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

A reworking and intensifying of major elements of No Orchids for Miss Blandish

Claire Holding, the daughter of the Assistant Chief of the Federal Investigation Bureau, is kidnapped by Dill Slitson’s white-slavery-and-blackmail gang

Lynx Hanson, Slitson’s rival and a former member of the gang, teams up with gold-digging fan-dancer Cora Bilt, who’s out to get the maximum from her senescent sugar-daddy, millionaire John P. Halmar.

Grover Holding and his assistant Glyn Alder, on temporary leave-of-absence, are trying to get Clare back.

Rubber-hose flogging, rape, police torture (third- degree), strip-teasing, Tommy guns, knife murders.

In 1945, George Ryley Scott, not the most squeamish of readers, remarks of Lady that “It would be difficult to pack into 192 pages of largish type more stark unreserved brutality than is here presented.”

For more, see Sidebar 2, Sidebar 3, and Sidebar 8.

The Maltese Falcon segues into Red Harvest, sort of.

The title is a come-on, but in the first edition there is some unforced nudity and a reassuring bit of lovemaking by private-eye Dave Fenner that are missing in subsequent editions. Some of the violences are toned down, too, and the dozen or more cuts Disneyfy a well-made book.

Raymond has earlier adapted the title-pattern of Jonathan Latimer’s The Dead Don’t Care as The Dead Stay Dumb

The first four chapters are a gripping ur-Jack-Carter first-person narrative by an explosively violent small-time crook. After that, as he softens because of a decent girl and troubles mount, the novel loses the uncompromising consistency of a voice unique up to that point, and for a number of years to come, in British crime fiction. (See Sidebar 6)

Twenty-six page episode of the People in a small town sending the “better elements” through a gauntlet to a cliff’s edge or disposing of them with revolutionary fervour in other ways.

His most entertaining novel, or at least the one with the most action—Moose Molloy wreaking havoc in a bar, Marlow escaping from a crooked private sanitarium, his visit to the offshore gambling ship, etc. But Chandler’s dialogue doesn’t wear well.

An explanation in psychological-political terms of the Moscow Trials confessions of the highly sophisticated and articulate Nikolai Bukharin, at one time the political equal of Stalin, via the imprisoned composite figure of Nicolas Rubashov, who takes Communist torture and machiavellianism in pursuit of “good” ends for granted. The pressures applied by the NKVD to most of the accused and their families in the Purges, as was discovered later, had usually been considerably more physical. As it is, we remember Rubashov holding the stub of a cigarette to the back of his hand to test his ability to endure torture, the throbbing of his untreated abscessed tooth, and the blinding lamp during Gletkin’s implacably persistent interrogation of him.

Scott explores the psychology of torturing and its religious components, as well as providing far more details of particular cases than many people would admit to wanting.

He observes that, “The moment an attempt is made to justify any form of torture, whatever the circumstances may be, there arises the possibility of creating a dangerous precedent.”

He animadverts against justifications of “Negro lynchings, of Bolshevik atrocities, of ‘Black-and-Tan’ outrages, or brutal floggings, of ’third degree’ methods,” but, oddly, doesn’t mention the Nazis. He comments:

Gang-boss Sam Lemberg has problems with three women, especially fiery Rita, after removing the daughter of a Jewish anti-Nazi crusader from the torture-chamber clutches of German-American Fifth Columnists for whom his gang is doing a spot of sabotage while America is still neutral.

For more, see Sidebar 3.

Free-lance gangster Dario tries to get control of a dope racket and has to cope with a corrupt city machine and a devious Chinese supplier. A flavour of Hammett has been stirred into the mix.

For more, see Sidebar 3.

After being raped by him in a roadside shelter, intelligent, level-headed young Edda Garfe helps thick unfaithful roughneck Max Broler to rise in the liquor racket.

For more, see Sidebar 3.

According to the 1953 blurb, slum-rat Lugs Cortesi is able to satisfy “his worst urges” working for big-time crook Albery. Here is the beginning of the blurb.

For more, see Note 46 and Sidebar 3, in that order.

Young, independent-spirited Eilleen Rourke quits an exploitative garment workshop job for the open road, drifts into truck-stop sex-for-pay in order to survive, and starts killing truckers after being viciously raped by a pair of them.. An “existential” novel a year before Camus’ L’Etranger, but there are human decencies and real-feeling relationships, and it’s not bleak or bitter.

In the blurb on the 1950 Robin Hood Press reissue we read, “She suffered the worst humiliations, the crudest brutalities. It soured her, but with her Irish blood she had to fight back. She lost—yet perhaps in one sense, she won.” Is Harold Kelly, the loser in two trials, speaking here?

