Gun in Cheek (26 page)

Richard slammed one in the face with a Magnum barrel, chuckling when he heard the breaking teeth and jawbone, almost laughing out loud as, dodging a knife thrust, he twist-kicked the imbecile in the balls. The man let out a great "Owwwwwwwwwwww!" and sank to his knees, while the third barmy-brained boob resorted to a trench knife underhanded belly thrust which Camellion swept aside with a Korean karate sidesweep. Even in the almost darkness, he could see the look of absolute horror on the blockhead's face as he finished him off with a middle knife-hand spear-thrust to the solar plexus. (
The Death Merchant #9: The Laser War
)

Camellion is a master of karate, and one of his favorite moves is the "twist-kick" just mentioned—otherwise known as the "Goju-Ryu karate ball-of-the-foot koga geri groin kick," which he uses whenever he is engaged in hand-to-hand combat. There are several references to "killers with inflamed balls" through-Out the series.

As can also be seen from the last quoted passage, Rosenberger takes a jovial pleasure in describing breaking bones and teeth (spurting blood, too). But it should be noted that he is not lacking a certain sense of humor, despite the serious intent of his work, and that he likes to sprinkle his narratives with jokes. Here is one such rib-tickler, from
The Laser War
:

"The Republicans are thinking of changing the Republican Party emblem from an elephant to a condom, because it stands for inflation, halts production, and gives a false sense of security while one is being screwed!"

The rise of the Death Merchant—as with the Executioner, over thirty titles have been published to date—inspired Rosenberger to begin another series in the early seventies, chronicling the adventures of the Murder Master. This one failed after only a few titles, perhaps because of poor distribution by the publisher, Manor Books. A second series for Manor, featuring a kung-fu expert and written under the pen name of Lee Chang, fared somewhat better; the following excerpts from
Kung-Fu: The Year of the Tiger
(1973) again demonstrate the distinctive Rosenberger touch.

Tuskanni stood in the open doorway at the top of the stairs, a .38 Colt automatic in his hand, watching as the burly drivers tried to bring down the two brothers—their efforts making as much sense as the termite who was a conscientious objector and went around trying to eat up draft boards!

All in the same motion, he snap-kicked the man in the right armpit! The knife clattered to the floor as Mace finished the slob off with a mule-kick to his scrotum. Looking like a goof who had just discovered that ice-cream cones are hollow, the man sagged to the floor.

And if those two passages aren't the essence of alternative literature, I don't know what is.

God—Whose Hand?"

Several women were looking at themselves in the mirrored panels, inserted the entire width of the dance floor, and one of them in shimmering green which displayed a lot of tanned shoulders, and considerably more underneath the shoulders where they begin to swell out and mean something if you like them that way, stopped in front of the table.

—Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet,

The Feather Cloak Murders

With one of those queer kinks common to all lunatics, Damian was not homicidally inclined towards his victim. He might kill him, but it would be a pure inadvertence. He might kill millions of others, maliciously, but Windermaine was required for another and far greater end.

—Austin J. Small,

The Avenging Ray

T
he novel of suspense—or thriller, as the British call it—has historically been almost as popular among mystery-fiction addicts as the roman policier or the whodunit. Its antecedents are the Gothic novel and the supernatural horror story; in its early years, such writers as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Eden Phillpotts mixed qualities of both with the traditional tale of mystery and detection to create the basic hybrid.

H. Douglas Thomson, in
Masters of Mystery
(1931), the first book in the English language to assess crime fiction critically and historically, offers a succinct definition of the thriller and a "recipe" of its three basic ingredients. Thomson's opinions are not always to be trusted, nor are his historical facts; he makes the following gaffe-strewn dismissal of Hammett and Sam Spade, for instance: "Sam Spade, the ex-Pinkerton man of Mr. Dashiell Hammett's
The Maltese Falcon, The Dain Curse
, and
Red Harvest
, is an honest-to-goodness, 100 percent American detective. There does not appear to be much more than this to commend him." But Thomson's comments on the tale of suspense are nonetheless valid.

