Friday was never a terribly active day at a Bouchercon—only the professional writers and diehard fans who’d flown or driven in from here/there/everywhere would be around; Saturday would find Chicago-area fans flocking to a complete card of activities—speakers, panel discussions, movies—and Bouchercon, Chicago-Style, would be in full swing.
Still, there were probably twenty-five or thirty people wandering about the room, and the number of dealer tables was probably nearly the same. I bumped into Sardini and Murtz, both of whom carried ever-growing stacks of books they’d just bought, each commenting about having to go home after the ’con and immediately write and sell something to make up for what they’d been spending. Some of the dealers were hawking new books by the likes of Donald E. Westlake, Joe Gores and Lawrence Block—as well as studies and biographies on writers like Rex Stout, Dorothy Sayers and John D. MacDonald. And of course there were books by the writers who’d be appearing at the ’con, which gave fans a chance to pick up copies to get autographed. Cynthia Crystal was sitting at a table doing just that with her Hammett bio, for a cluster of fans of various ages and sexes (all wearing glasses—see what reading gets you?). Several dealers were carrying my books, and I thanked them for their support; most dealers are mystery
fans
as well, and a couple had copies of my two novels tucked away for an autograph, which I gladly gave them. If only the guy at the Port City 7-Eleven who always insisted on seeing my ID before cashing my checks could see me now...
The major attraction of the room, however, was old books: hardcover editions in dustjacket, with prices routinely in
the forty to one hundred dollar area—
The Long Goodbye
by Raymond Chandler, a surrealistic cover depicting a little idol with blood on it;
Galatea
by James M. Cain, a purple cover with a picture of a water tower. The appeal of all this was a bit beyond me. I’ve never been a collector, anyway not the type who has to have first editions and the like (a novel’s a novel—it doesn’t matter to me what’s on the cover or what edition it is, so long as it’s in English). But I did get a kick out of seeing the rare old paperbacks from the ’40s and ’50s, with their garish covers.
I had done my collecting years and years ago, in secondhand stores where I’d gotten dog-eared paperbacks of Spillane and Prather and Roscoe Kane and the like with gloriously tacky covers, babes and bullets and blood—what more could an impressionable teenager ask? And I’d paid a nickel or a dime apiece for them. The dealers here were asking (and sometimes getting) ten dollars and up. It wasn’t unusual to see a paperback (
The Marijuana Mob
by James Hadley Chase;
Five Murderers
by Raymond Chandler) go for thirty dollars or more.
And all the Roscoe Kane first edition paperbacks—which yesterday would have brought perhaps five dollars per—were marked twenty-five dollars and up. Dying can do wonders for a guy’s career. Gat Garson would’ve cheerfully shot the dealers who’d indulged in this overnight grave robbing; Gat wasn’t around, so I shot them for him—using dirty looks for ammunition, instead of .38 slugs. Not that any of them noticed, or anyway cared.
I caught up with Kathy and her
Noir
sweatshirt at a table where a lavish paperback selection had every passerby’s eyes popping out at the bright colors and sexy, gory subject matter. This particular dealer was a guy I knew—Bob Weinberg, a bearded guy with glasses and a sense of humor so dry you
didn’t laugh till a day later; his prices today were, as usual, not out of line. And he hadn’t raised his Roscoe Kane prices, either. I complimented him on that.
“Don’t be silly,” he said. He wore a green sweater and cream button-down shirt and gray slacks, a conservative contrast to the excesses of the covers of his wares, spread out before him like a kitsch banquet. (Do real men eat kitsch?)
“It’s just refreshing to run across a dealer who isn’t a ghoul.”
“Dealers are rumored to be human,” he said, as if not entirely in agreement with that notion. “I do have a Roscoe Kane item you might be interested in. In fact, I brought it with you in mind.”
“I have all the books, Bob. And I don’t have the patience to go after the short stories in the pulps.”
“No, this is something special. I think you’ll like this. Let me check with my wife and see where we put it.”
Bob’s wife was his business partner.
Meanwhile, Kathy was looking at the cover of a Kane book called
Hearse Class Frail
.
“Don’t tell anybody,” she said, “but I have to admit I like these covers.”
This particular one portrayed a beautiful busty blonde in a negligee looking out her bedroom window where, in the blue darkness of the night, Gat Garson was punching out several thugs.
“You don’t like the books,” I said, “but you like the covers.”
