Kill Your Darlings (2 page)

“Only I lost,” he admitted. “No publisher in America would touch me. I wrote five Gat Garsons that were never published in the United States. They were published overseas....”

“Yes,” Murtz said, nodding, all of this news to him (not the million-dollar lawsuit, which was famous, among writers
at least: but the blacklisting of Roscoe Kane). “I have those, in British editions. I always wondered why...”

“They’re published in sixty-five countries, young man,” Kane snapped, “but not here. Not in my own hometown, the old U.S. of A. Not a single one of my books is in print. Nobody wants me here, ain’t it funny? The blacklisting bastards!”

“That’s nuts!” Murtz said. “No publisher is stupid enough to turn down a sure thing! Even if you did take your publisher for a million, some other publisher would’ve
grabbed
the Gat Garson series.”

“So one would think,” Kane said, hoisting his Scotch.

Murtz, though a professional writer and a good one, was thinking like a fan: later, he’d probably, on reflection, figure it out. The heyday of Roscoe Kane was 1950 through 1960. Even then, his phenomenal sales figures had begun to show a downward slant. By the early ’60s, and the James Bond spy boom, Kane was out of step; he was still turning out his tough, tongue-in-cheek private eye stories, with no discernible difference between his 1965 style and his 1950. It was in ’66 that he went to court, charging the publishers with doctoring the ledgers to deny him his rightful royalties, and the million-dollar lawsuit took several years, during which time Kane did no writing.

By 1970, when he began approaching new publishers with his Gat Garson series, he was sadly out of step, out of date. He had never written a novel that wasn’t a Gat Garson story, and as unique and genuine as his talent was, it was a narrow talent, apparently suited only for the sort of tough detective story he’d begun turning out in the 1940s, when he broke in by writing for the renowned pulp magazine,
Black Mask
.

Had Kane not alienated himself from the publishing world by airing its dirty laundry in public, had he not a reputation for
(literally) punching editors in the mouth (he broke a hapless copy editor’s arm for inserting too many commas into one of his leanly written manuscripts), had he been a normal, non-wavemaking, sane writer, he—and Gat Garson—might have found a new home in the publishing world. His sales figures alone would’ve been impressive enough to get him a contract with some smaller company looking for a name, even if that name belonged to a guy who made derbies in a world that was wearing sweatbands.

But if Roscoe Kane had been a normal, sane writer, he wouldn’t have been Roscoe Kane; he wouldn’t have had the stuff to create a figure like Gat Garson, who had spawned twenty-five novels, a radio show, a couple of bad movies and an equally bad TV show, but who (Gat, we’re talking about) was a genuine popular culture figure that most folks on the street would even now recognize by name. In Europe, Gat was as well known as Lemmy Caution, and the general European taste for private eyes kept Roscoe Kane in print and even in vogue.

Kane’s continuing success in Europe—and his dwindling million—had kept him alive. He was on his third wife now (and his tenth Scotch tonight), and was a cantankerous self-pitying old bastard whose private eye books I read as a kid had made me want to write mysteries when I grew up, and so he was my hero. Still.

And he was standing again.

“The sons of bitches blacklisted me!” he shouted, waving his hands, though not spilling his drink—a trick few of even the most serious drinkers can pull off. “Let’s drink a toast to ’em!”

A hushed pall overtook the bar, like the room was one great big cake that fell, and we were the unlucky ingredients. We were all caught in his grip. Lunatics have that power, you know. Any
time they want the floor, they can have it; sometimes they use a gun, but more often just obnoxious behavior.

Because there is something irresistible about a lunatic in full swing; somebody out of control who can control all those about him.

“Let’s drink a toast to ’em!” He held his glass high. “Let’s toast the American publishing industry! The sons of bitches who keep me off the paperback racks!”

He stood there with drink held high, and everybody in the place knew that he would stand there like that till hell froze over or they toasted with him. Some time passed, and it got chillier. But eventually we all toasted with him, and the poor old bastard sat down. The party was over.

“I think I better get some shuteye,” he said softly, with a weary, suddenly lucid expression that people sometimes get shortly after behaving like lunatics, realizing what they’ve just done.

“I’ll walk up with you,” I said.

“Thanks, kid,” he said.