It has also struck me, on reading of the newspaper campaign against “smut” that resulted in the 1942 trial, that Kelly may have been conscious of approaching constrictions on freedom when he celebrated one variety of it.

The only copy of the original edition listed in Copac was in Trinity College, Dublin, but it has gone missing, leaving me unable to check for cuts in the later reissue.

But George Ryley Scott, who is good at describing the course of events in novels, reports in 1945 that “in Chapter VII there is a particularly unpleasant and unnecessarily drawn-out description of an assault by a trucker named Jake Greiner and a Negro, while a bum looks on …,” which is where it had seemed to me that there had been a cut.

[I have now had the great good fortune to acquire a photocopy of the 1941 edition. The rape episode in Chapter VII is substantially cut in the reprint. There are small cuts elsewhere, mostly involving undergarments.]

For more, see Sidebar 3.

Withdrawn from circulation in Britain but available still in French as Méfiez-vous, fillettes, (Gallimard)

It is the novel that, as Orwell puts it in “Raffles and Miss Blandish” (1944), “brought Mr. Chase’s books to the attention of the authorities.”

Cold-blooded sadistic Raven (yes, same name as Graham Greene’s killer in A Gun for Sale ) seizes control of the St. Louis vice racket and develops a large-scale brothel network. Sadie Perminger, after witnessing him leaving the apartment of vice-boss Mendetta whom he has just murdered, is incarcerated in a brothel and subsequently made his instant-obedience mistress.

The details we’re given about the art and craft of breaking a woman’s spirit go horrifyingly beyond those in Lady—Don’t Turn Over. Kelly outdid Raymond with Lady. Now Raymond outdoes Kelly.

The interwoven narrative of reporter Jay Ellenger’s blood-hounding lacks tension, because we already know the facts that he’s seeking.

But the action really kicks ass in the last eleven short chapters, with brothel inmates taking a savage vengeance on two of their male oppressors, a gunfight when Raven and his three brutish henchmen retrieve the loot from his apartment as the roof falls in on his operation, and Raven on the run, accompanied by a woman he’s picked up as cover, with a memorable episode of nudity, and a gas-chamber finale.

The body of a murdered prostitute identified as Julie Callaghan makes an appearance in the prologue, an inferior reprise of the opening of Latimer’s Lady in the Morgue.

Orwell (see his correspondence) initially thought that it was Lady—Don’t Turn Over, rather than Miss Callaghan, that landed Chase in court.

For more about the novel, see Sidebar 3.

It would be filmed in 1957 by Yves Allegret as Méfiez-vous, Fillettes, with Robert Hossein well cast as Raven. Apparently it was released in the States as Young Girls Beware.

[Benoit Tadie reports recently finding in a bookstore a copy of an English-language reprint, the Scherz Phoenix edition published in Berne/Paris, 1947,"not to be introduced into the British Empire or the USA," and has provided me with Chase’s own texts of the two passages that I translated. See Sidebar 8.]

The title is a tip of the Chase hat, well, a flick of fingers to his RAF officer’s cap, to Latimer’s The Dead Don’t Care.

Chase (Raymond) publishes seven or eight novels during the war. I shall not list any more of them.

This is some kind of theatrical piece, with no connection with the 1988 collection of stories by Chase with the same title.

A reprinting by Wells Gardner, in their shilling paperback series, of Tracy’s 1937 lynching novel (see above). It appears in the same curious format as Glinto’s No Mortgage on a Coffin and “Snow” Vogue—stiffer paper covers with a dust-jacket on top.

The reference in the blurb to “Don Tracy’s story of the lynching with its appalling torture” is one of those hooks or come-ons that are likely to make readers proceed through the earlier pages faster than usual.

The toughest thriller up to this point, and one of the toughest still.

In 1939, No Orchids for Miss Blandish. In 1940, Lady—Don’t Turn Over. In 1941, Solomon’s Vineyard—and the arrival of the feared and expected second Great War.

Had Latimer been stimulated by the success of No Orchids, I wonder? Solomon’s Vineyard was first published in England, by Methuen, and wasn’t published in the States in its complete form until 1988.

Why isn’t it too prosecuted the following year along with the titles by Chase and Glinto? Has the print run been too small to make an impact? Is there no point to making an example of an American?

An unpretentious, efficient, fairly violent, and reasonably well paced thriller, first-person-narrated in pseudo-American prose, indebted to Cheyney, Glinto, and Chase, but without pastiche and better than Cheyney.