She shrugged. “It evokes an era. And I have to admit something...”
“Feel free.”
“I never read one of these Gat Garson things all the way through. Maybe if I got into one...”
“I’ll buy you a copy of one of his better ones.”
“That’d be nice. I’d like to give Roscoe Kane another try.”
“As a gesture to me.”
She gave me wry smile #764. “Maybe I’m just trying to keep on your good side. I’m counting on that interview with you.”
“Your publisher might have some objection to your running an interview with me, you know.”
“Gregg gives me free editorial rein. The interview’s still on, then?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“After you take me out to dinner, that is.”
“Right. I’m all for bribing journalists before they interview me; it’s good for my image.”
“What image is that?”
I scowled at her. “The Gat Garson of the ’80s.”
Weinberg was back and he had a big twenty-by-twenty-five piece of bristol board covered with a protective sheet of tissue paper through which I could, barely, see something—something I liked very much.
“I don’t collect that stuff,” I said, not very convincingly.
“It’s up to you,” Weinberg said. Not the hardest sell.
“It’s beautiful,” Kathy said, something like awe in her voice.
And so it was: the original cover painting to
Murder Me Again, Doll
, my favorite Gat Garson novel; the very painting that had adorned the cover of the novel’s original publication in 1958, which I had read a battered used copy of in 1961, the first Roscoe Kane novel I ever read, the book that gave me Gat Garson fever.
The painting showed Gat on a fire escape, a lithe brunette beauty in a negligee huddling next to him as he fired his .38 down toward several armed thugs climbing up toward them.
It was a night scene, blue tones shattered by bursts of red and orange from Gat’s gat.
“It’s by Kinstler,” Weinberg said. “He’s a big-time portrait painter now, you know—his paperback covers are getting collectible.”
“I believe it.”
“Imagine,” Weinberg said, “having a painting by somebody who did both Gerald Ford’s portrait
and
Gat Garson’s.”
“I don’t think I can afford it.” I was holding the painting in my hands, which were shaking—Gat seemed to be moving; I could almost hear the gun going
KA-CHOW
....
“I was going to ask two hundred for it. Unless you wanted it, in which case I’d settle for one seventy-five. Of course, that was before Roscoe Kane died on us.”
“
Now
what do you want?”
“One seventy-five.”
“It might be worth twice that, now that Roscoe’s gone.”
“I brought it here to offer you for one seventy-five. Do you want it or not?”
I handed the painting back to him—and wrote him out a check.
“Keep it for me till I’ve been around the room, would you, Bob?”
“Sure,” he said—shrugging, as if this deal couldn’t have meant less to him. But he’d gone out of his way to be nice to me, and had managed to confirm the rumor that some dealers
were
human, after all.
Kathy and I walked along, glancing at the various tables of colorful paperback and pulp covers.
“Did you notice how much the ‘doll’ Gat’s holding onto in the painting looked like you?” I asked her.
“I was afraid to point it out without sounding like an egomaniac,” she admitted. “That’s some pretty girl in that painting.”
“Don’t you mean pretty ‘woman’?”
Her smile went crinkly on me. “No, Mal. That was definitely a girl.”
“You, on the other hand, are...”
“Definitely a woman. But is that so bad?”
“You don’t hear me complaining.”
We each picked up a few books as we wandered through the adjacent rooms—she bought an extra copy of guest-of-honor Donaldson’s most recent novel,
Poisonous Wine
, to get an autograph later; and I found a couple of novels I’d been looking for by Jim Thompson, an underappreciated crime novelist of the ’50s whose bleak books made James M. Cain seem like Louisa May Alcott. Phyllis White, the widow of the ’con’s namesake, Anthony Boucher, and a regular, treasured guest of the Bouchercon, was chatting with Otto Penzler at the Mysterious Press table. Kathy and I stopped so I could pick up the Spillane collection Penzler had recently published and I exchanged smiles with Otto and Mrs. White. Tim Culver had joined Cynthia at the autograph table; they were cordial to the fans, but I still sensed a tension between them.
Then we came to the Mystery House table. Various Gorman publications were on display—including that slipcased set of Carroll John Daly that both Tom Sardini and I had sprung for by mail—and so was Gorman.
So much for dealers being human.
I hadn’t noticed him come in, which was like failing to notice a garbage scow pull into your marina. I must’ve been caught up in that deal with Weinberg and the painting, and Gorman must’ve been uncharacteristically close-mouthed for
the past few minutes, because normally his loud and obnoxious voice would have carried like a bad smell in a small room.
