Found Pages: The Remarkable Harold Ernest (“Darcy Glinto”) Kelly, 1899–1969.

Marvellous, marvelous.

Many thanks for the lead to John Fraser's work. Wow, what dedication and scholarship! I picked out a number of tidbits for my next Addenda column (and must remember to credit Fraser as the source).

“The Remarkable Harold Ernest (Darcy Glinto) Kelly 1899–1969.” Who? you may well ask, and rightly so.  While the website above is still a work in progress, let John Fraser be your guide in exploring the life and works of this all-but-unknown British author, with side excursions and commentary on others you may have heard of: James Hadley Chase, Stephen Frances (Hank Janson), Edgar Wallace, Peter Cheyney, Gerald Butler and more.  A monumental project, and one I cannot recommend more highly.

I was amazed at some of the detail you've managed to dig up. I'll look forward to your website expanding and growing

I found much of interest on your site (the word "much" being an understatement, by the way—I thought your site was absolutely absorbing).

Very much enjoyed your page on Darcy Glinto. I was actually doing a Google search for information on Robert Du Soe when I ran across it. I had not heard of Glinto, and was fascinated by the great style of the passages you quote. He now has a new devotee. I see that on ABE books, which these days pretty much represents the world used market, there is exactly one Glinto book for sale. Scarce stuff!

I read your Kelly book a few weeks ago, and I loved it. The way you organize the materials into small units is perfect and, especially for a Kelly novice like me, a great help to assimilating so many different facts. The tone is affectionate and trustworthy—you do not oversell your own claims and hunches. The debate with Orwell, your take on the gangster Nazis, the exceptionally warm and smart presentation of the Westerns (maybe my favorite part)—it all really pleased and inspired me. The quotations from the Westerns are great examples of Kelly‘s sensitivity and amazing versatility. With “voice” still romanticized as the writer’s only goal, versatility is too infrequently identified as a writerly virtue.

The crispness of your own writing is what best helps the unfamiliar get into the complexity of Kelly’s world. You’ve gone well beyond the kind of academic pop-culture approach which reduces everything to genre study, and I left Kelly with a sense of him as a real, working artist. The web-design is good, the accompanying pictures are really cool, and the interplay of texts works well on the computer. The way you manage the material is web-friendly, but it also feels like a book-book. With good photos of the covers, it would be ready to go.

The first Robin Hood Press edition of There Were No Asper Ladies was 1946, I'm sure.

The second edition, is rather difficult to date. But that might be the 1947, though I'm of the opinion that it was in the early 1950s (shrug). Undated books are a nightmare.

The first RHP edition has a vampire in coffin cover, much like the original Mitre Press cover.

The second RHP edition has NO vampires at all. Rather, it bears good girl art of a blonde dame, I believe if my memory of the hair serves accurate. She is in the center of the cover by herself, kind of sitting on her legs leaning back in somewhat horror, I think. That's it. Yellow backdrop colours.

Art was the immeasurably hot R. Heade. If this ever comes up on eBay, you'll never afford it.

Summarizing what I have now learned from Morgan, who has been further researching the matter, it appears that there were in fact three early editions of the book, namely

A 1944 Mitre Press edition, with on the cover, a nattily suited young man shining a flashlight on a mummy-wrapped figure in a coffin.

A 1946 Robin Hood Press edition. with on the ugly cover a sinister figure in silhouette.

A 1946 Robin Hood edition with on the cover a sexy Heade female having nothing to do with the contents, and the text identical with the previous one, but the pages slightly trimmed.

Apparently There Were No Asper Ladies was the first book published by Robin Hood, 1946 being the date in each of those two Robin Hood editions.

The most plausible assumption is that the Kellys began with what was a more dramatic cover than the Mitre one, but quickly realized that it was ess ee ex that was going to sell the Glintos, and were lucky enough to acquire the Heade cover.

The first, or both, may have been printed and copyrighted in 1946 but not marketed until 1947. My own guess is that the silhouette edition appeared in 1946 and the Heade in 1947.

In any event, 1946 appears to have been the year in which the Robin Hood Press began.

Apparently there is a controversy as to whether at some point the Mitre Press, which was already in operation in the late 1930s, and by 1943 had at least 19 titles on its list (see ads in The Bronsville Massacre), was taken over by the Kellys’ Everybody’s Books, which started up in 1943,

My only scholarly contribution at this point is to point out that in The Bronsville Massacre the address of Everybody’s is in Denmark Street, just off the Charing Cross Road in the West End, while that of Mitre is in Mitre Street, in the East End, level on the map with the Tower of London.

