FFB: Harlem Underground - Ed Lacy

Lee Hayes, the rookie patrolman protagonist of Harlem Underground (1965), has been summoned by his captain. He's sure that he is about to receive a promotion to detective for his recent nabbing of a serial rapist. Imagine his disappointment when he hears from a fellow cop that he's being transferred to an uptown station to work as a typist. Can't be true, he thinks. He did some incredible work on that rapist case.  It's all a smokescreen for his fellow beat cops. The typist job is a cover so word won't get out about his real assignment. Chosen specifically for his youthful looks and street smart sensibility the 23 year-old Lee is to go undercover as a teenager and infiltrate a gang known as the Bloody Blacks who are responsible for several violent hate crimes against whites and are rumored to be plotting something worse than muggings and stabbings.

Lee experiences first hand ugly racism in his brief job as a garment district rack boy, gets into a fistfight with his employer and is fired on the very first day.  All this is to serve to build a reputation as a bad boy to make him more attractive as a recruit for the Bloody Blacks.  He finds a cheap room in the home of the Johnsons where he befriends teenager Ace, a hooligan braggart who dreams of owning his own fighter jet and dropping bombs on Klansmen in the South. Lee listens to ridiculous stories that have filled Ace's easily manipulated mind all of which come from the brains behind the Bloody Blacks -- an intimidating man known only as "Purple Eye."  With the help of fellow police officer Mary Parenti, working undercover in the guise of a social worker, he is to find out the identity of Purple Eye and stop the secret plan that has only been hinted at in the rambling bravado talk of gang members like Ace.

While both Lee and Mary do some impressive detective work the mystery novel aspects are thin here.  True, there is final reveal of the identity of Purple Eye but it's not all that surprising.  Nor is that Lacy's intent. The story serves only as a method to explore race relations at a time when the civil rights movement already seemed to be failing. Lacy allows for several fervent speeches about race relations, some delivered with thoughtfulness and understanding like the scenes between Lee and Helen Johnson. But there are more instances of the zealotry of Black Power and bigotry as nasty as the ingrained unfairness whites inflict on blacks.  This ranges from the intolerant thoughts of the West Indian grocery store owner to the unbridled hatred for whites exhibited in the inflammatory dialogue of Solmen, superintendent of the building where the Johnsons and Lee live.

Harlem Underground is a remarkably resonant book for our time. Considering what just happened in South Carolina its also a sober reminder that things never seem to change. Written only months after the Harlem race riots and with the murder of Malcom X still fresh in the minds of everyone Harlem Underground is an angry book filled with volatile emotions, didactic speeches, intolerance on multiple levels. Eerily, when the nightmarish plot of the Bloody Blacks is uncovered Lacy foresees the kind of terrorist acts that have become nearly commonplace today. Lacy intersperses the story of Lee's undercover work with journalistic passages (some actually lifted verbatim from newspaper accounts) describing the struggles and  unfair treatment of the people of Harlem.

Among these accounts are the story of a pregnant teen who doesn't know or care who the father of her baby is, a black teen sent to the store to buy a can of chili but who shocks his father when he steals it, a black youth riding the subway who pretends to help a fearful white man fix his radio but takes it and runs, and Lee's rejection by a prospective employer who is shocked when a black man turns up at the interview.  Lacy presents all these stories in a straightforward style telling each vignette in a first person narrative. So true and natural are these voices they come across as though he transcribed their words from an interview tape. Though fictional they are as true as a story on the nightly news. One can't help but join in their anger and buy into all the rationalizations each character gives for their behavior.

Lee Hayes does get his promotion.  He appeared one more time, this time as a police detective partnered with Jewish cop Al Kahn, in Lacy's final polemical Harlem novel aptly titled In Black & Whitey (1967).  The only paperback edition of this book touts "Soon To Be a Major Motion Picture!" but I'm not sure it was ever made. Lacy's entry at imdb.com doesn't list any movie or TV episode resembling the novel. Movie mavens can feel free to enlighten me in the comment section if I'm wrong.

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Reading Challenge update: Silver Age card, space R3 -  "Book with place in title"  This is the corresponding missing category that should've been on the Silver Age Bingo card in the last column.

