The Spitting Image - Michael Avallone

The “alternative classic” is a term Bill Pronzini created when he wrote Gun in Cheek and Son of Gun in Cheek, two entertaining and enlightening books about those hair-brained detective and mystery novels with loopy plots and even loopier writing. Pronzini loves them. And so do I …to a point. Before I had even heard of Pronzini’s books or heard of the term I had stumbled across more than my fair share of alternative classics. The Case of Mr. Cassidy by William Targ, The Palgrave Mummy by Florence M. Pettee, and Murder on the Palisades by Will Levinrew are three outrageous examples of the kind of book discerning readers of crime fiction now call alternative classics. They may be bad, but we love them all the more because of their very badness. Ludicrous plots, wacky detective work, far-fetched murder methods, and some atrocious writing are all in great supply in each one of those books. I read them years before I learned they all ended up both celebrated and disparaged in one or the other of Pronzini’s books. Some writers are even lucky enough (if lucky is the right word) to get an entire chapter to themselves in the Gun in Cheek books. Such a lucky one is Michael Avallone.

I managed to acquire five of Avallone’s private eye novels featuring Ed Noon in my various book store hunts this year. After decades of looking for them they all started turning up with increasing frequency and all at very affordable prices. Last week I finally sat down to read one and after debating whether to go with the very first one (The Tall Dolores) or one that Pronzini wrote about with great affection (The Crazy Mixed-Up Corpse) or the one with the strangest cover (The Voodoo Murders) I finally settled on choosing the one with the most intriguing and appealing story - The Spitting Image. It also happens to employ one of my favorite overused detective novel tropes – twins – and I wanted to see what Avallone did with that. As it turned out this was perhaps the best book to start my Avallone initiation. It turned out to have a wild plot with a surprise ending that blew me away. I should’ve seen it coming miles ahead of the reveal, but I didn’t. I loved that.

The Spitting Image (1953) is the second Ed Noon novel and tells the story of April and June Wexler, twin sisters who both fear the other is planning to do her in. There’s a convoluted will (a la Harry Stephen Keeler) that their wealthy oil tycoon father drew up stating if by the date of their twenty-first birthday one of the twins dies, the other will inherit his two million dollar estate. If both survive, none will inherit anything and the estate goes to a charity. Was there ever a more inviting incentive for a murder to take place? Prior to the novel's opening chapter three attempts were made on June Wexler and she tries to hire Noon to protect her and put a stop her murderous sister’s plot. When a chandelier comes crashing from the ceiling nearly killing both girls Noon is not sure which woman is the intended target. Then April secretly tries to hire Noon as her bodyguard until her birthday which is quickly approaching. A movie star handsome lawyer, his thug of a male secretary, and couple of goons from Central Casting all figure into the storyline as well.

One surprise that didn’t impress me at all was Avallone’s depiction of the handsome lawyer. Just as Sax Rohmer created eerily “feminine” looking men and turned them into some of his best villains implying along the way things about their sexuality and planning a grisly end for him, Avallone creates a gorgeous man and goes out of his way to talk about the eerie handsomeness of the character and how it makes Noon extremely uncomfortable. The lawyer is gay, of course, and will turn out to be something of a crook as well. Think he’ll suffer a gruesome death? Of course he will. This kind of thing was pretty much standard for the period. Evil homosexuals who break the law, treat women indifferently or cruelly, and do other reprehensible things like speaking grammatically perfect English must all suffer nasty violent deaths. It shouldn’t bother me these days, but it still does.

Pronzini writes in Son of Gun in Cheek of how Avallone liked to insert his conservative social and political beliefs into his books. The loathsomeness displayed for the lawyer is one of Avallone's more subtle early examples. Apparently he gets more and more right wing in the later books when Ed Noon ceases to be the typical flatfoot and more of a secret agent for the federal government fighting Commies, fags and all other threats to the American Way.  I wonder if lesbians turn up in Avallone’s books. Usually they are treated just as shabbily during the heyday of the paperback original, but also in a sexually prurient and titillating manner.

I almost forget the best part of these books - Avallone’s writing. Let me close with some choice examples of his mastery of the silly simile and other metaphorical wonders:

She came into my office like the first five bars of "Tiger Rag."

She sat down with an effort, crossing a pair of silken legs that were strictly weapons to be used on men.

A volcano was going on inside her and the bubbles were erupting like hot lava.

The floor around him was a pool of vermilion. Like the Red Sea. I'm not being funny. Just descriptive.

His eyebrows rose like a fast elevator.

Randall Crandall. That wasn't a name. It was a voice impediment.

Crandall's nostrils nearly rose in disgust.

I had a headache. A musical headache. All of the scoring was by Max Steiner with just enough Stan Kenton noisy brass section thrown in to keep my skull in an uproar.