This was only a year after the scandal of the obscenity trial of Chase’s Miss Callaghan Comes to Grief and Road Floozie at the Old Bailey. So presumably one can either assume that the Kellys were hiding their tracks or wonder where, after Harold’s heavy fine, they would have found the cash for a take-over .

In any event, they do appear to have been uncommonly secretive, probably because of a determination never to come within the orbit of the Law again, possibly because they may have operated occasionally in the spirit of the archetypal outlaw.

(An out-and-piratical American record operation in the late 40s or early 50s called its label Jolly Roger.)

Their operations are virtually invisible in accounts of fringe publishing in those years, like a shadowy planet in a solar system. But they published a lot of books.

In terms of prestige, British Westerns appear to have been the runt of the litter.

Carl Williams reports having a hardcover copy of the first edition, and has provided the following bibliographical note

There’s no literal identification of the cover girl, but she could indeed be Zola.

He has also scanned the cover to me. The front image is the same as for the pb. On the back we have:

“We All Gotta Start, Sister” is presumably the working title of the persistently inaccessible Yours Truly, Hoodlum, the Robin Hood cover of which is reproduced in colour on the back of Maurice Flanagan’s Brtitish Gangster and Exploitation Paperbacks of the Postwar Years (1997) and elsewhere in this site.

The fact that Snow Vogue appeared in hardcover makes me wonder about the other five first-series Glintos.

Managed to obtain a copy of Preston Yorke’s The Astounding Crime.

Here is your listing for it:

I can add that the PY story runs from page 4 to page 52. Page 2 features a lengthy "Publisher’s Note" and Page 3 features a note from the author, instructing that this book be "Not For Publication". The story itself is referred to in the notes as "The Traitor Murder", which I myself find amusing in that this is the ripped title of a most famous detective story written by President Abraham Lincoln, prior to his famed, in 1843, called "The Traitor Murder Mystery." Undoubtedly this is the true source for that title, ripped from an arcane detective story exactly 100 years prior to the 1943 publication of Preston Yorke’s "The Astounding Crime."

The cover art is by the usual JEFF COOK. Cover price: 1/6d It is a thin digest, not a pamphlet. Typical wartime issue cheap papers.

What I find odd is that your page notes that it was reissued as Death on Priority 1. This is incorrect. The two stories have nothing to do with each other. Totally different.

"The Astounding Crime" features an Inspector Sean McEvrett, and notes that this story was communicated to Preston Yorke only days before the Inspector’s death. [yeah, right]

The spirit of the chase (Steve Holland)

Research difficulties (SH)

A basic Kelly source (SH)

Kelly’s Jansons (SH)

Library holdings (SH)

Dodgy publishers (SH)

Two attributions (SH)

Another attribution (SH)

Deep South Slave (SH)

“America,” British-style (SH)

Educated guesswork (SH)

City Mid-Week libel case (SH)

John R. Parsons (SH)

I think a more or less literal translation of Méfiez-vous, fillettes [the French title, for both book and movie, of Chase’s Miss Callaghan Comes to Grief ] would be "Girlies, Beware". "Fillette" (literally 'litttle girls') is outdated postwar humorous slang, quite typical of the largely artificial style which the translators of the Série Noire used in order to make the novels sell.

The Série Noire is a fascinating and paradoxical collection: on the one hand it was instrumental in defining the "noir" genre and published the best American paperback authors of the 40s and 50s, bringing them together and giving them a status which they'd often have to wait a long time to acquire in their own country (and sometimes only posthumously: e.g. Goodis or Thompson); on the other hand they often resorted to a sort of overblown humorous slang (perhaps under the influence of Peter Cheyney, the first author to be published in the series) which sometimes ran counter to the mood of the original novels. This is particularly blatant in the translations of titles, as with Chase's novel here and countless examples.

The translators (often Duhamel himself, or Boris Vian) also cut pages and sometimes whole chapters from their translations in order to bring them closer to their simplistic and virile idea of the genre (this happened especially to Chandler's novels, which were disfigured beyond recognition in the French versions). So that all that is now written in American criticism about the 40s Série Noire having consciously identified and properly valued the "noir" atmosphere of the American paperbacks is not really true, or, if true, only unintentionally so: Marcel Duhamel, the collection's founder, was more fond of superficial macho humor in the Cheyney vein than of the more profound existential gloom you find in Woolrich or Goodis. The mystery is why and how he also published the latter, as (as his memoirs show) he was obviously not really aware of their intrinsic quality.

