GRANDMASTERS...

...Four Kings.

When I became a working comic book artist in the 1970s—“Going pro,” as it was called then—I found myself in the company of a dozen or so roughly contemporary men, with whom I shared a long string of interests, in movies, music, television and fiction; the latter, mostly fantasy and science fiction, with a big dollop of Sword and Planet and Sword and Sorcery.

This was true of the artists and writers of my generation, most of the latter failed artists, whose inadequacies were finally instrumental in the stretching of my reach to write my own material.

Besides the guys—and yes, before you go all revisionist, it was mostly a man’s game then—of our parents’ age, there were a few fellows five to ten years our senior, who seemed to operate in an atmosphere separate from ours, and equally distinct from the old guys, too.

It was one of those middle generation minority, Archie Goodwin, who, perhaps purposefully, maybe inadvertently, weaned me off SF and fantasy, and started me on what has been a steady diet of crime fiction for well over fifty years now.

He hipped me to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, the two men who shared the center of the mandala. James M. Cain, too, an outlier in this crowd, and the two MacDonalds, Ross and John, neither of whom made any real positive impression on me, an uninterest which persists to this day.

He pointed me at Rex Stout, whose regard among critics has waxed and waned over the years, unlike the quintet mentioned above, unjustly, to my eyes. His conflation of the English drawing room style narrative with American hardboiled prose was a stroke of genius, and he kept it up for forty years, in a consistency that might have made critics suspicious.

So I had an education in the classics, the canon from a profoundly well informed and critical reading source. W.R. Burnett, Cornell Woolrich, Horace McCoy, David Goodis, Dorothy Sayers, Jim Thompson, Paul Cain, Marc Behm and others would ultimately join the list of great dead crime writers that were my syllabus…

…But it was a living breathing author Archie shoved under my nose that, along with three other men, we are here to discuss.

That man was Donald Westlake, who I first read under his most famous pseudonym, Richard Stark.

The Parker books were like nothing I’d ever read; but I had seen a slew of movies imbued with the skepticism, the nihilism, of these short and tightly written theft novels. Like a lot of midcentury popular fiction, separate and distinct from the all too often bloated bestsellers that are all but forgotten today, the Stark stuff was aimed at a public transportation readership, giving a commuter a couple of days of mental escape on a train or bus between work and home.

And in the midst of all this, I learned that THE HOT ROCK, a popular comedy released in 1972, was based on a novel by Westlake, under his own name. So, alongside the grim and stripped down Parker novels, Westlake, with the Dortmunder books, had created—accidentally, according to his own report—the comic theft novel.

Over the decades, I’ve read just about everything, certainly all the Starks—Parker and Grofeld—and all the Dortmunders. Everything is worth reading, but, since he is so damned prolific, not everything is on a level with the caper novels.

But those novels. Each one is its own joy. I’ll single out one lovely element, and then move on. In Stark’s PLUNDER SQUAD, Parker encounters an operative of Dan Kearney & Associates, a fictional repossession agency in San Francisco created by Joe Gores, I would assume a good pal of Westlake’s. Parker shows up in that Gores novel as well, for a crossover of the two novels.

In DROWNED HOPES, a particularly epic Dortmunder book, the heist crew comes in contact with another of Kearney’s ops, working a case involving the theft of 37 CADILLACS, the title of Gores’ novel—in which the Dortmunders make an appearance.

(The quartet of DKA novels are well worth a look, by the way. 37 CADILLACS in particular is a comic outlier in the series.)

And, just to monkey wrench the mistaking gravity for enormity crowd, it’s worth noting that as perfect as the Parker novels are, and, yes, they are perfect in their own right, the Dortmunders are particularly transcendent in their brilliance.

In a corollary to Raymond Chandler’s remark about Dashiell Hammett—” (He) gave murder back to the kind of people that commit for reasons,” The Dortmunder novels were a blue collar comic comeuppance to THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, THE KILLING, RIFIFI, and all those other admittedly terrific clockwork caper movies. That said, to this day, as much as I dig the movie, I have never forgiven them for letting them get away with it in the film version of THE HOT ROCK.

And then there’s Lawrence Block.

Five years younger than Westlake, his occasional collaborator, Block is the only one of the quartet in question who remains alive and vertical at this writing, albeit retired. Like Westlake, he was wildly prolific, working under a number of pseudonyms, dabbling as Westlake did in soft core porn, heterosexual and lesbian, too.

Block also started as a slush pile curator at Scott Meredith, a “Literary Agency” that racketeered cash from wannabe authors. Block published short fiction in MANHUNT, a late era crime pulp, and finally made his bones with a series of first person narrative novels featuring Matt Scudder, a melancholic and alcoholic ex cop, now operating as an unlicensed private investigator.

These novels offer a grim and gritty view of Manhattan, from the 1970s on, a perspective and sensibility all too recognizable to me—I was there, and lived in that city in that time.

The Scudder novels are one example of extraordinary regional writing, perfectly nailing as it does the zeitgeist of late twentieth century Manhattan. Block has stated that John O’Hara, a now mostly and unjustly ignored or forgotten author of the first half of that century, was a favorite of his. In that regionalism I mention, I can see a subtle trace O’Hara’s influence.