The other men at the table rose and gave him the respectful and friendly goodnights he would’ve deserved if he hadn’t gone over the edge the way he had; these men, like me, loved this sad old guy, and he could’ve hung naked from the ceiling shooting rubberbands at barmaids and we would’ve found a way to ignore it, or at least forgive it.

I guided him by the arm—it felt bony, the flesh on it slack. Was this small, shrunken man the guy who’d posed, à la Spillane, in a muscle shirt, wearing a .38, on the back cover of his paperbacks? Sadly, it was. A long, long time ago. We got on an elevator. A wealthy-looking couple stared at Kane disgustedly and I gave ’em back my best withering glance. And I’ve got a pretty good withering glance to give, when I’ve a mind to.

We were on Kane’s floor, the seventh, and were heading down the corridor to 714, when he said, “I didn’t mean what I said.”

“You’ll have to be more specific, Mr. Kane,” I said. “You said a lot of things tonight.”

“There you go with that ‘Mr. Kane’ crap again! I’ve known you for ten years, Mallory. We ’changed probably a hundred letters. You were to my place half a dozen times. And always ‘Mr. Kane.’ I hate that!”

But he didn’t hate it.

We were at his room.

“What I didn’t mean was that thing about no mystery writers since Hammett being worth reading,” he said. “Chandler’s worth reading.”

That was generous of him.

“Do you have your room key, Mr. Kane?”

“In my pocket,” he said, getting it. “The Mick’s worth reading, too, but don’t tell ’im I said so. And John D. And Culver’s good.”

“Yes.”

“And me. I’m still worth reading.”

“I know you are.”

“And so are you, kid. You are, too.”

I smiled, and felt some ambiguous emotion stir in me; I wrote mystery novels myself, in no small part because I had dreamed of being as good as this man one day. I certainly didn’t deserve being listed in the exalted company Roscoe had mentioned; and Roscoe knew it—he was just being nice, or as nice as that cantankerous old bastard was capable of being.

Still, hearing him say that felt like getting an A from your favorite teacher—even if your favorite teacher did happen to be dead drunk.

“Thanks, Mr. Kane.”

“G’night, kid.”

That was the last time I saw him alive.

I was on my way back down to the bar, to see if I could drink enough to lose the sad taste in my mouth, when the elevator doors slid open on the fourth floor and Tom Sardini, wearing an off-white shirt and dark slacks and a preoccupied expression, climbed aboard the otherwise empty cubicle. As usual, youthful, handsome Tom (handsome in a baby-face way he tried unsuccessfully to mask with a beard, the mustache of which never seemed wholly grown in) had a glazed look behind his black-rimmed glasses, as if even now he was working on his latest story.

Which he probably was. Sardini, at thirty years of age, was the current Fastest Typewriter in the East, turning out crime novels and westerns and an occasional spy novel (under various pseudonyms), as well as his “top of the line” books about private eye/ex-boxer Jacob Miles (under his own name), at an alarming rate. He worked so fast and wrote so much that writer friends of his told him to slow down, pretending (to themselves as well as Tom) to be worried about his health, while envying his productivity. Tom, meanwhile, sat at his typewriter in his Brooklyn home, writing, collecting royalty checks, quietly turning into a corporation.

“Okay, then,” I said, “
don’t
speak.”

“Mal?” he asked, brightening. “I didn’t recognize you!”

“I don’t mean to be a pest or anything. You probably got a book to write between here and the ground floor.”

He grinned and I grinned and we shook hands.

“It’s been a long time,” he said.

“It was another Bouchercon in Chicago, as I recall,” I said. “Many moons ago.”

“You had longer hair then, and a mustache.”

I gestured toward his own ever-scraggly mustache/beard and writerly unruly hair. “I looked around and noticed that all the old men had long hair and facial whiskers, and the kids were wearing short, punky hair.”

“So you got a haircut. What else is there to do in Port City, Iowa?”

The elevator doors slid open and we walked toward the nearby lounge.

“I keep busy,” I said. “I know you New Yorkers find it hard to believe a writer can actually get ideas in Iowa.”

We walked into the lounge; Pete Christian and Tim Culver were gone, and Brett Murtz had hopped to another table, where he and several people I didn’t recognize had cornered William Campbell Gault, giving him an eager, fannish interrogation. Gault, a dignified but unpretentious man in his early seventies, was the author of a number of fine tough-guy mystery stories, though he was also noted for his sports-oriented young-adult novels.