This mystery will probably be explained only when someone (a French Steve Holland perhaps?) finally tackles the long-overdue task of writing a detailed history of the collection's birth and development in the postwar years and finds out who was in charge of choosing the authors to be translated (and I'm ready to bet that it wasn't Duhamel himself most of the time). The basic paradox of the Série Noire is, thus, that it both created "noir" fiction as a category and at the same time distorted our perception of it.

I'm glad you pointed out to me that review of Fast One by Orwell; I found an extract of it on your website, and am a bit sorry that he should have thought the novel so bad, as I personally tend to think (much as I admire Orwell) that Fast One is a great book.

I particularly like its experimental staccato style, which also features in some of his short stories (especially “Parlor Trick,” “Pineapple” and “Murder in Blue” in Seven Slayers). Together with Hammett's works and some of Raoul Whitfield's stories (and also, in a slightly different vein, P.J. Wolfson's Bodies are Dust), I consider that it represents the best of the first generation of hardboiled writing (and also, perhaps, of all generations).

I think the extreme precision of the visual and auditory details, the lack of internal point of view, the swiftness of the action (and also that weird stroboscopic effect produced by the use of so many dashes and the elimination of the conjunction "and") turn his writing into some sort of revolutionary experiment—quite as experimental, in fact, in its own way, as some of the stuff now canonized under the label of modernism. But I also understand why this violent and purely "objective" kind of narrative could seem immoral to Orwell.

Personally I tend to think that there is some kind of covert morality in the presentation of these manic characters always on the move and so eager to doublecross one another with no particular reason for doing it; it chimes with the presentation of life as given by Sam Spade in the Flitcraft episode: not so much an expression of nihilism as a philosophical point of view about man's lack of control over the world he lives in, the kind of point of view which may have been pretty widespread in the chaotic days of Prohibition and is still, I think, quite relevant to our own times.

JF writes:

I tossed the gun on the bed—slashed out with my left. Steiner swung back—stepped in close. I saw the right coming up—it was a nasty punch. It came up through my right arm—and I tried to ride with it. It didn't work.

My lower jaw clicked up—the end of my tongue caught between my teeth. There was a lot of pain—and as I started to go down, Steiner struck with his left. It landed. My knees hit the floor. There was a stabbing pain along my right side. Steiner's thin voice got out one, nasty word. Then I was digging my head against the cheap carpet—and forgetting a lot of things.”

(Green Ice [1930]; No Exit Press, 1988, p. 60)

As Doolin half rose, Halloran's long leg lashed out again, his heavy shoe struck the side of Doolin's head. Doolin grunted, fell sidewise to the floor.

Doolin lay on his back and the room went around him. Later, in remembering what followed, it was like short strips of motion-picture film, separated by strips of darkness.

(Seven Slayers 91950] ; No Exit Press, 1988, p. 90)

At nineteen minutes after one the telephone rang.

Maschio put down his shears and comb and started to answer it.

Angelo said: “If that’s for me, boss - tell her to wait a minute.”

Maschio nodded and put his hand out towards the receiver, and the telephone and the wall came out to meet him, the whole side of the shop twisted and curled and was a smothering sheet of white flame, and pain. He felt his body torn apart as if it were being torn slowly and he thought “God!—please stop it!”—and then he didn’t feel any more, or think any more.

Mccunn raised his head once and looked down at the right side of his chest and it seemed curiously flat, curiously distant; he lowered his head and was still. Angelo moaned.

The wind was like an icy wall.”

(“Pineapple”, 1936, Seven Slayers p. 122-123)

As for my own stuff - I’m sorry there has been so much blood shed. I think it will decrease. The real reason for it (the bloodiness) was, I think, that I have been working for a precision of language and to get it at the start have had to treat of things where simple actions occurred—the simplest—and which I had seen the most of—was one form or another of killing.”

(24/10/1927, Selected Letters)

Steve Holland writes:

I have to agree with Benoit that Fast One is a classic hardboiled yarn: the best movie Bruce Willis never made! Produced and directed by Robert Rodriguez, it could be the ultimat Willis movie.