FFB: Murder by the Day - Veronica Parker Johns

In the opening chapter of Murder by the Day (1953) we learn that Mortimer Rutherford, a millionaire with a morbid fear of dying in an inferno, has completely fireproofed his penthouse. How then was he found incinerated in his newly purchased designer armchair? A chair, that like the rest of his home, was most recently treated with a new fireproofing compound he helped develop with a chemist friend. Furthermore, Rutherford's interior designer, Althea Tamblyn (one of the more colorful characters in the book), had also purchased several of those chairs for other tenants in the building. Mysteriously, the chairs keep turning up in the oddest of places. Murder by the Day might well be subtitled The Case of the Flip-Flopped Furniture along the lines of an alliterative Perry Mason title. It's well suited for the Mason series for just like Gardner's obsession with switching guns and bullets in the Mason books Johns has her characters switching and moving those chairs around the Rutherford House apartment complex with the rapidity and deftness of a con man running a shell game.

Mercury Mystery digest paperback (1954)

But it isn't just the bizarre murder method that makes Murder by the Day worth your while. Webster Flagg, ex-performer whose talents on the stage took him from the vaudeville circuit to Shakespearean repertory, is the Rutherford's butler and housekeeper who also is employed by several other residents at Rutherford House. Flagg is the amateur sleuth of our piece, the only actor turned butler turned detective I know of in the genre. Oh, but he's also one of the earliest African American amateur detectives in the genre, too.

Beating out both Ed Lacy's private eye Toussaint Moore who first appeared in 1958 and Chester Himes' policemen who debuted in 1957 Webster Flagg is perhaps the first of the modern amateur black detectives. But unlike Lacy's and Himes' creations you'll find no tough guy demeanor here. Flagg (two G's, please, if you don't want to unduly upset him) is a sixtyish gentleman in every sense of the word, restraining himself with the suavity of Jeeves, reining in his temper and never resorting to harsh words when he's taunted by his mercurial clients. Drawing upon his acting talents and his clever insights into his client's personalities based solely on how messy or tidy they lead their lives he makes for a formidable detective. Johns' characterization of a black servant in a very rich and very white environment makes for some enlightening reading. She makes her point especially in a flashback when Webster has to deal with one of his employer's frequent fits of rage and his repeated use of the "N word". Johns' handling of the scene shows only one of the many reasons that Webster is one of the most dignified and sophisticated of black detectives in the history of crime fiction.

Servant's Problem (1958) 1st US edition
The second and last Webster Flagg mystery

This is a detective novel with all the goods on display. Johns' has a lively writing style with a talent for turning a phrase and incorporating clever wordplay. Sometimes a bit self-consciously clever ("...slip covering herself in a kennel of blue poodles flaunting magenta ribbons") or awkward ("Her second Gibson laced her stays."), nonetheless, her writing is always vibrant and alive, never dull. At times tongue in cheek, but never silly; deadpan serious, but never preachy, as when dealing with the subtle and insidious racism that shows its ugly face at key moments. Her women characters are more colorful than the men ranging from the harried Priscilla Taylor, neglected wife who discovers the body, to the smug and haughty decorator Althea Tamblyn to the dumb blond hick Margie Peters whose naïve country ways are typical of the kind of comic character you get in a crime novel set in urbane Manhattan. Even the temperamental Black Angus, Rutherford's pet cat, gets to shine and provides more than a few clues to the solution of the murder. But this is no cat mystery. Angus has a few scenes of importance and never takes center stage, thank heaven.

Let me not overlook the essential ingredients of any good mystery novel -- the detective work and laying out of clues. There is an abundance of both. A stolen house key, the cat in the dumbwaiter incident, Rutherford's collection of valuable Impressionist and abstract paintings, an ingeniously painted copy of a Cezanne, reading glasses found in a recipe file, and the game of musical chairs in which the furniture moves around in dizzying circles rather than the people are among the numerous puzzling events and clues Webster will deal with as he sorts out fact from fiction in this literal case of in flagrante delicto.