Implausibly named Barry Saunders witnesses the nightclub snatch of rich-daughter Vivienne Pentee, and is hired by her father to get her back. He doesn’t do everything right, gets knocked on the head, and at one point, having been tied up, comments that he doesn’t have in his pocket any of those convenient bits of broken glass that you have in the storybooks. Along the way we have a sadistic gangster with a private torture chamber and murals displaying “the most horrible cruelties,” a sadistic mysterious boss communicating only as a voice, a girl spread-eagled in a vertical frame and whipped (the details not dwelt on), and two young helpers of Saunders’, male and female, trussed in preparation for the Death of a Thousand Cuts.

But there is no nudity that I can recall, not even during the whipping, and while this is obviously a book about the kinds of things that sell books, the violences are mostly plot-and-character-related, being what is done by the evil people whom the good guys are dangerously challenging.

At one point a dame tells the narrator and his young helper Wellman:

Who, I wonder, was Rine Gadhart?

A curious collage of first-person gangster narrative (he’s working for the FBI but, unlike Lemmy Caution, “English Ed” Gunning is an actual gangster), cop-organization narrative (sympathetic), and, towards the end, horror ‘zine. Opens with unabashed appropriations from the opening of Lady—Don’t Turn Over. Brief strong violences are less disturbing in context, at least now, than when quoted.

Steve Holland dates this 1942 in his invaluable “A British Crime Noir Bibliography,” My 1950 copy dates the first edition 1941, but 1942 feels the more probable.

The victim here had been responsible for Susie’s death in the same manner.

For more about Freak Racket, see Note 42.

The two Gunning novels Triggers are Trumps (Swan, 1942) and Gunning in England (Swan, 1946) contain no violences worth mentioning. The 1942 trial evidently did some chilling.

The chief Inquisitor in Lima (Portugal) becomes infatuated with a girl of good family whom he holds under sentence of a horrible death in the prison of the Inquisition, where he has a harem of young women prisoners, and seeks to bend her to his will by letting her see tortures going on.

The plot, including the efforts of her English sea-captain lover and his men to find and free her, is essentially a pretext for showing in action the horrors described in Scott’s 1940 History of Torture. The point is in the pain, and the novel feels unclean. Stephen Frances knew it, I’m sure, and made something more serious of his own out of a hint in it, in In the Hands of the Inquisition (1971).

The French-Algerian narrator gratuitously kills a working-class Algerian who is a stranger to him. After starting out with a flat effective style more concerned with actions than with feelings, Camus has to change conventions when he needs more subtle and/or philosophical comments.

Against censorship. No mention of the Old Bailey case. The introduction is dated 1941.

Brian Donlevy, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, William Bendix. Hammett’s novel adapted by Jonathan Latimer, who also wrote an unfilmed script for Red Harvest. Hard-boiled. Invigorating.

According to the blurb,

Mike Harrigan’s six-man New York gang moves in on Tinplate Inc and its union in Michigan City, Indiana. The action starts slowly with unreal-feeling gang talk, improves somewhat with the stirring up of strike action, and picks up momentum with Harrigan’s manipulation of union officials, a knife-cut-knife bargaining session between Harrigan and Elmer P. Dallas, owner of Tin Plate, and a brawl between the hoodlums and union toughs.

The union boss is brought to heel by being taken for a ride and doused with gasoline. With incineration imminent, he calls off the strike, an outcome that nets the gange $25,000. The ploys for conning the rank-and-file into believing that they’ve won are mildly amusing. Subsequently another company is struck at Bronsville.

A curious book, without a woman in it anywhere. The logistics and physical manoeuvrings of the Bronsville strike —terrain, fences, buses, scabs, the three hundred “rubber sticks” with which strikers have been armed, etc—are described attentively, as is the combat-thinking of the parties involved, including an earlier gathering of the bosses of several companies. Hard to believe that British readers would find this thrilling. The promise of the title is misleading.

What are the politics of the book? Certainly neither pro-labour nor pro-capitalist, and no moral indignation. Toler/Kelly is more interested in the how than the what—how the players here work to win, rather than the merits of the cases.

“Buck” as in “Buck Ryan”?—a Daily Mirror crime comic strip, begun in 1937

This is one of only four occasions that I know of after 1940 when Kelly’s own name appears on a work. The subject was obviously of personal interest to him.

The previous year, in a jury trial at the Old Bailey, Kelly was fined the equivalent of about four thousand present-day pounds for publishing two allegedly obscene novels.

In the story a jury is deadlocked eleven-to-one in a murder case that’s based entirely on circumstantial evidence. The lone member holding out against a guilty verdict finally agrees to go along—and then announces that it was he who actually did the murder. So much for amorphous criteria and the wisdom of juries.

Contains a ten-page description of being interrogated by the Gestapo.