You can find a good overview of the Série Noire on its publisher (Gallimard)’s website.

There’s also a link on that page (”tous les titres”) which gives access to a chronological list of the 2600 or so titles published since the collection started in 1945.

Be aware that the first titles on the list are the most recent, because they are now no longer numbered; the chronology starts somewhere towards the bottom of page 1.

There is an important connection between the Série Noire and marginal Surrealist figures: Marcel Duhamel was part of the group and his brand of slang is close to Jacques Prevert’s in the latter’s poems and dialogues for Marcel Carné’s films, and they shared a house in Paris, Rue du Château, together with Yves Tanguy in the 30s. This is recorded for example in Duhamel’s Memoirs, Raconte pas ta vie as well as in André Thirion (another lesser-known Surrealist of the 30s)’s interesting memoir Revolutionnaires sans revolution, which is full of anecdotes about the Surrealist group.

Also the first French writer to have produced pseudo-American hardboiled fiction (the equivalent of Chase’s No Orchids) was Leo Malet, during the German occupation of France in the early 40s. His first novel in the ersatz genre was called Johnny Metal and published in 1941 under the pseudonym of Frank Harding: its hero was a tough journalist in the tradition of Horace McCoy’s Dolan (if I remember the name correctly) in No Pockets in a Shroud. He had been a poet and member of the Surrealist group in the 30s, and later went on to write the first important series featuring a French hard-boiled private detective, Nestor Burma. Another one of the early translators of the SN, Max Morise, had also been a member of the group.

Duhamel’s manifesto for the “Serie noire”, which you will find reproduced on the above-mentioned web page (but of which there is a fuller facsimile version at www.polars.org/article7.html) stresses the basic ingredients of the collection as seen by its founder: action, anxiety, violence, love (”preferablement bestial”) and humour. Not exactly enough to define the existentialist perspective of Cornell Woolrich and David Goodis, indeed, and Duhamel was probably more comfortable with Peter Cheyney than with either of them. But (this is only an educated guess) he probably did have collaborators who saw the merits of the gloomier American products, so that even such relatively little-known works as Bruce Elliott’s One is a Lonely Number (published by Lion in 1954 and one of the most depressing books ever written, I think) eventually found their way into the collection.

The Série noire story is interesting not just as an indigenous phenomenon but also as seen from an English or American point of view (in the same way as Paris is important for an understanding of the development of American avant-garde literature of the 20s or of jazz in the 40s and 50s).

Benson Cardew is sick with a cold, and while sick dwells on how many people die from a silly common cold, that he wishes somebody would simply just come up with a cure, etc. Then he contracts an idea, to pass on his cold to somebody with a weakened immune system in order to murder them; he could never be charged for the crime!

Cardew rides the underground trains and stands next to anybody sneezing and coughing, strikes up conversations with sick people, and eventually comes down with a cold. He strikes out for Uncle Dursley's estate, desiring to kill him so that he can earn his inheritance all the sooner. The old man contracts the common cold and days later dies. Cardew gets the inheritance.

However, he begins to brood and can't honestly fathom that he really killed the old man with a cold, then realizes he has, and realizes further just how deadly the common cold can be. He works himself up into a fearsome fervor to the point that now he is utterly afraid to appear in public and holes up for the rest of his life on the estate, never to enjoy the monies he murdered to earn, and live the life of a recluse...just like his uncle.

Hi there.

I just stumbled upon Violence, Inc. (I had googled tramp steamers and ended up there).

What a wonderful read. It was like Nicholson Baker’s ‘Human Smoke,’ only enjoyable.

It should be a book.

Well done!

Regards

Jonothan Cullinane

I've been cruising the site reading here and there, on thrillers, other things, and tonight this chapter from your book I just wanted to express how eloquent and well you make your case. Too often there is a tendency to shrug off the chivalric impulse here and elsewhere as a sort of fecklessness, when in truth it is a deeply felt cultural movement that is self perpetuating. Both the British and the Americans have a deep appreciation for the romantic loser, the fellow who loses the battle, but wins some sort of moral war, even when too often the moral victory perpetuates societies ills rather than guards the honor of some belle epoque. It is hard to accept that some lost causes were better lost --- even for the loser. And yet we have seen what practical men without honor can do in the name of practicality as well.

