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The Red Right Hand by Joel Townsley Rogers

  Kill the Boss Goodbye by Peter Rabe

  The Gravedigger/Coffin Ed series by Chester Himes

  The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

  Interface by Joe Gores

  The Eighth Circle by Stanley Ellin

  Sleep and His Brother by Peter Dickinson

  The Light of Day by Eric Ambler

  FIVE

  RETURNING TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME

  On His Own Work

  INTRODUCTION TO LEVINE

  Westlake wrote this introduction to a collected edition of the five stories he’d written over the years about a New York police detective named Abe Levine. For the collection, which was published in 1984 by Grand Central Publishing, he also wrote a new, final Levine story.—Ed.

  In some ways, 1959 was for me a very good year. The preceding fall I’d moved to New York and gotten a job as reader for a literary agent and settled myself down at last to the task of figuring out how to (a) become a writer and (b) make a living at it. In 1959, fired with youth and freshness and enthusiasm, I churned out more work than in any other year of my life, and most of it found a market. When the dust had settled, it turned out I had produced over half a million published words that year (we say nothing of the unpublished words) and had become a freelance writer. In April, with blind optimism, no money, and an extremely pregnant wife, I had quit my literary agency job, and since that date I have never once, I am happy to say, earned an honest dollar in wages.

  Among that year’s output were forty-six short stories and novelettes, of which twenty-seven were published. (That’s about a third of all the short stories I’ve written over my entire life so far.) One of those pieces, written early in March, was a novelette entitled “Intellectual Motivation” (I hadn’t yet completely cracked the problem of titles—still haven’t, come to think of it), which was published in the December 1959 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine under the not-much-better title “The Best-Friend Murder.” The story contained clear analogies to my own current situation, and when I look back on it from a vantage point (if that’s the phrase I want) of twenty-four years I see it contains more than a little self-analysis and self-criticism. I wasn’t really aware of all that at the time, of course, or I would have been too self-conscious to write the story. (We do write what we know, whether we know it or not.) What attracted me then—and what I still think is the story’s major excuse for existence—was the attitude of the detective toward the idea of death.

  In any mystery story, one element is inevitably the detective’s attitude toward death, his reaction to the concept of death. The amateur detectives, for instance, the whimsical Wimseys and quaint Queens, view death in the shallowest possible way, as a solvable puzzle, which is in any event one of the subliminal comforts of the mystery form. Death is stripped of its grief, horror, loss, irrevocability; we are not helpless, there is something we can do. We can solve death.

  Similarly, it has become the convention that policemen, professional detectives, are hardened to death, immune to life untimely nipped. “All I want is the facts, ma’am,” Jack Webb used to say in his Sergeant Friday persona on Dragnet; nothing would make him scream, or cry, or—o’ercome—turn aside his head. (Although they broke with that just once, when the actor who played Friday’s partner died. They wrote it in, and on camera Jack Webb—somehow no longer the cop—did cry, was human, faced death squarely.)

  But is the policeman not flesh? Doth he not bleed? Hasn’t he in his own lifetime buried grandparents, parents? Isn’t he aware of his own mortality? It was the idea of a cop, a police detective, who was so tensely aware of his own inevitable death that he wound up hating people who took the idea of death frivolously that led me to Abe Levine and “The Best-Friend Murder” (nee “Intellectual Motivation”).

  Which doesn’t mean I saw a series in it. The other twenty-six published 1959 stories produced no sequels, nor did I ever expect to see Detective Levine again once he’d finished his gavotte with Larry Perkins. But for some reason he stayed in my mind, a worrying painstaking fretful unheroic man, a fifty-three-year-old who seemed to me at the age of twenty-five to be almost a doddering ancient, but who from my present position I realize is in the absolute prime of life. Levine had not entirely explained himself in that first novelette, nor had his relationship with death been completely explored. From time to time I thought about him, and slowly another story idea took rough shape in my mind, but I didn’t get around to writing it.

  Then a different story took shape instead, a further exploration of Abe Levine and the idea of death. What if he were faced with a potential suicide, someone who wanted to throw away that which Levine found most precious? Would Levine reject him, hate him, turn away from him? Or would he try, desperately, compulsively, to convert the suicide to Levine’s own point of view? And if the latter, what would it mean? It was in June of 1960, fifteen months after Levine’s birth, that I put him together with that man on the ledge, in a story I titled (sensibly enough, I thought) “Man on a Ledge,” but which Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine published in October of 1960 as (and here I think they were wrong) “Come Back, Come Back.”

  A sequel does not necessarily a series make. Having used Levine twice, it would have been possible then to go directly to that other story I’d thought of, work out the plot details, and have a true series on my hands—if a short one—but still I hesitated, and then six months later, in December of that year, with Christmas coming on, another permutation in the ongoing story of Levine and death occurred to me, and I wrote “The Feel of the Trigger.”

