You Play the Black & the Red Comes Up Up

“If you prefer sweetness and light; you' horrid.”

Black Lizard Books

Berkeley · 1986

Text Copyright © 1938 by Richard Hallas (Eric M. Knight). Copyright renewed by Ruth (Jere) Knight. Reprinted by arrangement with Jere Knight, Betty Noyes Knight, Winifred Knight Mewborn, and Jennie Knight Morre c/o Curtis Brown, Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction copyright © 1980 by David Feinberg.

This first Black Lizard Books edition published 1986.

You Play The Black And The Red Comes Up
is a Black Lizard Book published by Creative Arts Book Company. For information contact: Creative Arts, 833 Bancroft Way, Berkeley,

California 94710.

Typography by QuadraType.

ISBN 0-88739-006-4

Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 86-70458

Manufactured in the United States of America

by David Feinberg

You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up
(1938) by Richard Hallas (Eric Knight) has had a paradoxical history. It remains one of the most celebrated hardboiled novels ever written but, because it has been out of print for almost 40 years, not many people interested in the genre have had an opportunity to read it. To some extent then, its reputation exists independent of its strengths or weaknesses as a novel and one of the genuine pleasures that comes from rereading this book is the confirmation of how very good it really is. The past decade has seen a major reevaluation of tough guy fiction and a happy byproduct of the belated critical appreciation has been the fact that many of the novels under discussion are back in print. The works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James Cain have always been available but now some of the lesser known novels, Edward Anderson's
Thieves Like Us
(1934), Paul Cain's
Fast One
(1933), Horace McCoy's
They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
(1935), have been republished. But of all the good, hardboiled novels of the 1930s probab
ly the one most difficult to ob
tain has been this novel by Eric Knight. If it is possible for a published work to be "lost" then, surely, until now, that has been the fate of
You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up.

The book, originally published in 1938, was a moderate critical and commercial success. More important, there was something about the book's quirky power, something odd and dislocating, that seemed to demand attention. Critics, whether they liked the novel or not
,
took notice of it. This is the only crime novel that Eric Knight ever wrote; the only time in all his work that he employed the traditional tough guy style of writing. Such was the novel's impact, however, that Knight was forced to take his lumps, along with other, more popular, writers in Edmund Wilson's famous essay "The Boys in the Back Room." Wilson didn't like this book (he didn't like the work of Hammett or Cain either) but he didn't condescend to it and his perceptive criticisms were echoed by a number of other writers.
You Play Black and the Red Comes Up,
he wrote, "is a clever pastiche of Cain which is mainly as two-dimensional as a movie." The word "pastiche," implying satire, is the crux of the matter; in certain respects the power of this book worked against it. Some critics don't consider it a novel at all—they read it as a burlesque of the whole hard- boiled genre. J. Fenwick, in the New York
Herald Tribune
(1938) wrote,
"...
this book is a phoney, but it is a pretty slick job." In the anthology,
Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties (1968) You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up
is referred to as an "imitation." There are a number of reasons some critics remain wary of this work but the most important seems to be that the author of this archetype of the American crime novel of the 1930s was not an American at all. Wrote Wilson: "It is indicative of the degree to which this kind of writing has finally become formularized that it should have been possible for a visiting Englishman—the real author is Eric Knight—to tell a story in the Hemingway-Cain vernacular almost without a slip."

The "visiting Englishman" was born in Menston, Yorkshire in 1897, and emigrated to the United States while still in his teens. He studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and served in the Canadian Army during World War I. Following the war he worked for several newspapers in Philadelphia
. He moved to Holly
wood in 1932, wrote a number of film scripts, then returned to Pennsylvania to continue his writing career. In 1942, Knight was given a commission as a major in the
United States Army, serv
ing in the film unit of the Spe
cial Services section. He was killed, while on his way to North Africa, on January 15,1943, in the crash of a U.S. military transport plane in the jungle of Surinam, in northern South America. In addition to
You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up,
his best known works include
Las
sie, Come Home
(1940), the prototype for the TV series, a novella,
The Flying Yorkshireman
(1938), and a bestselling novel,
This Above All
(1941), which
deals with life in Lon
don during the blitz. He wrote several other novels, but these, his most popular books, serve to indicate his versatility as a writer:
The Flying Yorkshireman
is a fantasy about a man who has mastered the art of unaided flight;
This Above All,
despite its su
bject matter, is basically a ro
mance; and, of course,
You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up,
a classic "American" hardboiled novel.