The main attraction of the thriller, he says, is "derived from the excitement of the action, from a primitive and pugilistic romance. The first, second and third virtues . . . are, like the orator's, Action. Human life is cheaper in the thriller. The connoisseur has to bear with the 'copious effusion of blood.'" Continuing, Thomson lists the thriller's three ingredients:

1. Careful attention to creating "the nerve-wracking atmosphere. Otherwise, there will be no catharsis, and at the best we will be mildly amused."
   
2.  
   A brisk simple narrative, "unvarnished save with horror."
   
3. Exploitation of the dramatic effect. "Forlorn hopes, narrow shaves, last-minute rescues, 'tense' situations, all the frills and furbelows of sensation come under this heading."
   
    
   

Thomson goes on to document four plots "which the thriller shows a reluctance to abandon"; that may have been true fifty years ago, but contemporary thriller writers have abandoned such gambits as "the daughter of a murdered man determines to avenge her father's murder," and "the rescue of a beautiful girl who has got into the clutches of a criminal gang." Or, at least, the writers of good thrillers have abandoned them. The writers of bad thrillers, like sentimentalists and packrats, never abandon anything they can still get a little use out of.

One of the favorite ploys of early thriller authors good and bad, which Thomson neglects to mention, is the invention of a supercriminal to terrify the populace, baffle the police, flaunt his villainous ways, perform feats of iniquitous derring-do, and generally make a nuisance of himself. In the 1920s, the most famous of these devilish desperadoes was the Bat—the somewhat deformed offspring of the then-queen of Gothic thrillers, Mary Roberts Rinehart.

The Bat
was first conceived by Mrs. Rinehart as a play in 1918, based on her novel
The Circular Staircase
; but by her own testimony, in her autobiography
My Story
(1931), she was worried about her sons who were fighting in World War I and did not have her heart in the creation of bats and archfiends. With two acts completed, she turned the play over to her friend Avery Hopwood, who supplied the third and final act.
The Bat
was produced in 1920 and ran successfully on Broadway and in road versions for a number of years thereafter. Some audiences howled with laughter when they saw it, Mrs. Rinehart notes, and not just during the moments of planned comic relief. This seems to have mildly depressed her; the play was, after all, conceived as an amusing thriller, not a farce.

Farce, however, is what it is.

And farce is what the novel version is, too.

Published in 1926 and written by Mrs. Rinehart alone, although Hopwood is given a joint byline,
The Bat
has the rare distinction of being a novel based on a play based on a novel.

The stage version bears little resemblance to
The Circular Staircase
, which evidently persuaded Mrs. Rinehart (or her publishers) that the play could be novelized, changing the character names, without subsequent cries of self-plagiarism. And she was right; judging from sales figures, her audience appears to have welcomed
The Bat
with open wings.

What elevates the novel to classic status is its consistently maintained high pitch of melodrama. Reading it, one does not envision a play; one envisions a Pearl White silent-movie serial, replete with actors heavily made up and mugging at the camera, the villain in cape and mask and sinister pose, outdoor shots of a howling storm, indoor shots of shadows on walls that resemble bats, hidden rooms, clutching hands, sudden blackouts, and fast and furious action. You can almost hear the creepy organ music playing in the background, full of crescendos. Whatever else may be said about Mrs. Rinehart's literary abilities, she was indeed masterful at the concoction of Gothic melodrama in its purest form.