Perhaps we err on the side of the man of honor because after all he will stop short of demeaning that honor where the truly practical man will too often stop at nothing. Then too, can personal honor mean anything in a cause that harms others and threatens their freedom, family, and fundamental rights? Still worth thinking about today. Perhaps more vital than ever really.

I genuinely enjoyed the thriller site. Like you I enjoy Donald Hamilton, though I am somewhat harder on him than you, not for his politics, but for the one factor in Matt Helm's personality you don't really comment on --- what an old woman he can be. The endless going on about women in pants (to the point in one book he considers not intervening in a possible rape only because the victim is wearing pants), the flaws of American cars (true enough), and sometime specious expertise about handguns (I can think of almost no arms expert who considers the Luger a particularly good weapon, but Helm does --- at least in one book). Don't misunderstand, it isn't these things in particular that bother me, but the repetition of them in book after book ad infinitum, ad nauseam. I do think the stand alone novels are much under rated and unfairly dismissed by both critics and students of the form. And I would also agree that too many critics review Hamilton's politics and not his writing.

But that said, the fact that some of this does bother me goes to how fully Hamilton has fleshed out Helm, to the point I react to him as I might an acquaintance I liked, but wished would get off certain hobby horses he has ridden all the glitter and paint off of. That's an accomplishment in itself.

I did find it ironic that you chose Dorothy B. Hughes to compare to Hamilton, since most of my older Helm books prominently feature her favorable review of Hamilton and Helm "the toughest operative to ever crush a Russian's kidney with a crowbar" on the front covers.

Over all your judgements on thrillers don't conflict with my own. Some differences, writers I like you don't or you like and I don't, or not as well, but in general many agreements. I did find one great difference and that is in regard to Lee Child and Jack Reacher.

Frankly I don't find Reacher the least bit convincing as either an American or the ex military cop and special forces type he is supposed to be. The first Reacher novel I read used the word "guy" until I wanted to scream; made the huge and easily researched mistake of having a major military base within easy driving distance of Dallas (there isn't since Travis Air Force Base closed in Fort Worth, and Dallas never had one save for the Dallas Naval Air Station, which is not a base), an even worse mistake about DFW airport, a long and incorrect tirade about the inefficiency of the .38 (without realizing the 9mm is virtually the same caliber), and frankly a villain lifted in almost all ways from John D. MacDonald. I find Reacher an unconvincing rehash of bad Travis McGee, tiresome Spenser, and trite stereotypes poorly observed and colorlessly portrayed.

I haven't found any of the others any more convincing, including a really silly book that has the Secret Service hiring Reacher to pretend to try and assassinate the Vice President. To be frank, Peter Cheyney's Lemme Caution at least had the charm of being funny and James Hadley Chase a bit nasty. Child just doesn't entertain me with his faux toughness. I can think of any number of British thriller writers who did the American thing better, and a few American's who do the British thriller well, but Child isn't one of them. That said, none of those things would have bothered me if I had liked the character or the writing, but frankly Reacher for me is merely a collection of unconnected attitudes and Child terribly flat as a writer.

But then that's what makes horse races (to beat an old cliche), and his sales certainly support your view more than mine. I'm not sure I see what you see in Child or Reacher, but it's enough that you see it.

I noted your mention of Sapper's The Black Gang. I've just posted a review of the book at Mysteryfile (the review isn't up yet, has to be formatted), a site devoted to mystery and thriller fiction. Overall I agree with what you said, though I felt the need to put the book in perspective for readers who only know Drummond from the films or by name.

Finally I want to applaud your site. It is attractive, but obviously aimed at readers and not bloggers. You write well, and with literacy, and these days both things are in short supply. Should you add to the thriller section in the future there are a few writers I would be interested to hear your opinion of (if you have already written something and I missed it I apologize): John Mair (Never Come Back), Robert Goddard, Dornford Yates, and Victor Canning. Incidentally I agree whole heartedly with your views on Geoffrey Household who I think has been neglected and deserves to be re-evaluated.

[April 30, 2009]

Lovely to be praised for giving pleasure, not always an automatic accompaniment of litcrit. Thanks, David. Too much here to take up, but a few points, not by way of serious disagreement.

“Honor” seems to me a complex family of values, some of them as old as humankind and overlapping all manner of cultures and subcultures, with the major advantage of not being dependent on any particular religion, or on religion at all. If at one end of its various spectrums is the odious machismo of Southern lynchers and Latino drug-thugs, at the other is the gentlemanliness of old-style businessman and public servants who would never dream of lying, cheating, stealing, or bullying. No not a sentimentalized fiction. My father over in London, a small-claims-court judge in low-income districts, was like that, and I would swear that he never talked about honor.