(Read O’Hara—THE GIBBSVILLE STORIES, APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA, PAL JOEY, BUTTERFIELD 8—forget the later novels. They’re bloated doorstops, at best.)

Block’s unforgiving characterization of Scudder and his self torment gives these novels a depth that is missing from most other detective fiction. He reaches the apex with a novel he built from a novella, both entitled WHEN THE SACRED GIN MILL CLOSES, the story of Scudder becoming and staying sober.

Block continued the series, with a sober Scudder, now writing with an elegiac tone that replaces and displaces the melancholy of the novels when Scudder was still a grief stricken and depressed functioning alcoholic.

Now, another writer of post Chandler/Hammett crime fiction might have been contented with one singular series. Block, like Westlake, had other ideas. Rather than creating two series of crime caper novels, Block simply turned his take on late twentieth century Manhattan on its head.

Whereas Scudder’s city seemed to be trapped in that perpetual late afternoon early darkness of a permanent winter, Bernie Rhodenbarr, the bookstore owning thief hero of the Burglar novels series, lived in a Manhattan bathed in a lost patina of autumnal light, an engaging and charming town that existed and exists only in wish dreams, or maybe a late twentieth century masculine version of Sex in the City.

The Rhodenbarr novels are ingeniously plotted, imbued with a sweetness antithetical to the Scudders. And while they may not possess the over the top manic genius of the best of Westlake’s John Dortmunder novels, there is a slyness that runs through the Burglar books that never cloys or annoys…and, in one particular mid run entry, THE BURGLAR IN THE LIBRARY, Block pulls off a hat trick with his customary first person narrative that brings to mind Rex Stout’s conflation of the cozy and the hardboiled.

I won’t spoil this lovely bit of business—it’s too good not to read.

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I got high with Block—then Larry, not Lawrence—back in the early seventies, before either of our sacred gin mills had closed. He was pals with a guy who edited my stuff at DC, and with a legendary SF writer with whom I ended up collaborating, and is also still with us today.

Block has no recollection of this, nor should he—I wasn’t all that memorable.

He has retired from writing. He’s entitled, of course, but man, I do miss the work enormously.

And then there’s Ed McBain.

Another of those slush pile fellows who matriculated at Scott Meredith, McBain was a pseudonym for the aspiring literary novelist Evan Hunter, which in turn was a pseudonym for Salvatore Lombino.

McBain, a few years older than Block and Westlake, came up in East Harlem and the Bronx. It would seem that his earliest ambitions might have been in the visual arts, but after naval service, he gave himself completely to writing fiction.

Rather than producing two successful series over his career as Westlake and Block had done, McBain led two very different literary lives. As Evan Hunter, he wrote mainstream literary fiction, aimed at a sort of middlebrow book club audience. These books were regulars on various bestseller lists.

As McBain, he wrote crime fiction; at first, in service to the times and market, in a conventionally pulpish approach. And then, and then, there was THE 87^TH PRECINCT.

These novels, taking place in a fictional police station in a fictional American city, began as, yes, conventional pulp. He wrote a few a year, each entry coming in at well under two hundred pages. I understand that he wrangled with his editor, who wanted to maintain the conventional lone police detective hero approach that informed the first few novels ; but McBain, whether consciously or intuitively, was onto something new, something different.

Within a very few years, he had created a now familiar genre of crime fiction; a police procedural featuring an ensemble cast of very different characters, some of whom would emerge in various novels as the protagonist, while Steve Carella, the nominal hero of the first books, would occasionally, but certainly not often, serve a subordinate role.

The 87^th Precinct novels comprise over fifty books, each building in continuity from the previous, creating an utterly convincing fictional alternate universe. I say fictional, I say alternate universe, because, once the geography becomes clear, Isola is a beard for New York City, rotated forty five degrees on its side.

To paraphrase the novelist and critic Ed Gorman, you would be hard pressed to find a better social and criminal history of mid twentieth century New York City than in the 87^th Precinct novels.

I’ve read much if not all of his novels as Evan Hunter, and they are perfectly acceptable examples of perfectly forgettable mainstream fiction. I’ve also read the Matthew Hope series, bylined by McBain, and they are equally forgettable, to my mind.

It’s the ensemble police procedural, as created by McBain, that is his legacy.

Two more things. McBain was enraged by Steven Bochco’s HILL STREET BLUES, and rightfully so. It was, if not an outright knockoff, so deliberately inspired, in tone and narrative, by the McBain novels, that a little shame wouldn’t have hurt. As I recall, McBain was talked out of suing, for reasons I don’t recall.

And two, as I noted above, he seemed to be heading toward a career as an artist when still a teenager, and I wonder whether comic books were a part of that reconsidered and abandoned ambition. From the first, I identified his fictionalizing of New York as Isola as the sort of trope put into play by comic books from their inception. McBain’s alternate urban sprawl would have fit right in with Metropolis, Gotham, and Central City, to name only a few.

And finally, Elmore Leonard.