Tom and I found a table, and the same barmaid who’d helped Roscoe Kane stay knee-deep in Scotch took our orders; I was drinking Pabst from bottles, and Tom was, too, since I was paying. The barmaid was trying for another five-buck tip.

“You know,” Tom said, picking up on the Iowa motif, “I somehow can’t shake the image of you sitting in a cornfield, a
scarecrow looking over your shoulder while you perch on a crate writing stories on lined paper with a stubby pencil.”

“Did I ever mention I hate New York?”

“Frequently.”

“Well, just for the record, I hate New York.”

“You do manage to keep stumbling onto murders, in that little hayseed community of yours.”

“Give me a break, Tom. It happened twice. And years apart.”

“You’re just the only mystery writer I know who’s done research
that
active. Still live in a trailer?”

“I moved out.”

“How come? Did it finally sink into that landfill it was sitting on? Or did selling your books to the TV movie folks make you
nouveau
rich?”

“That’s
riche
. I think. As for the trailer, I got tired of being mistaken for Jim Rockford. Anyway, I did come into some dough from those TV sales, and got a chance to pick up a little house.”

“On the prairie?”

“No, with a river view.”

“Sounds real Mark Twain.”

“It’s a house, not a houseboat, Tom. I don’t want ’em to start mistaking me for Travis McGee.”

“Well, you
did
put a color in one of your titles.”

“Hey, be fair, Tom—last I heard, the rainbow was in the public domain. You didn’t like that book much, did you?”

He shrugged. “I liked the book okay. I just like your short stories better.”

I shrugged back. “Can’t make a living at that. Books are where it’s at. Maybe you’ll like the next one; maybe I’ll put you in it.”

“That’d help,” he admitted. “Just promise me you won’t make any cracks about my name sounding fishy.”

“If you slip me a fin, it’s a deal.”

His grin under the almost-mustache was infectious. “Very funny. You know, I can’t say I was nuts about what the TV folks did to your first book.”

I groaned, swigged some beer. “Couldn’t we talk about something more pleasant? Like my hernia operation?”

But Tom was enjoying my misery, and plunged on, archly: “Granted, they made some minor changes. They switched the locale from rural Iowa to Los Angeles, and your white-bread hero was played by O. J. Simpson. And they changed the ending, ’cause they didn’t think the high school sweetheart ought to be involved in the murder.”

“Otherwise it was a faithful rendition,” I said.

Now Tom seemed to feel a little bad about needling me, and leaned forward and said, with no archness at all, “Don’t forget what James M. Cain said when the reporter asked him what he thought about what the movies had done to his books: ‘Nobody did anything to my books,’ he said, ‘they’re right back up there on the shelf, just like I wrote ’em.’ ”

“O.J. Simpson isn’t going to be in the next movie.”

“That’s good.”

“They’re talking Scott Baio.”

“Maybe we better get some more beers. That better be some house.”

“Oh, it is. Got a roof and everything. I bought a new car, too.”

“What was wrong with the van?”

“Just not my style. I’m not a kid anymore. I turned thirty-three last time I looked.”

“What car d’you buy?”

“A silver Firebird.”

“No kidding? That’s what Rockford drives.”

I’d just bought the car a few days ago, and this drive into Chicago, on a cold, rainy October afternoon, had been my first extended experience behind its wheel. I liked the feeling of driving a sporty car, my last two vehicles having been an old Rambler and that van Tom had asked about; but the dreariness of the day, and the realization that I had finally gotten a sporty car at an age, or anyway “time of life,” when it didn’t mean as much to me, had a sobering effect on me (unlike the Pabst I was now chugging).

I’d been nervous about attending the Bouchercon; the last one of these I’d attended, I was a barely published writer of short stories—now I was a more visible “author” of two published hardcover novels, one of which had just been nominated for Novel of the Year by the Private Eye Writers of America (whose awards ceremonies were traditionally held at Bouchercon). I considered the nomination a fluke—for one thing, the book had gotten (deservedly) mixed reviews; for another, the hero wasn’t a private eye and so, technically, the book probably shouldn’t have even been in the running. But knowing I didn’t deserve to win—knowing I didn’t have a prayer to win—didn’t keep me from writing an acceptance speech over and over again in my brain on the four-hour drive from Port City to Chicago.