  There are several things to say about “The Feel of the Trigger.” First, at last Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, which published the story in October of 1961, agreed with me on a title; it was published as “The Feel of the Trigger.” Second, this story probably shows at its peak the influence of Evan Hunter on my development as a writer. He had run down these same alleys just a few years before me, had worked for the same literary agency, published in the same or similar magazines. His 87th Precinct novels, as by Ed McBain, had started being published just around the time I was first seriously trying to figure out how to be a self-supporting writer. Naturally I read them. They were that rarity, that near-impossibility, something new under the sun, and naturally I was impressed by and influenced by them. I would not for a moment blame Evan Hunter for “The Feel of the Trigger”; I would only say that a kind of specificity of description and a particular method of entering the protagonist’s mind did not exist in my stories before I read Evan Hunter

  Sometimes poetic justice is comic; maybe we should call it doggerel justice. At the time “The Feel of the Trigger” was published, an 87th Precinct series was on television; the only story of mine ever bought to be the basis of an episode in a television series was “The Feel of the Trigger.” It ran as an 87th Precinct story on February 2, 1962, with Meyer Meyer the character who was worried about his heart condition. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be home that night, but a friend offered to tape the program for me. Remember, we’re talking about 1962, not 1982, and the tape he was talking about was sound. He did record the program, and some time later I heard it, and my memory of it is a lot of footsteps and several doors being opened. Someday I’d like to see that show.

  After three stories, there was no longer any question in my mind that I had a series on my hands, but at that time I had no idea what one did with a series. A story—any story—is about several different things, at different levels. It is about its plot, for instance, but only in the worst and most simplistic writers do specific plots repeat themselves often enough to be termed a series. The repetition of characters makes a series, but if the characters in the original story are tied to a theme or a concern or a view of life that colors them and helps to create them, can they live in stories that are irrelevant to that extra element? I don’t think so, and I think over the years there have been several series characters who have been less than they mig
ht have been because their later adventures never touched upon those thematic elements which had created the character in the first place.

  So if I was going to write another story about Abe Levine, it would have to tie in with his relationship with death, his attitude toward death, his virtual romance with death. Death fascinated Levine, it summoned him and yet repelled him; how could I write a story about Abe Levine without that element?

  I couldn’t. The series might have died aborning right then, three stories in. I still didn’t want to write the one for which I’d had that rough idea, and no other story that included both the character and the theme came to the surface of my brain. Goodbye, Abe.

  It was, in fact, not quite a year before another story came along that suited the character and the theme; and had the potential as well to broaden both. It marked a real change in the stories, since for the first time Levine was attacked directly in the area of his weakness. He had been attacked before, as any policeman is liable to be attacked, but in “The Sound of Murder” (my title, left unchanged, hallelujah) Levine is attacked in a way specific to Levine, particular to the character and particular to the theme. The generational element became more obvious, though it had been there in some way since the first story. “The Sound of Murder” took Abe Levine farther down the same road, and when I finished it I wondered if I hadn’t gone too far, if this most recent experience might not have changed Levine too much, and made him someone no longer relevant to his theme? An odd finish for a character, if true. (That did happen, as a matter of fact, a decade later, to the hero of a series of mystery novels I’d written under the name of Tucker Coe.)

  That story, “The Sound of Murder,” was written during a strangely sporadic period of my writing life. I had written two mystery novels, The Mercenaries and Killing Time, published by Random House, and in the summer of 1961 had started a third which I already knew would be called 361, which is the numerical classification in Roget’s Thesaurus for “Murder, violent death.” Random House did eventually publish the book under that title, with a note in front explaining what the title meant, but they didn’t do what I’d wanted, which was to run, in the form of a frontispiece quote, the entire 361 listing from the Thesaurus. Read it for yourself some time, and you’ll see why I found it striking and wanted to use it.

  In any event, 361 was the coldest book I’d tried to write up to that time, a book in which the first-person narrator would never once state his emotions, but in which the emotions would have to be implied by the character’s physical actions. It was an easy mood to get into, but a hard book to write, and in the middle of it I stopped and switched to another book entirely, one I’d been thinking about for a while, a paperback-style tough guy novel in which the entire world would be like my 361 hero; a world of unstated emotion and hard surfaces. That book was finished in September of 1961, and was published in February of 1963 as The Hunter (my title!) by Pocket Books, under the pen name Richard Stark, a name I’d already used for a few of that spate of short stories from 1959.

  Having finished The Hunter, I should have gone back to finish 361, but I think I wasn’t ready for two emotionless heroes in a row, and that’s when the idea for “The Sound of Murder” came bubbling to the surface. Levine is emotional, the Lord knows, and I notice that in this story he even makes a point of his being emotional. It was written in October of 1961 and published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in December of 1962. “The Sound of Murder” restored some juice to my brain, some humanity, and made it possible for me to go on and finish 361.

  Another idea for a Levine story had emerged at the same time, fed by the same impulses, another permutation on Levine’s reaction to violent death, but that other story had seemed much more of a problem and I’d chosen to ignore it. Not that it would have been a problem to write, but that it might be a problem to publish. The first four Levine stories had all appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, but the story I had in mind seemed inappropriate for that market. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of another publication more likely to find it useful, so I turned my back on it, for as long as I could.

