New Reviews Today at Flash Bang Mysteries

BJ Bourg has added more reviews to the site. Barry now has up:

Review: WATCH ME DIE (originally THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE) (2005) by Lee Goldberg 

and

Review: THE MARBLE ORCHARD (1996) by William F. Nolan

I also have new reviews up. Mine are:

Review: THE LAWYER: THE RETRIBUTIONERS by Wayne D. Dundee

Review: WHEN OLD MEN DIE: A TRUMAN SMITH MYSTERY by Bill Crider

FFB Review: SHARKS NEVER SLEEP (1998) by William F. Nolan --Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Hope you and yours had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Barry is back with another excellent review for Friday’s Forgotten Books hosted by Patti Abbott.

SHARKS NEVER SLEEP (1998) by William F. Nolan

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

The third book about "the Black Mask Boys" (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner), in what was originally planned as a series but wound up as a trilogy, Sharks Never Sleep is narrated by Gardner. The year is 1937, by which time he has stopped practicing law, still writes for the pulps, especially Black Mask, and has become hugely successful because his Perry Mason novels have taken off with both readers and Warner Brothers.   

Gardner and his wife Natalie have been separated for some time. They still care for one another, but realize that their marriage will never work. Before giving up his law practice, Gardner had gotten deeply involved with Amy Latimer, who worked as his partner's secretary. After Amy met film and radio star Lloyd Hadley "Tink" Thompson and Thompson made a big play for her, eventually asking her to marry him, Gardner,  knowing he couldn't give her the lavish lifestyle Thompson could and feeling too guilty to ask Natalie for a divorce, nobly let her go.

He's shocked when he reads a newspaper article that says the Thompsons' three-year-old son died after falling down a flight of stairs, and sends a condolence card to them. A week later he receives a call from Amy, who asks if they can meet at Gardner's home that night. He readily agrees, and when she arrives, Amy tells him about her married life. She maintains that Tink Thompson is a philanderer and monster and not at all the virtuous family man he likes to portray himself as. She insists that Thompson married her and fathered a child simply to project an image, and further that he was directly responsible for their son's death. She wants a divorce, and wants Gardner's help in obtaining it. He doesn't hesitate to agree.

A day or so later, he reads that Amy Thompson is dead, that Tink came home and found her lifeless body on the sofa in the living room. Although there is no evidence of foul play, Gardner is certain Tink murdered her and is determined to prove it. An autopsy subsequently reveals that Amy had been poisoned with an oleander extract. Gardner becomes the chief suspect, as a result of which he enlists the aid of friends Hammett and Chandler to nail the real killer. When yet another murder occurs, the frame gets tighter and Gardner becomes a man on the run. Readers familiar with his fiction shouldn't find it a surprise or a spoiler to learn that the novel culminates in a courtroom sequence worthy of a Perry Mason mystery. 

Sharks Never Sleep, like its predecessors, combines action and cerebration and appearances by famous personalities of the period. As I mentioned in my review of The Marble Orchard, some of these "guest star" moments serve only to add color to the narrative and to fix the story in time, but are not directly relevant to the mystery plot. Thus, in Sharks, we have "cameos" featuring Mae West, Gloria Swanson, Walter Winchell and John Barrymore. On the other hand, legendary auto racer Barney Oldfield has an important role as the driver who, to assist their murder investigation, takes Gardner and Hammett on a wild event-filled trip to Mexico.  

There are also a number of passages that should interest anyone fascinated by the pulp magazine era in general and Black Mask in particular, as author Nolan provides historical information and scenes about people who actually edited the magazine and their different takes on writing for it.

Like The Black Mask Murders and The Marble Orchard, Sharks Never Sleep is a briskly-paced whodunit featuring a cast of colorful characters from a colorful era, brought to life by a pro who knows his material and, most importantly, knows how to tell a story. It's an easy one to recommend.

Barry Ergang ©2012

Sharks Never Sleep, as well as the other two Black Mask Boys mysteries mentioned in the review, are among the many titles Barry Ergang has for sale at http://www.barryergangbooksforsale.yolasite.com/. A Derringer Award winner, some of his work is available at Smashwords and Amazon.com.

FFB Review: "THE MARBLE ORCHARD" (1996) by William F. Nolan

This week for Friday’s Forgotten Books it is Barry’s turn front and center. The complete list of books is over on Patti Abbott’s blog at http://pattinase.blogspot.com/ While you are there, check out what is going on with Pulp Ink 2 and other things of note.

THE MARBLE ORCHARD (1996) by William F. Nolan

Reviewed by Barry Ergang

Best known as the author of the science fiction novel Logan’s Run and the screenplay for the film adaptation of same, William F. Nolan is a versatile writer who has worked in several fiction genres and who has written a number of non-fiction works as well. In 1985 he wrote The Black Mask Boys, a book highlighting the stories of eight important writers who helped make Black Mask the most renowned detective pulp magazine of them all. Each story was prefaced with a biographical piece about its author. Nine years later he published The Black Mask Murders, the first novel in a trilogy that stars “The Black Mask Boys”: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner. All three appear in every book, but each is narrated in the first-person by a different writer: The Black Mask Murders by Hammett, Sharks Never Sleep by Gardner, and The Marble Orchard, under consideration here, by Chandler.

