanded the same who, what, where, when, why and how of successful fiction taught me how to tell a story — well enough, eventually, to sell it ($65 from Manhunt for my first). And when I did sell, it was usually mystery or suspense. So I began to aim for those markets.

Of course most of the other things I have done, the places I have seen and the people I have known, have also turned up in the stories, novels, and scripts I have written during the three decades since my first story was published.

But not here. Not in Mostly Murder.

In 1966, while still a full-time detective, I talked about my work to the Northern California Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. The late Tony Boucher suggested I approach Fred Dannay of EQMM about doing a series of private-eye procedural stories based on the real agency. Fred was amenable, and the DKA File Series was born. “File #1: The Mayfield Case” is the first and perhaps most realistic of them; real life happened just about exactly the way fictional life does in the story. There are a dozen short stories and three novels in the series; as I write this, the fourth File Novel, 32 Cadillacs, is in manuscript.

A friend named Dave Buschman told me two stories. First, a week earlier he had witnessed a penitentiary execution. The experience had shaken him badly, but he was too cool to let it show. Recounted in Dave’s laconic, hip argot, this death burned itself into my brain. His second story was about a chance meeting with an old friend in North Beach. After they had chatted for twenty minutes, Dave asked after the man’s wife. “Oh,” he said, “she killed herself last night.” My mind fused execution and meeting into “The Second Coming” — although by then the dead wife, strangely, had become superfluous to my purposes.

I wrote “Plot It Yourself” for a Japanese magazine when my novel Hammett was doing well in that country. This was shortly after I had written a script for a half-hour TV drama series, with Orson Welles as narrator, which promptly died aborning. I converted my script into this story, giving Welles’s narrative voice to the killer. Thus he could make sardonic comment on the murder he committed while challenging the reader to solve it. “Plot It Yourself” is my only locked-room story (although the DKA File novel Final Notice is a sort of “locked house” novel). Connoisseurs of crime will note that the dinner Eric Stalker serves his victims is called “the ideal dinner for The Detective” in the The Nero Wolfe Cookbook.

Notebook entry: “A man lives in the chinks of an affluent, creditcard society. Moves swiftly, like a shadow, no one is ever sure he has been there. Except for the aftermath.” What aftermath? I wrote “Raptor” to find out; the story ended up having almost nothing to do with the original note. I cut ruthlessly — first draft, 14,210 words, final, 4,800, to achieve a formal, stately gavotte where death was dealt with panache but without emotion. I used this to bring Raptor, finally, to a comprehension of the Void in Musashi’s Book of Five Rings.

Because I knew the instructor, in 1970 I was snuck into an Explosive and Sabotage Devices anti-terrorist course for police officers given at Ford Ord, California, by the Army’s 87th Ordnance Detachment. When not blowing stuff up, I talked with an FBI shrink who had developed a profile of the terrorist true believer: be he neo-Nazi militant, Communist zealot, student radical, or Middle East fanatic, he always feels that he, him alone, his actions, are going to alter the entire course of human history. Heady stuff. I wrote “Watch for It” to explore the inevitable human costs of such dangerously unreal expectations.

I got the idea for “The Andrech Samples” (then titled “Rogul for the Quota”) on a June 9th; the story was written that same day and went to market on the 22nd. Very fast for me; I don’t really like to write in the future tense — seldom do — so I write quickly, angrily, and the stories are dark, sardonic, touched with black humor, invariably grim. Bureaucracy is the true enemy, even for bureaucrats, and it can only get worse. With mankind’s finger on the self-destruct button, perhaps futuristic tales can only be written angrily.

I lived the year 1957 in Tahiti, getting up at four each day, writing non-stop until noon, then going skin-diving until dusk. Writing about death, because shortly before I left San Francisco I had been fired upon by an irate businessman and run down by an enraged cleric — in a single week. “Killer Man” was my reaction in story form. I had gotten the title months earlier on Upper Grant in North Beach when somebody with a beard and a guitar sang, “Killer man, don’t you kill kill me” in The Co-Existence Bagel Shop (it still existed then). I don’t know if this was a well-known song, or original with him; I never heard it again. But it gave me the perfect title for my hitman story.

My grandfather died during my junior year at Notre Dame. I hitched north through the snow to Minnesota to see him before he went, then wrote an angry little memoir called “Epitaph” — angry because I had loved him deeply and he was dead. Fifteen years later I was ready to make memoir into story: the angry man hitchhiking north was older, an escaped convict, the dying man was a father instead of a grandfather. Fred Dannay made me rewrite it, polish it, sandpaper its rough spots innumerable times — never letting me scour away the real emotion of the original. I called it “Goodbye, Pops,” EQMM published it, and Mystery Writers of America gave it that year’s Best Short Story Edgar.

So Mostly Murder is... mostly murder. No mainstream, no navel-gazing, no adventure tales, no hardcore science-fiction. Just criminous tales, mostly violent — with a soupçon of fantasy — and, I hope, an insight or two into the parts of human nature that give root to that violence. A pretty much representative selection of my mystery and suspense short stories that I still pretty much like. I hope you do too.

Joe Gores

San Francisco

May 1991