“Well,” he said. “It’s Mallory. The asshole.”
He wasn’t a big man, at least not tall; maybe five-eight. He had a beer belly and a goatee in which flecks of his last half-dozen meals hung on like bad memories. His hair was a washed-out, colorless red and thinning, and his nose was roadmapped darker red. His eyes were little dark beady things that looked out from under bushy eyebrows like bugs hiding under weeds. His thick upper lip curled up under the mustache part of the goatee and revealed teeth as yellow as the sun, but not shining.
“I love you, too, Gorman.”
He poked a thumb at a chest ensconced in a pale green sweater polka-dotted with vague foodstains and strained to the point of looking threadbare over the protruding belly; one of the collars of the paisley shirt beneath the sweater poked out like a knife, the other was tucked in. For a guy worth half a million easy, he was hardly a page out of
GQ
.
“Anytime you want a piece of me, say the word, asshole. We can step outside now, if you like.”
“All right,” I said.
He just stood there behind his table with a nervous, fallen expression, trying to figure out what to do since I’d called his bluff.
Then he grinned, lamely. “You’d fall for anything, Mallory. You’re that big a sucker.”
“Oh. I get it. You were just kidding. You don’t want to go outside and beat me up.”
“I got better things to do.”
“Like swindle people?” I said.
He bristled. “That’s a serious accusation, asshole. You... you better be able to back that up.”
I looked at Kathy, whose presence Gorman hadn’t yet acknowledged despite her being the editor of one of his publications, and said, “You want to hear why the king of Publisher’s Row, here, doesn’t like me?”
Caught between me and her boss, Kathy just looked blank, managing to swallow once, but not to say anything.
I went ahead: “There was an old mystery writer named Raoul Wheeler. He wasn’t the greatest mystery writer in the world, but he did a series of short stories back in the ’40s about a character who was the forerunner of James Bond. Erik Flayr, a secret service man who battled larger-than-life villains.”
Kathy was nodding; she’d heard of Wheeler and his creation.
Despite her knowing most of this, I wanted to say it all; some people were gathering, and not all of them knew the Raoul Wheeler story.
“Wheeler was one of those writers like Carroll John Daly who are historically important, mentioned in all the reference books and such, but who didn’t
really
make it. The Flayr character had a brief period of popularity in the pulps, and Columbia Pictures even made a serial about him; but that was it for Wheeler—his moment of glory. Then came the James Bond boom in the ’60s and some of the mystery-fiction historians remembered Wheeler’s work and started dropping his name. But none of Wheeler’s Eric Flayr stuff got brought back in print, during the Bond boom, because Wheeler had never done Flayr novels, just short stories, and publishers of paperbacks like to do novels, not short-story collections....”
The rest of Gorman’s face was gradually turning to the same shade of red as his nose.
“Wheeler finished out his career writing soft-core porn and confession-magazine stuff, never amounting to much... but he had a certain pride in Eric Flayr. He lived in Clinton, Iowa, Wheeler did, near me. I heard he was living there and I drove up to meet him. He lived in a two-room flat and he was ill—dying of cancer, in fact. A frail little man with a mustache. Skinny. But he was a nice old guy, with lots of stories about people he met in the pulp days—Hammett, Chandler, Daly, Fred Nebel, Frank Gruber, all those guys—and he had a complete collection of the
Thrilling Detective Adventure
pulps with his Eric Flayr stories in them. One afternoon, he gave them to me. A gift. A legacy.”
Gorman began talking to his flunky, that teenaged kid with acne on his neck and a plaid shirt. Pretending to ignore me, and the small crowd that was gathering.
“I was an innocent back then—this was maybe six years ago. All I knew about Gregg Gorman was that he was reprinting rare, important mystery fiction, for the hard-core mystery fan market. So I wrote him a letter. Told him I had a complete run of the Flayr stories. Suggested collecting them into a book. Gorman called me—he came on a little strong, but I figured that was just the difference between Chicago and Port City, Iowa. What did I care if he was obnoxious, as long as he published a collection of Wheeler’s stories—which he said he intended doing. In fact, he’d had the idea before I even came to him, but had been stopped by the rarity of this particular pulp—even top collectors like Blackbeard and Pronzini didn’t have a complete run of
Thrilling Detective Adventures
between them! So he was very grateful.”