Hush, Gabriel! (1941)  Atlas paperback edition
Johns' first mystery novel featuring Agatha Welch

Not much is known about Veronica Parker Johns other than her writing career. In addition to only five detective novels -- two with a spinster detective named Agatha Welch, one stand-alone mystery, and two with Webster Flagg -- she wrote a non-fiction work about her unusual hobby of collecting sea shells titled aptly enough She Sells Sea Shells. A number of her short stories appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and she is perhaps best known for her story "A Gentleman Caller" which was adapted for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour starring Roddy McDowall in the tile role. A review of the second and last Webster Flagg mystery Servant's Problem will be appearing here soon. Stay tuned.

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Reading Challenge Update: Golden Age Vintage Mystery Bingo -- space E2, "Book with a time, day, month, etc. in the title". Another Bingo line! And only four more books left to fill the card.

1958: The Real Cool Killers - Chester Himes

US first edition (Avon, 1959)

"The Harlem of my books was never meant to be real; I never called it real; I just wanted to take it away from the white man if only in my books."

-- Chester Himes in The Several Lives of Chester Himes (Univ Press of Mississippi, 1997)

I wonder if Chester Himes would be at all surprised that the world he created, one he insisted was not at all a real depiction of Harlem in the 1950s and 1960s, has manifested itself as something all too real in the 21st century. Gangs of teenage thugs now flourish more than ever, shootings have become almost a daily occurrence, and indifference for human life and disrespect for any kind of authority trumps all civil behavior. These are the kinds of events and symptoms of Harlem that Himes held up to ridicule. His gang of teenagers who call themselves "The Real Cool Moslems" dress up in robes and turbans pretending to be Arabs. People are routinely murdered just so a new gun can be tried out. Young girls allow themselves to be humiliated and insulted just so they will be paid attention to by boys. I guess it was funny almost fifty years ago. I just kind of shook my head at how things haven't changed at all.

The Real Cool Killers (first published in France as Il Pleut des Coups Durs in 1958) are anything but cool. The gang Himes creates is made up of a ragtag bunch of bored teenagers led by an arrogant kid calling himself Sheik who taunts and insults everyone around him. A little man in the ghetto who becomes a big man when he has a zip gun or a knife in his hand. Shedding their ghetto identities as they don their ludicrous outfits the "Moslems" all prefer to go by ridiculous nicknames in an attempt to further escape into a world of their own fashioning. The Sheik surrounds himself with an army of sycophants called Choo-Choo, Inky, Camel Mouth, Slow Motion and Punkin Head. Their girls are Sissie, Good Booty and Sugartit. Sugartit turns out to be Evelyn Johnson, daughter to Coffin Ed Johnson, one of the two Harlem policemen who are Himes' series characters. Johnson's partner is Grave Digger Jones whose first name is not revealed in this book. I wonder if it ever is. The two are not your typical policemen and make a strong contrast to the uptight rule-following white cops who are their colleagues and superiors

The opening of The Real Cool Killers is a whopper. Within the first four pages a barroom brawl breaks out replete with knife attack, a couple of shootings and a hand dismemberment by a very angry ax-wielding bartender. The police are called in when a white man ends up shot.

UK reprint (Allison & Busby, 1985)

Coffin Ed it turns out is still getting over an attack that left his face a ruinous horror. Some punk threw acid on him and he's understandably very touchy about anyone throwing any type of liquid at him again.  When he beats one of the gang members after a bottle of perfume is thrown at him he is suspended from duty and disappears for the remainder of the book. We are left with Grave Digger Jones, even more intolerant of the inhabitants of Harlem who he finds to be an ignorant bunch of brutes and savages. He loses his patience, frequently exploding in violence, slapping and beating the gang members when he gets nothing from them but feigned ignorance of the shooting and violence at the bar, loads of lies peppered with plenty of swearing. The word "mother-raper" appears on nearly every page and I'm sure it was a toned down version of more commonly used slang of the real Harlem.