So finally we come to the book itself. There are so many disparate plot elements in
You Play Black and the Red Comes Up
that to describe them all would make the novel seem like an anthology: through tough guy fiction with gun and camera. Anyone familiar with the genre is sure to recognize one or two old favorites. There is a protagonist (known only as Dick) cut off from his past with little hope for the future. He hops a freight train and ends up in Los Angeles, where he runs into some tough customers. ("A thousand and one nights [on] the screwy Pacific Coast," Edmund Wilson complained.) Dick commits a crime, plans another, and is finally arrested for something he didn't do. There is also a film director, Quentin Genter, of uncertain sexuality, who tries to have Dick killed and then becomes his pal. There are two floozies, one of whom is an out-and-out psychopath and the other of whom isn't very nice, either. (She does possess, however, the stamina of Rasputin.) There's a "good" girl with whom Dick falls in love. Her name is Sheila and she is, in her own sweet way, as loopy as the film director. There's a tart or two; various and sundry Hollywood folk who are, to put it kindly, eccentric; crooked cops; a shyster lawyer; and a muscular lifeguard who has no uncertainty about Genter's sexuality. There are three homicides, a robbery, a suicide, several illicit love affairs, a gambling den, and a spectacular murder trial. Finally, there is a wicked send-up of Upton Sinclair's EPIC (End Poverty in California) campaign for Governor in 1934 and a scene in a meeting hall-cum- temple that manages to polish off not only Mr. Sinclair but Aimee Semple McPherson as well. As Tolstoy is supposed to have said of
War and Peace:
the only thing missing from this book is a yacht race.

A novel with this sort of plotline is obviously going to slide into melodrama every now and then. What is remarkable about
You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up
is how rarely this happens. There is much about the story that is familiar but Knight, speeding things up, slowing them down, emphasizing first the humorous and then the tough and gritty, always keeps the reader guessing. Take, for example, the character of Quentin Genter—Dick's guide through the underside of Hollywood society. Dick quickly comes to understand that Los Angeles is "different" than any place he's ever been. "I kept thinking that the goofier the plan the more quickly people seem to fall for it in California" (p. 41). A bit later, while attending the religious rites of a wacky political cult, Dick describes the entranced audience: "I thought sure people would jump up and give [the] horselaugh out loud, but they all applauded and never cracked a smile. These people were so slaphappy they couldn't have told the difference between Thursday and a fan dancer" (p. 65).

Dick may have his suspicions but it takes Genter to give him the lowdown on what the situation really is:

You see, I’ll tell you a secret. No one is sane here. No one is sane and nothing is real. And you know what it is? . . .It's the climate—something in the air. You can bring men from other parts of the world who are sane. And you know what happens? At the very moment they cross those mountains . . . they go mad. Instantaneously and automatically, at the very moment they cross the mountains into California, they go insane. Everyone does. They still think they're sane, but they're not. Everyone in this blasted State is raving mad. (p. 44)

Attitudes like this have become de rigueur in novels about California but it is worth noting that Nathaniel West's
The Day of the Locust
(1939), published a year after this book, portrays an attitude towards Hollywood not dissimilar to that of
You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up.
Raymond Chandler's Hollywood satire,
The Little Sister
(1949), was published a decade after that. This is not to say that Knight was exploring virgin territory but there was, at the time this book was written, some life in the old cliches yet. Similarly, the jaded, alcoholic film director, a man so corrupted by his work that he sees life itself as a movie set, has also become a kind of literary "stick figure." He is, to this type of novel, what the bitter, cynical private dick is to the detective genre. Yet Knight, miraculously, makes Genter come alive. Genter remains a character of such good-natured mendacity that he is never reduced to mere stereotype.

The key, I think, to Eric Knight's success is that he maintains a firm and knowing control over the admittedly gaudy elements of his story; the pacing is terrific and technically the novel is a virtual tour de force. There is, however, another factor which makes reading this book so enjoyable. Char
les Barr, a film critic, has de
scribed a hidden pleas
ure that comes from viewing cer
tain old Laurel and Hardy shorts. Forming the background of those films is the Los Angeles of the late 1920s; flat, hardly developed, a western town really, existing forever as it once did before the builders and city planners destroyed its original beauty. In much the same way the "background" of this novel—the syntax, the vocabulary of the novel—illuminates a world that is no longer there. It is not only a matter of physical locale but also of character; the way the people in this book relate to each other, the way they think about themselves. It's just not done that way anymore. This is the hardboiled novel of Hammett and
Cain and Horace McCoy, the gen
uine article, before psychoanalysis and self-pity took away its sting. The characters in this book don't worry about motivation or Freud or which side of the law they are on or even about doing the "right" thing. They just do. The dialogue is sharp and individual scenes remain vivid. It's a trifle silly at times—all that running about, all that energy—but it works. It is almost inconceivable that someone could begin to read this book and not finish it. After 40 years
You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up
is still, as a visiting Englishman might put it, a smashing good read.

David Feinberg
New York City