The Bat
opens with a lengthy commentary on the super-crook's crimes—jewel robberies, bank robberies, six known murders—and the police department's frustrated efforts to put an end to his reign of terror. Among the more feverish descriptive passages, we have:

"Get him—get him—get him—get him!" From a thousand sources now the clamor rose—press, police and public alike crying out for the capture of the master-criminal of a century—lost voices hounding a specter down the alleyways of the wind. And still the meshes broke and the quarry slipped away before the hounds were well on the scent—leaving behind a trail of shattered safes and rifled jewel cases—while ever the clamor rose higher to "Get him—get him—get—"

Get whom, in God's name—get what? Beast, man or devil? A specter—a flying shadow—the shadow of a Bat

The Bat—they called him the Bat. Like a bat he chose the night hours for his work of rapine—like a bat he struck and vanished, pouncingly, noiselessly—like a bat he never showed himself to the face of the day. He'd never been in stir—the bulls had never mugged him—he didn't run with a mob—he played a lone hand and fenced his stuff so that even Ikey the Fence couldn't swear he knew his face. Most lone wolves had a moll at any rate—women were their ruin—but if the Bat had a moll, not even the grapevine telegraph could locate her.

Columnists took him up—played with the name and the terror—used the name and the terror as a starting-point from which to exhibit their own particular opinions on everything from the immortality of the soul to the merits or demerits of the Lucy Stone League. Ministers mentioned him in sermons—cranks wrote fanatic letters denouncing him as one of the seven-headed beasts of the Apocalypse and a forerunner of the end of the world—a popular revue put on a special Bat number wherein eighteen beautiful chorus-girls appeared masked and black-winged in costumes of Brazilian bat-fur—there were Bat club sandwiches, Bat cigarettes and a new shade of silk hosiery called simply and succinctly "Bat." He became a fad—a catchword—a national figure. And yet—he was walking Death—cold—remorseless. But Death itself has become a toy of Publicity in these days of limelight and jazz.

(If you conclude from the above that Mrs. Rinehart's favorite form of punctuation was the dash, you are correct.
The Bat
contains more dashes per page than even a Carolyn Wells novel—no small achievement—to be sure.)

Next we are introduced to some of the lead players in the melodrama. First we meet Detective Anderson, one of the chief's best men, who has been working on another case and thus hasn't been able to go bat hunting until the present. Then we meet the "indomitable" Miss Cornelia Van Gorder—sixtyfive, longing for some adventure at the end of a quiet, discreet life; Miss Cornelia's comic-relief Irish maid, Lizzie ("'I'm not going to bed! Do you think I want to wake up in the morning with my throat cut?'"); Miss Cornelia's Japanese butler, Billy ("'She no take nap. She out in srubbery shotting."); and Miss Cornelia's favorite niece, Dale Ogden, who has recently fallen in love with someone.

Miss Cornelia has rented a country house belonging to Courtleigh Fleming, president of the Union Bank, which has just failed because the cashier, a young man named Jack Bailey, has allegedly absconded with most of the funds. Fleming, meanwhile, is reported to have fled to Colorado; his son, Richard, was the one who rented the house to Miss Cornelia.

She and Lizzie and Billy arrive at the house, which is "two miles from the nearest railroad" and otherwise isolated. No sooner do they settle in than strange things begin to happen:
 
Miss Cornelia receives a note warning her to leave immediately or she'll be killed; prowlers are seen on the premises; Miss Cornelia's Ouija board spells out "BAT," further terrifying the superstitious Lizzie. But Miss Cornelia refuses to be intimidated; the excitement of the mystery appeals to her. She has in her possession a revolver, which for unexplained reasons she purchased two years previously, and proceeds to take some target practice with it. Which is what she is doing when Dale arrives from the city. (" 'Good heavens, child! I might have shot you like a rabbit,' and, overcome with emotion, she sat down on the ground and started to fan herself mechanically with a cartridge.")

Enter the rest of the principals. First there is Brooks, who purports to be a gardener but who thinks urticaria, rubeola, and alopecia are types of shrubbery ("'Young man, urticaria is hives— rubeola is measles—alopecia is baldness!' "). Then Detective Anderson shows up, having been summoned from the city by Miss Cornelia, who evidently has friends in high places. Then comes Dr. Wells, a local physician who acts in a decidedly peculiar fashion when nobody is paying attention to him; Richard Fleming, Courtleigh's son; a young lawyer friend of Richard's named Beresford; and a bloodied Unknown who has a penchant for turning up at odd moments.