The book also contains a ten-page description of the beginnings of the Final Solution, when the killings are still being done by means of sealed vans into which carbon-monoxide-laden exhaust is injected.

A Group Theatrical morality play about the mob mentality and America’s capacity for wickedness. The weaker-willled go along with the three or four strong-willed characters, especially the cruel, authoritarian, and bogus would-be Southern aristocrat bent on a hanging, their arguments about law and order overlaying nastier desires.

The presence of the three patently innocent accused men around the same fire as their killers-to-be during the cold night hours brings out the dreadfulness of decent young rancher Dana Andrews knowing that all the ongoing satisfaction of his family life, and its promise for the years to come, is going, despite anything he can do or say, to be blanked out for ever. Reportedly the movie was made in 1941, before Pearl Harbour. What would its politics have looked like then, I wonder?

On an expressionistic front cover, a blonde in an evening gown is in the process of being crushed between two gigantic blood-streaked rotating cog-wheels, while a man of indeterminate age tries in vain to reach her. Below the title at the top we have, “Buck Toler at his toughest and roughest.” Price 2/-

Inside is an ad in which Everybody’s Books, in the Charing Cross Road, offers to buy used books, presumably so that it can get credit in paper stock when they are pulped.

All that I can tell from the first three pages is that it’s about Hank Rimmer, cynical-ruthless mastermind of a major American black-market operation.

He is originally from the Bowery.

In the three opening pages, after a brief overview of his operation, we cut to a confrontation in his office with a stuffy Eastern blue-blood who was conned into giving Rimmer a business start, and now, on learning how crooked the operation is, declares his intention to denounce it to the authorities and socks Rimmer on the jaw. After which Rimmer shoots him four times.

I only have To Kill a Corpse but presume that the texts are the same.

Archaeologist and researcher into the paranormal Lucian Carolus, during his investigation of an odd phenomenon in the country house of an aristocratic friend, visits her hyper-cultured (and in fact vampiric) neighbour Hilary Asper, who favours him with a rare vision-inducing wine and introduces him to his “museum of suffering,” a collection of torture implements and pictorials.

Looking at the rack, Lucian “heard a long groan beginning with a sharp hissing intake of breath, rising to a crescendo and dropping in a slow, gurgling diminuendo into a harsh ‘Ah-h-ach’ that sounded as if it had been wrenched from the vocal chords in a final contortion of unendurable pain,” and vivid images of actual torturings start coming.

In the account of his flogging by Turkish soldiers in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (trade edition 1936, Sidebar 10), T.E. Lawrence describes the warm, almost sexual glow of contentment that had come upon him at one point.

For more about Ascher, see Note 14.

Best-seller with miscegenation and a lynching. Dull.

A famous comparison of the ethos of E.W. Hornung’s late-nineteenth/ early twentieth-century stories about gentleman-thief and cricketer A.J. Raffles and that of No Orchids for Miss Blandish.

That last sentence nails it.

For some reservations about Orwell’s indictment, see Sidebar 1.

A famous manifesto (late by a dozen or more years), against so-called Classic Puzzlers. Sentimentalizes the shamus in a way guaranteed to create identification in the bosom of every literary-minded academic seeing himself as nobly seeking The Truth in a philistine world.

Farewell My Lovely filmed straight, with Dick Powell escaping successfully from his principal-boy musical-comedy roles, and Chandler’s oh-so-clever prose treated as if it could actually emanate from human mouths.

Contains five pages about the 1942 trial of Chase and Glinto as a major episode in ”The Great ‘Purity Drive’ of 1942,” a unique feature of which was that “in addition to the publishers being summoned for issuing obscene books, the authors were also charged with causing the books to be published.” The plot summaries are full and accurate.

Contains the following admirable passage:

A lovable priest is executed by a German firing squad, Anna Magnani is killed in the street by a squirt from a soldier’s submachine-gun, and a Resistance leader is fatally interrogated by two torturers with blowtorches in a sound-proof room in the headquarters of a German commander. The movie very effectively establishes, or accepts, every stereotype connected with the German occupation of conquered countries.

Sidebar 1. Some Orchids

Sidebar 2. Chase and Glinto

Sidebar 3. The Pre-trial Glintos

Sidebar 4. Deep South Slavery

Sidebar 5. Darcy Janson

Sidebar 6. Rogues’ Gallery

Sidebar 7. Kelly Brothers

Sidebar 8. Scandal

Sidebar 9. Westerns

Sidebar 10. City Mid-Week

Sidebar 11. Gangdom NEW

Sidebar 12. Jungle Books NEW

Sidebar 13. Bodily Harms NEW

Sidebar 14. Propaganda? NEW