We’ve been having all too many demonstrations, on Wall Street and over in England of what happens when the idea of shame is junked and you can do absolutely anything that will profit you if it isn’t technically illegal, and lie brazenly when challenged, and feel no twinge of embarrassment when caught out.

I too like those pre-Helms of Hamilton, both the Fifties Westerns (especially Smoky Valley) and those Forties thrillers (especially The Steel Mirror) in which non-macho and well educated young men have to figure their way through dangerous situations in ways that satisfy their own sense of what lines they can and can’t step across without losing their self-respect. Also, of course Line of Fire (Hamilton’s own favorite, he said in a note to me) and Assignment: Murder, aka Assassins Have Starry Eyes (dreadful title!), though there’s surely a serious error of plotting in the hospital scene in the latter. The Helms put bread on the table and shoes on the feet, but if we’re talking about Donald Hamilton, Novelist, it’s surely the non-Helms that require and repay the most attention.

That’s funny about Matt’s kvetching, which was his default mode in the first few books. Was Hamilton himself as irritated back then by irrationality and sentimentality (as he saw them) and the unprofessionalism of things done in slipshod or by-the-book mechanical fashion? Carol and I passed through Santa Fe in 1970 on our way up from Mexico to San Francisco, and I found where Matt did the shooting near the end of Death of a Citizen, but I didn’t try to contact his creator, fearing he’d be too opinionated and all-round formidable.

Helm’s prejudices are conservative ones. Travis McGee offers far more opinions about the decline of things (even Plymouth gin), but they’re mostly moyen-sensuel liberal. I mean, how could one not be against urban sprawl in Florida, ad-men jargon, and so forth?

I mostly agree about Child, but it’s a Yes-But. For me, where are the other games in town now? I certainly don’t want to trudge through rain-grey Glasgow or Belfast with some depressed copper precariously on the wagon and tell myself that this is the Real World. I also don’t want to have to work at my reading. Peter Temple down-under is the most brilliant current thrillerist that I’ve come across, but his plots require charts to follow them, and some of his Strine dialogue needs subtitles. James Lee Burke keeps going, bless him, but by now there’s too much of a shadowy presence of earlier characters and episodes and attitudes, so that simply relaxing and going with the flow is hard. Denis Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone is masterly, but South (is it South?) Boston isn’t my resort town of choice, any more than it was in George V. Higgins’ presentation. Elmore Leonard I simply can’t get with, though he’s been a great creator of plots for movies.

And actually, to tell the truth, I don’t feel the urge to turn back to the rows of McGees on my shelves. I re-read them so much back-when that there’s no suspense left, and if we’re talking writerly quality, JDM could be pretty mannered and period in the wrong way.

As for Hamilton, a problem with having written in depth about someone is that when you reread him after an absences you’re liable to find yourself having to cope with your own writing and wondering whether what you said at that point or this was correct.

Which sort of leaves me, for escape night-reading, with Richard Stark (especially the comeback series), Jonathan Latimer, Ross Thomas, and (at present) Child.

Yes, his can be over-informative, maybe on the airport-bookshop principle that a fat book is easier to read than a lean one, but also because it can be easier writing long than writing short, i.e., selectively. When I return to one of the books, I’m likely to be skimming even more than I did the first time. (Reacher’s on the highway, Reacher’s taking a plane trip, OK OK.) Yes, Child doesn’t have a good ear for American speech. I’ve not noticed him making obvious mistakes, the way I do when MacDonald attempts Britspeak. But I simply don’t experience a Child character—age, region of origin, social class, etc— in his or her speech rhythms and idioms. And lots of the dialogues are simply exchanges of information.

The repeated “Reacher said nothing” is irritating, leaving the reader to figure out how Reacher looks at that point and what he’s thinking. As to his travelling lighter-than-lite, book-person Margaret in our best local bookstore (Book Mark) remarked to me that, speaking as a wife and mother, she did rather wonder about Reacher’s underwear.

At times, too, Reacher’s violences can be like those of Stephen Seagal in a movie like Out for Justice, where what counts is the visible devastation wrought by Seagal’s fist-strikes, thrown pool balls, etc. Contact action.