The oldest of this foursome, and an anomaly, in that he wasn’t a New Yorker, nor ever slushed his way through a pile in service to that on the edge of felonious Scott Meredith Agency.

Rather, he began as a copywriter for a Midwestern advertising agency in the days of the last hurrah of regional advertising, and began trying to sell short fiction on the side. And the market he first served was western short stories, when a post war triumphalist American culture went mad for its own creation myth, which, other than a few exceptions, had lain mostly dormant in the forties.

He sold short stories and novellas, first to the soon to be gone pulps, and to the slicks, when mainstream magazines were packed with short genre fiction and serials. Western stories shared space with private detectives and melodramas in weekly general interest magazines.

I was, as most of my contemporaries, batshit crazy for western movies—cowboy pictures—and television shows, as well. I have specific memories of the first television show I saw on the first television set we owned—it was an episode of THE CISCO KID. My toy chest was packed with cowboys and Indians. I worshiped at the altar of Hopalong Cassidy.

That said, when I became a regular reader of genre fiction, mostly sf and fantasy, then, as noted above crime novels, despite all this, not to mention a longtime fandom for wstern comic books, I never read any western fiction. I was aware of all the names—Louis LaMour, Luke Short, the above mentioned Ed Gorman—but, until I read Larry McMurtry’s epic LONESOME DOVE, I had never indulged in as a reader of what remains to this day among my favorite genres in film and television.

Suffice to say, that experience opened my eyes, and the first of this genre I dove into was the work of Elmore Leonard. Now, I’d been reading Leonard’s crime fiction since the mid 1970s, but the westerns—all of which I ended up reading in one several months long gulp—were revelatory.

All of the elements of Leonard’s work that I loved in his crime fiction—characterization through dialogue, clarity of action without a dependency on florid prose, a perfect balance of setting a scene in description that never went past what was absolutely necessary—was all there in his westerns.

And, scattered thoughout my massive accumulation of mid century mass market slick magazine tearsheets were his short stories, illustrated by mostly mid level artists, albeit at a time when a B talent was pretty damned great, as I realized these had been waiting for me for the longest time; not to mention 3:10 TO YUMA—the original, not that bullshit remake—and THE TALL T, one of Budd Boetticher’s RANOWN features starring Randolph Scott, among my favorite cowboy pictures, had their start in those SATURDAY EVENING POST sales.

So, I love his westerns. I love his crime fiction even more, because, having read every one of those westerns, I’ve come to understand that he simply transferred much of the ethos of his take on the American western to his contemporary crime fiction.

I have to take with a certain grain of salt his comment in an interview that, when the bottom fell out of the Western market, he briefly considered adopting a female pseudonym and transliterating into a romance novelist before doing the right thing.

Really, now.

All that short story experience served him in good stead from word one. With his earliest crime novels, he landed, fully formed, with a recognizable tone, minimalist, with Hemingwayesque echoes, but with a light, occasionally humorous touch—remember, Leonard had been an ad copywriter—that set him apart from any of that self seriousness that infect so much of the hairy chest school.

As he hit his stride with crime fiction, he returned now and then to westerns, with no slacking off in either genre. Much later, when he published CUBA LIBRE, his Spanish American War novel, no less an ardent fan than George Will seemed nonplussed in his reaction; to paraphrase, “A crime novel set during the Spanish American War?” George clearly hadn’t paid any attention to westerns, either.

Leonard never entered the series sweeps, only rarely repeating a character. Carlos Webster, the lead in THE HOT KID and UP IN HONEY’S ROOM is the son of CUBA LIBRE’s hero. Chili Palmer and Raylan Givens get a few spotlights, of course.

While Block, Westlake and McBain had some success in film and television, Leonard was the winner in this sweepstakes, if not in quality but quantity, certainly. For the longest time, the western movie adaptations were of a much higher quality than the crime pictures. MR MAJESTIK profited from his screenplay, and THE MOONSHINE WAR wasn’t bad.

But too many filmmakers seemed to feel that the novels were templates to improve. From the over the top villains in 52 PICKUP and STICK, and Burt Reynolds, in the latter taking all the good dialogue for himself, it seemed like nobody could get it right.

It wasn’t until GET SHORTY and OUT OF SIGHT were adapted for features that it seemed they’d finally figured out how to do just that; and the long running television series JUSTIFIED, an elaboration of a tiny shard of a novella, was a perfect transliteration of Leonard’s tone, characterization and mannered anti mannerism.

I’ve read all of Leonard, and loved the vast percentage of his work, with the caveat that a number of the later novels end in ways that confirm his confident avoidance of structural planning; this is sometimes effective. In other cases, it feels lazy and too damned casual.

If I had to pick one to recommend to a newcomer, it would likely be either CITY PRIMEVAL: HIGH NOON IN DETROIT, or TISHOMINGO BLUES.

All that said, Leonard, when he’s good, he’s great…which can be said for all four of these grand masters.

There are, of course, great crime writers alive and working today. I hope I am wrong, but I fear we will never see giants on par with this quartet again.

Trust me on this.

As ever, I remain,

Howard Victor Chaykin…a Prince.