  Which turned out to be seven months. After four novelettes, nearly forty thousand words, I had grown to know and to like Abe Levine. The story I had in mind, which I was calling “The Death of a Bum,” was somehow the inevitable next step in Levine’s narrowing relationship with death. It was not, in the normal sense of the word, a “mystery” story, which was why I knew Hitchcock’s would have trouble with it. Remove Levine from it and it wasn’t a story at all; I had written myself into a terrible corner, the one in which the character himself has become the world in which the story is set. (A simpler and sillier example of this is Batman. Somewhere around 1955, the evil activity most pursued by the criminals in Batman became the uncovering of Batman’s identity! If Batman didn’t exist, they wouldn’t be criminals. In self-referential fiction, I can think of no peer to Batman.)

  Nevertheless, for seven months I turned my attention to other things, and it wasn’t until May of 1962 that I finally gave in to the inevitable and wrote “The Death of a Bum.” It was one of the easiest writing tasks I’ve ever had; I knew the character somewhat better than I knew myself; I had known the story for more than half a year; I had already decided it was uncommercial, so there was no point trying to please any particular editor or audience. Sometimes writers say this or that story “wrote itself,” which is never true, but “The Death of a Bum” required a lot less midwifing than usual.

  As I’d expected, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine couldn’t use the story, though the editor wrote a very nice and sincere letter—not of apology, but of regret, since he too had grown to like Levine. I wrote back explaining that I’d been prepared for the rejection and was neither surprised nor hurt. I then left it to my agent to do what he could.

  It took nearly three years, and I don’t know how many submissions, but at last “The Death of a Bum” was published, in Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, in June of 1965. And there the series ended.

  It ended for a variety of reasons. One of them, naturally, was the three-year span between the writing of “The Death of a Bum” and its publication; I felt I couldn’t write a new story about Abe Levine before the previous story had found a home. This may seem an unnecessary self-restriction, but in my mind the stories had evolved in such a clear step-by-step way, each one leading to the next, that a story written after “The Death of a Bum” but published before it or instead of it would at least for me have destroyed the organic reality of the character and his life.

  Another reason for the series ending was a change that had taken place in my own career, which had become schizophrenic in the nicest possible way. The tough guy novel I had written under the name of Richard Stark—The Hunter—had been liked and bought by an editor at Pocket Books named Bucklin Moon, a fine man of whom I cannot say too much (but one thing of whom I must say is that I wish he were still with us), who had liked the lead character in that book, Parker, and asked me, “Do you think you could give us two or three books a year about him?” I thought I could. For several years, I did.

  At the same time, the writing I was doing under my own name had taken a completely unexpected (by me) turn. Comedy had come in.

  Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I was never a comic. All through my life, in grammar school, in high school, in college, I was never the funniest kid in class. I was always, invariably, the funniest kid’s best friend. Out of college and in New York and beginning to make my career as a writer, I got to know a couple of funny writers and I was their best audience. I wasn’t the guy with the quick line; I was the guy who loved the quick line.

  Comic elements started creeping into my stories in surprising and sometimes alarming ways. Even in “The Sound of Murder,” look at how many comic references, comic elements there are in a story which is in no way comic. Undoubtedly that was an unconscious part of my reaction to the coldness and humorlessness of both The Hunter and 361. />
  It was two and a half years after “The Sound of Murder” before the comic side was at last given its head. In the early spring of 1964 I started a mystery novel, intended to be published under my own name by Random House, about a young man who runs a bar in Brooklyn which is owned by the Mafia. They use it as a tax loss and to launder money, they occasionally use it as a package drop, and the young man has the job of running it because his uncle is connected with the Mob. At the beginning of the story, two Mob hitmen enter the bar as the young man is about to close for the night, try to kill him, and miss.

  This was intended to be an ordinary innocent-on-the-run story, in which the innocent can’t go to the police because of his uncle’s Mob connection. The schnook-on-the-run story, as in The 39 Steps or Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Saboteur (in which Robert Cummings played the schnook, and not to be confused with Hitchcock’s Sabotage, in which Sylvia Sidney played the schnook), has certain comic elements built into it, but it needn’t be a comic story, nor did I initially see my Mob-nephew tale as a comic story.

  But something went wrong. The conventions of the form prostrated themselves before me. Something manic glowed in the air, like St. Elmo’s Fire. Instead of the comic’s best friend—Shazam!—I became the comic!

  I finished that book in May of 1964 and called it The Dead Nephew. My editor at Random House—Lee Wright, the best editor I have ever known, though two others come close—hated that title, and I hated every alternative she suggested, and she hated every other title I offered, and finally, exhausted, we leaned on our lances and gasped and agreed to call the thing The Fugitive Pigeon. It became the first of a run of comic novels which, so far as I know, has not yet come to an end.

  Well, The Fugitive Pigeon was published in March of 1965 and “The Death of a Bum” appeared three months later, and by then I was deeply into being a comic novelist. And in those periods when I came to the surface for air I would turn into a coldly emotionless novelist named Richard Stark who wrote about a sumbitch named Parker. And Levine receded.