This is a good book to start with Avallone even if you read only one.  It has all his hallmarks: goofy writing, nutty characters, loopy story with a surprise twist worthy of some of the great of the Golden Age. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the Ed Noon books I own. I've even ordered one of Avallone's Gothic suspense novels written under a clever pseudonym that's more of an inside joke - "Edwina Noone."

More on Ed Noon here and an excellent remembrance on Michael Avallone here.  Both posts include bibliographies.

FFB: Frank L. Packard - The Underworld & Exotic Crime

Today is Friday's Forgotten Books Salute to Canada.  Our guest host for this Black Friday is the ever resourceful Todd Mason. The links for today's other posts are at his blog Sweet Feedom.  Check them out for other (I'm sure) more recent and contemporary writers from Canada.  I had to go with one of the most neglected Canadian writers of crime fiction from the past century.

Although Frank L Packard was born and raised in Montreal, attended McGill University, and worked for years for the Canadian Pacific Railway as a civil engineer he tended to write about the dirty underworld of New York crime or exotic adventure tales set in the South Pacific and Asia like those found in Shanghai Jim (1928). Rarely do you find anything about his books on the internet and so I dove right into his books of which I had amassed quite a few.

Packard's first novels dealt with the redemption of the criminal world.  The Miracle Man (1914) tells of the Patriarch, a healer who has a run in with some con men and the surprise healing of a cripple boy that transforms the lives of the crooks trying to fleece the town. The book was adapted into a stage play and later was a high grossing silent film with Lon Chaney in the role of a contortionist who stuns the town by crawling up the aisle in extreme pain and then after receiving the Patriarch's healing touch unfolds his twisted limbs and walks away apparently cured. Similarly, in The Sin That Was His (1917) a crook falsely accused of a murder disguises himself as a priest in order to escape the police, but in living out his second disguised life undergoes a spiritual and moral change.

Probably his best known character is Jimmie Dale, aka "the Gray Seal," one of many in a long line of gentleman thief characters. Jimmie Dale also shows signs of the hero pulp characters with his secret hideaway, masked costume, calling cards stamped with the figure of a seal. I saw a lot of similarities to Herman Landon's Gray Phantom who is also a devil-may-care playboy who enjoys masquerading as a crime fighter and both use multiple identities. The Gray Phantom stories appeared serially in the pulps as did the Jimmie Dale stories but Packard's character came long before making his debut in 1914 while Landon's Gray Phantom appeared in 1920. While Packard may have borrowed from Raffles, Arsene Lupin, and other similar characters of the late Edwardian period in creating his own version of the gentleman thief who fights crime there can be no doubt that in Jimmie Dale we see the origin of the hero pulp characters culminating in The Shadow, The Spider, and even Batman. For an excellent overview of Jimmie Dale see this article by David Vineyard at Mystery*File.

One of the most interesting of the Gray Seal books is Jimmie Dale and the Blue Envelope Murder. Herbert Carruthers, the newspaper editor who knows nothing of Dale's secret identity, delivers to Jimmie Dale the news that the Gray Seal is dead. 

A good example of Packard's exotic adventure novel is The Locked Book which begins aboard a merchant vessel sailing through the Malay Archipelago. After surviving an attack by savage pirates led by a white man wearing a crimson sash, Kenneth Wayne vows revenge on those who killed his father, Old Man Wayne, the skipper of the Waratan. Kenneth makes his way to a hotel run by the mysterious M. Fouché and passes himself off as a mining prospector. He succeeds in getting a local guide, a boat and heads off in search of the pirates pretending all the while to be a man looking for gold. Instead he comes across a shrine where an ancient book is being guarded as if it were a god. It's even given a name that sounds like a deity: Itu Konchi-Kan Kitab, which apparently merely means "the book that is locked." The book bound in an ornate stamped dragon that is swallowing its tongue is said to hold the key to a buried treasure of the Rajah Kana-ee-aa. But a native frightened by Kenneth's desecration of the shrine takes the book out of his hands before he can open it and flees in the jungle. Kenneth's vengeance takes a back seat to his interest in the book and the story becomes a mix of chase and intrigue as he attempts to recover the book and discover if it holds the secret to the treasure.

Part of the fun of reading this adventure tale is that the book itself is a replica of the locked book in the story. Shown above is the Copp, Clark Company 1st Canadian edition with the ornate gilt embossed dragon grasping his tail in his mouth. When the book is closed it gives the impression that it too is locked like the book guarded by the natives.

Whether he is writing about gangsters and their molls, crooked antiquarians seeking rare books with hidden secrets, sailors and merchant seamen battling marauding pirates in the South Seas, or Jimmie Dale and crew in the New York underworld, Frank L. Packard was instrumental in the development of crime fiction that shied away from amateur sleuths and focused on the darker and dirtier world that would explode into the violent writing of hard-boiled writers like Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett.