Open Pores

I introduced myself to Tom at the 1992 MWA Edgar Awards Dinner. I’d read Dark Maze and believed it the best crime novel of the year, so I brought it to the dinner for Tom’s autograph. It got the Edgar and I made a friend. Ten years later, Tom was in L.A. waiting to be discovered when he persuaded his buddy, the late David Mills, to buy our pilot script, ‘The System,’ for Aaron Spelling-TV Productions. That got us two free weekends in Hollywood working with Mills in his trailer on the set of his then ill-starred ‘King Pins,’ a gory Mexican cartel melodrama, as we revised and blackboarded our script. Spelling flew us from NYC to the Coast First Class. On arrival, the agent Tom had arranged as our representation said words to us I’ll never forget. “You’re hot in this town,” she said.

In the end, NBC passed on filming our opus, and flew us back home—Coach. We’d cooled.

Robert Knightly

---

Thus begins a fog-bound Thursday in the life of Yours Truly, mystery writer of yore:

I awake, scratch myself, consider the merits of shaving (or not), drink up the newspapers and a pot of coffee, wonder where I might find a spot of cash, decide who among the people in my head are quick or dead, and wonder about a cryptic e-mail.

A decade ago, my place in the demimonde of crime literature, as I prefer to call the noble genre, still flickered, if weakly. Two decades ago, I established myself in that world on the wonderful April evening of ’92, when I collected an Edgar Allan Poe Award. Now in the year 2013, you have likely never heard of me. My last crime novel, Grief Street, was released in 1997. Its forerunners—Sea of Green, Dark Maze, Thrown-Away Child, Drown All the Dogs, and Devil’s Heaven—have been promoted to Glory, to employ the Salvation Army eulogy. There are two ways of looking at this: negatively, or positively. Which is to say, Nothing recedes like success—or, To everything there is a season.

My comrades in the writing dodge—scriveners like me, whose claims to fame are now mainly down the drain—frequently blame publishers for their plight. (To be sure, publishers deserve a measure of ill repute. As a species, they are unlovely, possessing all the imagination, romance, and élan of—pigeons. Yet they are not so beautiful against the sky.) But just as often, and to their great credit, my comrades recognize a time to move on.

A few of us, having moved on and aged with some degree of grace, harbor the hope of one more of life’s rewards before we croak—perhaps one more book that we may set upon the brag shelf. Such is how it is with me.

Presently, I compose essays for a daily online journal of literature, music, and politics—the Berlin-based CulturMag. My usual dateline is “New York, near America,” and my stuff usually involves the absurd behavior of a fading empire. I am a foreign correspondent in my own country. Besides this, I slowly labor toward completion of Lovers & Corpses, which I think of as a novel with murder. The book involves a minimum of shaving, what my German colleagues call Gesäß aus Eisen (buttocks of iron), and a number of choices regarding who shall live to tell a tale and who shall die trying—and more importantly, why.

The tale concerns a burned-out cop who evolved as a burned-out journalist. Since I came within inches of becoming a cop as a young man, I am able to imagine myself as the former character. And having spent several decades in American corporate media, I know whereof I speak as regards the latter.

Should Lovers and Corpses sound rather downbeat, I hasten to add my happiness on discovering that I retain the Writer’s Soul: still, I have need of fiction’s ingredients—a cast of characters, a ripping plot, an alter ego—to sort through the chapters of my own true life.

Good cops, good journalists, and good writers walk around with their pores open. That way, everything gets under the skin. Most people don’t like feeling itchy all the time; as mentioned, though, I scratch a lot. In true life, things much stranger than fiction will occur. This very drab Thursday morning, for instance, I opened an e-mail message under the subject line, “GET BACK TO ME ASAP.” It reads, word for mangled word—(and I swear, I am not making this up):

…Someone you call a friend wants you dead by any means and the person have spent a lot of money on this. The person also came to us and told me that he want you dead and he provided us with your name, picture, and other necessary informations we needed about you. So I sent my boys to track you down and they have carried out the necessary investigation needed for the operation on you, and they have done that but I told them not to kill you that I will like to contact you and see if your life is important to you or not since their findings show that you are innocent…

If Lovers & Corpses ever sees the light of a publication day, and should you be willing to plunk down twenty-five dollars or so for your very own copy, you will recognize the foregoing as an excerpt from a larger fulmination of menace.

And know that beyond the obvious grift, the e-mailer’s lie could be a truth somewhere in time.

Thomas Adcock

A Drink with the Hollywood Production Code

Sheila York writes the Lauren Atwill mystery series. Her amateur sleuth is a screenwriter in post-war Hollywood, chasing killers in the last hurrah of the Great Golden Age of Film. Lauren’s latest adventure is Death in Her Face.

---

I’m excited and flattered to have been invited to be a regular player on this team. And maybe a bit nervous. Where to start? How about at the beginning?

I came to crime writing early and late.

I was an extremely shy child, a condition not improved by my family’s frequent moves. My father was a career army officer, and we moved 6 times before I was 10. My solace was books, and I thought the best job in the world would be Writer: independence, recognition and something I could do in solitude. I thought maybe I had some talent for it, too, as I two-fingered my way around my portable Royal, a candy cigarette dangling from my lips because I’d seen a picture of Lillian Hellman in Life magazine.

Sheila York

But unlike Lillian, my instinct was to write crime. For every creative-writing assignment in junior high and high school, I crafted mysteries, often romantic mysteries. But, of course, teachers back then weren’t looking for those. They were looking for feints at literature. This was, after all, ‘college prep’. Along the way, my insecurity and the dissuasion of my instinctive efforts convinced me that whatever skill I possessed must be no more than an average example of students in my town, which at the time had fewer people than the closing credits in The Hobbit.

Lillian
Hellman

It took a few decades before I finally asked, “If not now, when?” Then with the determination only possible in someone clueless about publishing, I decided to set a mystery in 1940s Los Angeles. Even after people warned me it was risky territory, I persevered. If there’s a characteristic I share most deeply with my heroine, Lauren, it’s stubbornness.

From the beginning, there was never any doubt in my mind that my sleuth would be an amateur and a woman, that she would meet a private detective with a troubled past, that he would be the love of her life. And she would be the one who ultimately caught the killers. But how does a woman in the 1940s find scandal, corruption, betrayal, greed, sex, and murder?

No brainer. She had to work in Hollywood.

And I love movies. From all decades, but I’m a particular fan of the 1940s, when some of the best films ever made were produced. Part of what I admire about them is the ability to tell a good tale while navigating the severe restrictions of the Production Code, the set of rules that controlled the morals of American movie content from 1934 till 1968 when the Code was replaced by an early version of our ratings system. The studios agreed to be ruled by the Code in part to pacify local censor boards and religious groups who found films of the silent era and the early 1930s too sexual and violent, a threat to family life, and a bad influence on youth.

Every script and every film’s final cut had to be approved by the PCA (the Production Code Administration). Its primary rule was “No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it.”

Wow, how exactly do you assure that? By adopting the most conservative values in America.

Today, I thought I’d share a bit about three things I know well: The Production Code, movies and drinking. Okay, that didn’t come out right. The Production Code, movies and drinking in the movies. Although, full disclosure, I’m quite fond of a glass — or two or three — of wine. (You can always find the hotel bar at a writers convention. Just follow the game trail in the lobby carpet.)

The Code spends most of its efforts on sex and crime — and ensuring neither one looks appealing — but it also makes clear how studios should treat booze. “The use of liquor in American life, when not required by the plot or for proper characterization, will not be shown.”

This makes it kind of hard to throw a party. Or run a bar.

So let’s visit briefly the most famous bar in the movies: Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca, which does a fine business for a place where alcohol is rarely actually consumed. In a movie that takes place almost entirely in bars, drinks are constantly ordered, poured, carried, deposited, picked up, held and raised to the lips, but you can count on your fingers and toes the number of times characters swallow. Let’s see how many swallows make a movie.

His heart breaking after seeing his lost love again, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) sits alone in the darkened club getting drunk, a nearly empty bottle beside him, and delivers one of the most quoted lines in movie history — “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”. How much does he drink in his misery? Three swallows. Three. In that whole classic, world-famous scene.

Earlier, when Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and underground hero Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) first come to Rick’s, four rounds of drinks are ordered, three at their table and one when Victor goes to the bar to meet a contact. Glasses move to lips, but how many swallows do you see? One, and that’s a paltry sip.

In Death in Her Face, when a sultry starlet with a mysterious past vanishes and her gangster boyfriend turns up dead, my sleuth, Lauren, is hired to rewrite the script for another actress should the starlet turn out to be a killer in more than looks. (Of course, Lauren is neck deep in the investigation within 24 hours.)

Besides prohibitions on liquor, here are just a few of the rules Lauren has to keep in mind:

• The guilty must be punished. Don’t create sympathy for criminals.
• Keep marriage sacred. Adultery should not be excused or justified (Casablanca also slips around this one very neatly).
• No mocking of religion or those who minister in it (who also can never be villains unless they are historical characters).
• No prostitutes (women who plied the trade in novels ended up as taxi dancers in the film version).
• And my personal favorite: No representation of anything that would look like advice to criminals. A thief couldn’t tell another, “Hey, put some gloves on before you touch that.”

The next time you’re watching a film from the Great Golden Age, you might think a little about these restrictions and the creative artistry required to tackle adult themes and occasionally make magic.

Sheila York