The year is 1936, and Raymond Chandler and his wife Cissy are living in the Los Angeles area. Chandler continues to learn and hone his writing craft by turning out stories for Black Mask, the magazine that has also been a home to stories by his friends Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner.

When Chandler answers a phone call from a homicide lieutenant requesting that Cissy come to the morgue to identify a body, he asks who the dead man is and learns it’s Julian Pascal, Cissy’s former husband. His body was found in a Chinese cemetery, and his death appears to have been a ritual suicide. A stunned Chandler tells the detective that he’ll come to the morgue, that he and Julian were friends. Once he confirms the dead man’s identity, Chandler dreads having to tell Cissy. When he breaks the news to her, she vehemently insists that Julian would never kill himself and urges Chandler to look into the matter to find out what really happened.

A mysterious woman in a white limousine appears at Julian’s funeral, a woman later identified as Carmilla Blastok, a now-retired actress whose claim to fame is a series of films that began with The Blood Countess, in which she portrayed a vampire, “a kind of female Lugosi,” as Hammett describes her. She retired after David DuPlaine, the director of all her hit films, was shot to death, ostensibly by a burglar he caught in the act of robbing his house. When Chandler meets with her, he learns she barely knew Julian Pascal, though the latter composed the scores for a couple of her films. She attended his funeral, she tells him, because she hoped to see her much younger sister Elina there. She suspects that Elina once had an inappropriate relationship with Julian.

Elina, who had had a brief acting career herself, has been estranged from Carmilla for three years, having taken up with an abusive former stage actor named Merv Enright. Carmilla begs Chandler to find her sister, just so she can know if the girl is alive and well. When he reminds her that he’s a writer, not a detective, she offers to pay him a thousand dollars, money he can sorely use. Thinking that Elina might be able to enlighten him about Julian and thereby enable him to definitively resolve the question of Julian’s death, he accepts. 

And so, enlisting when necessary the assistance of his friends Hammett and Gardner, Chandler’s adventure at “playing detective” begins, plunging him into some situations more appropriate to his fictional sleuths than to a middle-aged former oil company executive turned pulp writer. One of those situations is reminiscent of a similar one in his novel Farewell, My Lovely, as William F. Nolan no doubt playfully intended readers to believe Chandler used his “real life” experience as the basis for Philip Marlowe’s fictional one several years later.  

As entertaining a whodunit as The Marble Orchard is, the detective-story portion feels like one of novelette length, the rest a lot of filler. Thus the reader is given scenes involving real-life personalities including William Randolph Hearst, Orson Welles, and Shirley Temple, among others—scenes that do nothing to advance the plot but which serve to fix the story in a particular place and era. The reader is given historical information about a number of locales within the greater Los Angeles area. And there is a secondary story thread involving an African-American man and woman that is clearly meant to depict the racial attitudes of the period but which is wholly irrelevant to the principal plotline. Fortunately, Nolan is a skillful writer with a smart sense of pace, so the filler is equally entertaining and doesn’t disrupt the flow.

Since I first discovered him when I was in my early teens, Raymond Chandler has always been one of my literary heroes. (The Long Goodbye is my all-time-favorite novel.) So enamored of his style was I that, back then, when writing a story, I’d often ask myself, “How would Chandler handle this scene, or this section of narrative, or this exchange of dialogue?” Ultimately I realized that developing my own style and voice, for better or worse, was preferable to imitating another’s. Playing Robert Louis Stevenson’s “sedulous ape” will only get you so far; eventually you have to (and should want to) come into your own. To truly write like someone else requires one to be someone else. 

Chandler has had plenty of imitators. I personally think his style was among the most influential of  the 20th Century and might very well still be one. Whether they intended to imitate him some of those writers might dispute, but the influence is indisputably there. Three who carried it off well were Howard Browne writing as John Evans (incidentally the name of one of Chandler’s pre-Marlowe pulp-magazine detectives) in his Paul Pine mysteries; Roy Huggins in The Double Take; and Keith Laumer in his purposed homage, Deadfall.   

As a former editor of a couple of mystery magazines, one of my biggest pet peeves was the story submission that deliberately tried to imitate Chandler’s—or anyone else’s—distinctive style. Unless the author was writing an obvious spoof or one-time tribute, he or she was virtually guaranteed a rejection. I wanted to publish stories in the authors’ own unique styles.

To his credit—and he touches on the matter in an afterword—Nolan, save for maybe three similes, does not write like Chandler writing a Philip Marlowe novel. That’s because Nolan is not writing a Marlowe novel; he’s writing what is intended as a report from Raymond Chandler about events in which he personally played a role.

All things considered, then, The Marble Orchard is a good, if unexceptional, detective story embedded in a lot of entertaining and informative filler, and populated with a variety of colorful characters.

*****

Postscript: In real life, Chandler and Hammett met exactly once, at a dinner for Black Mask writers. In his biography of Chandler, Tom Hiney writes that Gardner and Chandler were friends, but outside of some correspondence they exchanged, I’ve never read anything that indicates they actually spent time in each other’s presence.

Barry Ergang © 2012

The Marble Orchard is one of the many books from his personal collection Barry Ergang has for sale at http://www.barryergangbooksforsale.yolasite.com/. He’ll contribute 20% of the price of the books to our fund, so please have a look at his lists. Some of his fiction is available at Smashwords and Amazon.com, and Amazon also has available a couple of his poetry collections.