And yes—or no—Child is indeed no JDM when it comes to the ongoing physical appearance of characters. There’s no Boo Waxwell, Junior Allen, etc.

And isn’t he cheating, plotwise, on pp. 14-15 of the Dell One Shot?

And yet and yet, dammit, he can take me on the kind of primal thrill ride I want, with arrogant sadistic super-villains, and merciless henchmen, and real risks for Reacher and other good guys, and scary, at times horrific, bad-guy violences and satisfying stretches of strong action by Reacher, and satisfying problem-solving come-uppances against heavy odds. And I’ve usually no idea where the twists and turns of plots are taking me.

He’s great at creating dangerous sites, whether needing breaking into or breaking out from. He can also make you uncomfortably conscious that innocence is no protection and that the bad guys, unless Reacher is prodigiously skillful and ruthless, could indeed win out. I think we come a little too close for comfort at times to being titillated by the infliction of major pain, whether by bad guys or Reacher himself. But “Hook” Hobie’s office suite in Tripwire is a VERY bad place to be (“the silence from the bathroom continued until a point Marilyn guessed was around eight o’clock in the evening. Then it was shattered by screaming.”

And one does indeed want total arrogant pitiless BASTARDS like Hobie or Alan Lemaison in Bad Luck and Trouble to get a very unpleasant come-uppance, though curiously Child doesn’t dwell quite as long on the final payback moments as he might, with the bad guys’ full consciousness of what they had and what they’ve lost and where they’re going now. And as Matt Helm would agree, those who too confidently take the sword may have to perish by it, like the two smugly brutal rednecks in Echo Burning getting ready to “cut” Reacher, or the black prison gangstas in The Killing Floor getting set for sexual fun and games with Reacher and his terrified companion.

The best-crafted Childs are probably (though I’ve no experience of U.S. army life) the first-person The Enemy, where Reacher, before he leaves the army, is embedded among so many givens of military routine and protocol that there isn’t the customary wordiness, and Child’s first novel, The Killing Floor, also first-person, where he’s really worked at establishing his small hot dusty town out in nowhere in the grip, for purposes unknown, of a Very Bad Old Rich Man. There are lots of good strong incidents in it, and though the grand finale is absurd, it’s magnificently absurd.

But then, Bad Luck and Trouble really kicks ass once the hither-and-yonning entailed by the complicated plot is over. And if I went back to the other books, I’d find other memorable stretches. At times, too, it’s interesting expertise that we’re getting, such as when Reacher’s getting his bearings in the potentially dangerous site of an unfamiliar bar with the trained eye of a former military cop.

And maybe Child needs his various insulgencs in order to build and sustain momentum. In the recent Nothing to Lose he takes the same basic dusty and ominous site as in The Killing Floor, but without benefit of an interesting villain, and with a lot of space-filling hither-and-yonning, and a woman cop so completely in Reacher’s corner, and with such characterless dialogue, that there’s no tension between them.

As to other writers, Dornford Yates thrilled me in his thrillers and sent me into hysterics with his Berry books when I was fourteen. When I bought the re-issued Blind Corner (his best thriller) a few years ago, I was too conscious of the class snobbery and the too “literary” style. Mair and Goddard I still haven’t looked for. Did I ever try Canning? Dunno.

Nice that we’re in the same playground about Geoffrey Household and, I infer, the good parts of The Black Gang, though I wasn’t able find my way to the article on the latter.

And very nice, as I said, to be liked and approved of, not always the same thing, particularly by someone as life-experienced and knowledgeable and bracingly judgmental,

One thing for which I’ll claim credit—the quotations with which each of the Quickies in “Thrillers” begins. Faced with the depressingly long and growing booksellers’ lists of thriller writers who are unknown to me, I take some comfort from the near-certainty, based on a few bad trips, that the actual execution in them, regardless of plots, is likely to leave me cold. But one never knows for sure, does one?

In the absence of quotations, the presumption for me is that puffery is involved and that publishers, reviewers, and editors don’t WANT us to be able to taste the actual flavours of the offered goodies.

So, where else am I going to find roller-coaster rides and primal chills like those that Child provides?

Stephen Hunter and Andrew Vachss, maybe? I haven’t kept up with them, and I found Hunter’s gun-fetishism questionable in places, and the ending of his Dirty White Boys seemed to me immoral. But anyway, I’ve sent off now for The 47^th Samurai.

[July 19, 2009]