Grave Digger receives little help from his fellow cops while Coffin Ed is out of commission. He is left to his wits and his brawn in trying to figure out how a white man ended up shot dead when the only gun on the scene can only fire blanks. It's sort of an impossible crime in the setting of a hardboiled -- very hardboiled -- crime novel. That was a pleasant surprise for me. Even more surprising were the characters who at first seem like cartoonish caricatures and stereotypes leftover from an Octavus Roy Cohen comic novel. As the book progresses. however, it is clear that Himes is using these very real stereotypical characters as foils for his intolerance for the "anything goes" lifestyle of the ghetto. His Harlem is filled with people who in order to have any decent life will use and manipulate anyone and everything. Morality goes out the window, crime is almost second nature to some of them. As Grave Digger says to one of the superior white characters: "If you white people insist on coming up to Harlem where you force colored people to live in vice-and-crime ridden slums, it's my job to see that you are safe." Grave Digger will not abide pretense of any sort. Both he and Coffin Ed tell it like it is.

French paperback reprint (circa mid 1970s)

Himes never really set out to write crime fiction. While living in his self-imposed exile in France along with other Harlem expatriate writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright he was approached by publisher Marcel Duhamel who was championing the publication of American crime fiction in French translation, specifically that of the hard boiled school. Himes confessed he hadn't a clue how he was going to write a hardboiled novel and Duhamel told him it was simple: begin with a bizarre incident and then imitate the writing of Hammett and Chandler. You can't fault him for following that bit of advice. Himes has been compared to those two kings of hardboiled crime, but I'd say his real influence is the most hardboiled writer of all -- Carroll John Daly. Himes himself has confessed that Daly's stories were a big draw for him when he was addicted to reading pulp magazines while in prison during the late 1940s.

All of Himes' books, both his crime novels and his other mainstream fiction, are readily available in a variety of reprint editions. The 1950s and 1960s paperback originals from Avon tend to be priced extravagantly these days due to his new place of honor in the Crime Fiction Hall of Fame. In looking for images of the first edition Avon paperback I saw prices ranging from $16 for a reading copy to $75 for a VG+ copy. If you spent that kind of money on a nearly pristine copy you'd probably never want to open the darn thing.

Moment of Untruth - Ed Lacy

Touie Moore returns in a sequel of sorts to Room to Swing. Seven years have passed since his debut and he is now married to Fran who he met at the boarding house in Bingsten, Ohio. As the story opens Touie learns his wife is pregnant, but he's not as excited as she is. In fact he's not at all happy about it though he doesn't reveal this to Fran. Shortly after getting the news of his impending fatherhood he calls Ted Bailey, his former private detective partner, to plead for a side job. He's already thinking he'll need additional income when Fran has to quit her job to take care of the baby.

Hoping for nothing more complicated than a guard job on the weekend he soon learns that Ted 's private detective agency is now an "industrial investigating" firm and that Kay Robbens, the PR TV executive from Room to Swing, is Ted's partner in the firm. As it happens they need an agent to take on a job in Mexico. The primary stockholder in a chemical company that Kay is wooing for her PR firm demands Ted's agency send down a private eye immediately. After some cajoling Kay and Ted get Touie to agree to take on the job. Touie sees it as an opportunity to escape his responsibility to his pregnant wife and a chance to distract himself from the major life changing event that he faces.

When Touie arrives in Mexico he learns that the "old bag" Kay was telling him about, Grace Lupe-Varon, is actually a very young and outspoken university professor. She wants Touie to prove that he husband was murdered. She is sure that a prominent matador is behind the death. Her investigative journalist husband had uncovered something about the bullfighter's career and was threatening to expose him. When the husband died of a snake bite she was convinced it had to be a murder. Snake bite? Where did the snake come from, Touie asks? From my collection she tells him. Mrs. Lupe-Varon it turns out is a herpetologist and she has a veritable menagerie of reptiles in her home for her extensive research on snake venom and their medicinal properties.


UK edition: T.V. Boardman (1965)

Complicating matters is the presence of Frank Smith, a mysterious American tourist who befriends Touie based solely on the fact that they are two black men in a foreign country. Smith claims to be a writer, Touie is suspicious. Nevertheless, the two strike up a friendship as often is the case when people of similar background met up by chance in a foreign country. Smith introduces Touie to the world of bullfighting allowing him to see firsthand the artistry of matador superstar "El Indio." But when Smith seems to be following Touie in his investigation of the Lupe-Varon murder the plot takes a sinister turn. Is Smith also a private detective interested in the death of the professor's husband? There is more to Smith than meets the eye as Touie will soon learn from the Mexican police.

Moment of Untruth (1964) as the title may suggest is a mystery about bullfighting. The moment of truth as bullfighting aficionados may know is the point at which the matador makes his kill. The title is one of the biggest clues to the ultimate mystery surrounding the murder of Grace's husband. There are plenty of scenes in the bullfighting arena, lots of background on the art of being a matador and specifically the unusual habits and rituals of "El Indio."

The mystery is much better constructed than Room to Swing and the exotic background makes for a gripping, fascinating read. Though Lacy apparently disliked the idea of a series character he does a fine job of incorporating Touie's life as husband and father-to-be into the detective story plot. And there is plenty of detection and action in this private eye novel. His final adventure in Mexico will force him to make decisions about what he really wants out of his life. That decision will fully explain why he never appeared in another book or story.

Yesterday was the anniversary of Ed Lacy's death. Coincidentally, there happens to be a rise in interest about him just as I have been posting reviews on his work. You can read a tribute to Lacy in Tablet, a Jewish online magazine. Click here for the article.

FFB: Room to Swing - Ed Lacy

I have a thing about the Edgar Awards. I happen to think a lot of the award winners didn't deserve that little statue of Poe. Only occasionally do I come across a truly worthy Edgar winning mystery novel. Room to Swing (1958) won the Edgar for Best Novel. It's most definitely one of the deserving winners. Not only that - it's a little known, little discussed, hardly reviewed at all, landmark novel in the history of crime fiction by a writer who deserves a lot more attention.

Toussaint Marcus Moore is a private detective hired by Kay Robbens, a TV executive, to shadow the subject of a soon to be aired reality TV show that sounds exactly like a 1950s version of "America's Most Wanted." The man, Robert Thomas, is wanted by Ohio police for a rape and assault of a teenage girl and Kay know he is currently living under an assumed name in Manhattan. Moore is to keep an eye on Thomas and make sure he doesn't leave New York until the show is aired. Then Kay hopes some TV viewer will spot Thomas, notify police, and he'll be arrested thus validating the purpose of the TV show and insuring it has a long run. But Thomas ends up dead, Moore is framed for the murder, and he flees the city. Moore is determined to clear his name, but in order to do that he needs to uncover who killed Thomas and why. He figures it's all linked to the rape case.

His travels take him to Bingston, a small Ohio town on the Kentucky border, where he holes up in a makeshift boarding house owned by one of the few black couples in town. This is good for Moore because as a black man himself with an opinionated, unguarded way of speaking he was nearly run out of town by the bigoted police officers in Bingston. He finds an ally of sorts in Frances Russell who immediately sees through his bad impression of an itinerant jazz musician. She will serve as his captive audience (and later a sometime assistant) as he tells his tale to her in a series of flashbacks.

What's most remarkable about this book is that with all its talk about race relations, its depiction of a complex black man in the 1950s fed up with being called "Boy" by nearly every white man he meets, disgusted with segregated hotels and restaurants and entire portions of cities, and "whites who can sure say the jerkiest things" is that it was written by a white Jewish New Yorker. Leonard Zinberg lived in Harlem all his life. Before creating his private detective (named after two prominent activists in Black history, I might add) Zinberg had always been interested in race relations and leftist politics. As early as 1935 he wrote a story titled "Lynch Him!" a hint at his strong feelings about the treatment of blacks. Later he wrote several stories about boxers, one of them Walk Hard, Talk Loud (1940) is the story of a black boxer and his relationship with a white woman who also happen s to be a Communist activist.

Room to Swing is a fantastic book. Well written, smart without being smart alecky, prescient and insightful in ways that make it seem like you are reading a book written only a few years old rather than decades old. The mystery is a good one if not one that has jaw dropping surprises, but what makes the book noteworthy are the well drawn characters and Zinberg's insights into black/white relations. Touie is one of the best of the earliest of the black private eyes. It's a shame he only appeared in two books.

For more on Ed Lacy I suggest you read Ed Lynskey's well written and very detailed article at Mystery*File. A review of the follow-up book The Moment of Untruth featuring Toussaint Moore in his second and last appearance in an even better constructed mystery than the one here, will be posted tomorrow. Ed Lacy is one writer I'm glad I discovered and whose books I am rapidly acquiring and reading with great interest.